The Soft-Hearted Sioux Sparknotes

Does your genetic makeup determine whether you will be a great guitar player, an adventure seeker or if pizza will be your favorite food? Or does your environment mold your personality over time, making you who you into whatever the circumstance demands? From the time of Columbus discovery of the new world well into the mid-twentieth century, American Indians were considered to be “treacherous, vicious, cruel, lazy, stupid, dirty, speaking in ughs and grunts, and often quite drunk” (Marger, 2015, p. 156). While these traits are stereotypes, many people believed that if a person was an American Indian these things were automatically hard-coded into them. However, In The Soft-Hearted Sioux Zitkala Ša shows that these qualities are not pre-programmed

into a person, but rather, a result of their environment. Ša demonstrates this through showing that the Sioux boy is not a special case, the boy’s personality change on his return from school, the boy’s change in religion and another change in the boy’s personality that coincides with his environment changing.
Zitkala Ša begins The Soft-Hearted Sioux with the Sioux boy and his family sitting around a fire talking about his future. The future they talk about focuses heavily on hunting and becoming a warrior. In order to prepare the Sioux boy for this future, which he is excited for, the boy’s mother gives him advice saying “My son, be always active. Do not dislike a long hunt. Learn to provide much buffalo meat and many buckskins before you bring home a wife” (Ša, 2013, p. 647). Through the kind of future the boy and his family are talking about, Zitkala Ša illustrates that the Sioux boy is not just a special case of soft-heartedness, but is a regular Sioux boy with all the hopes and dreams of any other Sioux. The importance of Ša showing that the Sioux boy was ordinary is to show that the changes that happen in the story can happen to everybody and not just a small subset of the population.
In The Soft-Hearted Sioux Zitkala Ša facilitates a change of environment by sending the Sioux boy to an Indian school run by Christian missionaries. During the nineteenth century, many American Indian children were introduced to the American-European style of civilization through these schools whose stated policy was to “Kill the Indian and save the man” (Baym, 2013, p. 639). On their arrival, the children were subjected to many forms of acculturation ranging from “having their long hair cut, to having the clothing in which they had arrived discarded and perhaps most painful, to being forbidden to speak their native languages” (Baym, 2013, p. 639). When the Sioux boy returns to his dying father, from his years at school, we see that these forms of acculturation have changed him to a point where he considers himself a stranger “Wearing a foreigner's dress, I walked, a stranger, into my father's village. Asking my way, for I had not forgotten my native tongue, an old man led me toward the tepee where my father lay… While talking he scanned me from head to feet. Then he retraced his steps toward the heart of the camping-ground” (Ša, 2013, p. 648). These changes weigh heavy on the Sioux boy causing him to feel a since of loss, fearing he may have become less than the great warrior he was supposed to be. However, even though he has these feeling he is still anxious to start the work he came back from school to do. The Sioux boy’s feelings and actions show that the environment of the Indian school has changed the boy to the point where he feels, acts and looks like a completely different person.
Perhaps the greatest change in the Sioux boy’s life is his religion and the speaking abilities that accompany it.

Zitkala Ša uses the Sioux boy’s religion to show that he is now intellectually mature and well versed in scripture. The Sioux boy had returned to his tribe as a missionary. When the boy begins preaching to his tribe, he preaches with such passion that sweat forms on his brow and he believes his tribe is considering his message to the point that he says “I was turning my thoughts upward to the sky in gratitude” (Ša, 2013, p. 649). The Sioux boy’s sermon is so convincing that the tribe’s medicine man feels threatened by the boy’s sermon. The medicine man immediately denounces the Sioux boy as a traitor. But he doesn’t feel that this is enough to protect against the boy’s message so the medicine man moves the tribe away, leaving the boy and his family to fend for themselves. Here Ša shows that through his schooling, the boy has become learned enough to persuade a people, who tie much of their identity with their religion, to consider a different way of life. This ability to learn directly contradicts the American Indian stereotypes held by people at the time, demonstrating that it’s not genetics, but the environment that make up a

person.
Ša uses the abandonment by the tribe to show, once again, that a person’s circumstances affect who they are.

After the tribe leaves, the boy and his family begin to run out of food due to his lack of hunting skills and his father’s inability to hunt. For this reason, the Sioux boy’s father becomes fed up with the boy’s soft-heartedness. After a time, the father begins to shame the Sioux boy into stealing a cow from a heard that is owned by a white man, jeering the boy on saying "My son, your soft heart will let me starve before you bring me meat! Two hills eastward stand a herd of cattle. Yet you will see me die before you bring me food!" (Ša, 2013, p. 650). The Sioux boy is overwhelmed by this statement and he rushes off to the herd of cattle and begins to plan his attack “Twenty in all I numbered. From among them I chose the best-fattened creature. Leaping over the fence, I plunged my knife into it…. Toward home I fairly ran... Hardly had I climbed the second hill when I heard sounds coming after me… A rough hand wrenched my shoulder and took the meat from me! I stopped struggling to run. A deafening whir filled my head. The moon and stars began to move… A great quiet filled the air. In my hand I found my long knife dripping with blood. At my feet a man's figure lay prone in blood-red snow” (Ša, 2013, pp. 650-651). Here Ša shows that when the Sioux boy’s environment changes from the Indian school to his father’s severe illness and abandonment from his tribe, it also

changes him, turning him into a thief and a murderer. These qualities are in stark contrast to his previous nature of missionary to his people. This also shows that the Sioux boy was not born hard-wired to be soft-hearted, but his environment at the school caused him to be that way.
Through The Soft-Hearted Sioux, Zitkala Ša illustrates that a person’s character traits are not an unchangeable result of their genetic makeup, but the outcome of an individual’s circumstances. Since our environment has such an effect us as a person, we must be careful what environments we allow ourselves to be put into, choosing only the ones that will turn us into the type of person we want to be.