ABSTRACT
This paper is based on archival work in Utah (US ) and Nuoro (Sardinia) and addresses three aspects of Indigeneity in early twentieth- century North America and Western Europe through a study of two figures—Zitkála-Šá (Yankton/Ihanktonwan Dakota Sioux) and Grazia Deledda (Sardinian-Italian). The chapter explores how hybridity, in different forms, is inherent in their own experiences/representations of Indigeneity and argues that such representations contest the assumption of Indigeneity as a homogenous bloc within and across nation-states. The second aspect illustrates how hybridity informs the imbrications of modernism and modernity in their times. The final aspect considers the state of Indigenous modernisms as (an emerging?) field of inquiry in Modernist Studies and how such shifts replicate the “time- lag” between “native’ ” and “ modern” on which narratives of Anglo-European modernity are based. By focusing on two Indigenous women contemporaries in a trans-Atlantic, comparative framework, the essay illustrates how Zitkála-Šá and Deledda respectively un settle epistemic state violence and analyzes the many ways they contest and resist such violence in their own contexts.
