Find five plum stones—be sure their sides are smooth. Go near a fire. Burn three of the stones on one side, and two on both sides. Take a hot instrument—an iron, nail, or knife. Carve shapes into the two completely burnt stones: a moon on one side, a star on the other. You will need to be precise; plum stones are small. Place them in a bowl. Careful! Hit the bowl against a pillow—else it may break! The stones land. Note the combination of the shapes landing face up—or have the observing assistant do so. Count. Go again. You are playing the plum-stone game.Footnote 1
In the late nineteenth century, two girls encountered it too: Nedawi, the eponymous heroine of the Omaha author Susette La Flesche’s 1881 children’s story, and the young Yankton Sioux author Zitkála-Šá (born Gertrude Simmons), as recollected in her autobiographical “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900), later included in American Indian Stories (1921). In La Flesche’s story, Nedawi joins a group of girls playing the game while caring for her infant brother. Zitkála-Šá’s moment is less direct: one day, her mother warns her never to approach a plum bush near their home, because it had sprung out of the cursed plum seeds clutched by a Native man addicted to the game, who is buried underneath.
This essay reads these two depictions of the plum-stone game from Plains Native literature to examine how childhood games of chance served as cultural battlegrounds in the fight for Indigenous ways of life in the late nineteenth century. I argue that La Flesche and Zitkála-Šá use the plum-stone game as a symbol for the spirit of play stolen by late-nineteenth-century federal assimilationist policy. The government enacted this policy through directives such as allotment—the practice of transforming Native communal land ownership into individual holdings—and the expansion of so-called American Indian boarding schools, where Native religions, cultural practices (like games), and languages were restricted. In depicting the plum-stone game’s sociopolitical implications, these authors reveal the potential importance of gaming.Footnote 2 Indeed, La Flesche’s first and perhaps primary move is displaying the acumen undergirding something that might otherwise be regarded as child’s play. La Flesche shows that the game’s intellectual underpinnings made it an arena within which cultural values are practiced—that is, expressed, refined, and solidified. In La Flesche’s descriptions of the social forces unfolding around the game, “Nedawi” charts a complex but generally communal ethic onto a seemingly inconsequential activity. La Flesche illustrates the potential import of the game on a small scale, which sets up but does not fully develop its more comprehensive magnitude.
To this end, Zitkála-Šá’s treatment of the game considers why the degradation of ludic cultural practices might be a vital component of governmental policies aimed at assimilating Native peoples. La Flesche’s and Zitkála-Šá’s sophisticated renderings of the game are a particularly intriguing counterpoint to the nineteenth-century infantilization of Native peoples legally codified through the Marshall Trilogy. This set of three landmark decisions made under John Marshall’s Supreme Court earlier in the century—Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)—collectively placed Native nations and tribes under the direct guardianship of the federal government. As the decision for Cherokee Nation ruled, Native “domestic dependent nations” are “in a state of pupilage,” like “that of a ward to his guardian. They … address the President as their great father” (United States 59).Footnote 3 Going beyond the critique of these policies as reductionist and inaccurate, the depictions of the plum-stone game analyzed here challenge the condition of wardship by describing the complexity of Native thought within the cultural practices of childhood. They thus strike back against the Marshall Trilogy at a more fundamental level, exposing the faulty reasoning in its paternalistic language.
Scholarship on both of these authors has unpacked their connections to nineteenth-century Euro-American culture and how cultural tensions are incarnate in their depictions of childhood. Frank Kelderman’s 2022 article on La Flesche argues that she turns to the figure of the child in a period of US-Native relations where the “policy of education-as-assimilation placed Indigenous children at the forefront of debates” (25). If, as Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) and Jean M. O’Brien have put it, allotment was regarded as “an explicitly ruthless process of transformation akin to social manufacturing,” then in the era of its proliferation the child was a particularly useful—and thus vulnerable—substrate for social assimilation (xiii).Footnote 4 Rather logically, Indigenous children, perceived to be not yet fully formed in their Indigeneity, were the most effective targets of the “ostensibly benevolent incorporation of Indians and other marginalized peoples into the social values of white Protestant America” (xv). To be sure, other Native authors also channeled their cultural work through children. Drawing on scholars like Amy Kaplan and Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who established the concomitance of nationalism and sentimental literature—a genre whose appeal to readers’ hearts frequently returned to the sympathetic figure of the defenseless child—Cari M. Carpenter has argued that “early Native American women” also used “sentimentality as one means of buttressing their own nationhood” (17).
While these critics have thoroughly explored the relationship between literature, assimilation, and education, this essay fills an important gap in the consideration of Native childhood: a historical contextualization of gaming in Native literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As this essay shows, games embody foundational social forms of relation. Authors like La Flesche reveal that play, properly construed, is not a competitive drive for domination or, importantly, a state of pure generosity and joy: it is a middle ground that models both individual achievement and the proper redistribution of rewards in the aftermath of achievement. Games are won and lost—in a fairly equitable distribution when playing a game of chance like the plum-stone game—but far more significantly prompt an expansion of social good by bringing together diverse groups. The didactic story “Nedawi” teaches selflessness by depicting the plum-stone game, which instructs its young players how to foster communality while also working within defined—and thus restrictive—standards. Play might then also engender an ethic of property that resists the forms of ownership imposed through allotment. By encouraging individual land holdings by Native peoples, allotment elevated economic uplift based in the familial unit over ways of communal habitation rooted in forms like usufruct, in which certain objects might be owned, but not the land itself.Footnote 5 Games provide a structure for these forms of community, since they allow for a temporary “ownership” in victory that does not necessarily translate into a permanent elevation of the individual, instead regarding their highest aim as the promulgation of social cohesion. Thus, the suppression of Native forms of play struck at well-established (and enjoyable) forms of enculturation that modeled redistributive—but still structured—ideas about property.
Scholars have known at least since Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) that play is no “purely physical or purely biological activity” but rather a “significant function” in which something “transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action” (1). The plum-stone game is intriguing in its own right but is particularly ripe for readings that consider how Native peoples play with identity and literary form in ways that resist the appropriative tendencies of white culture that Philip J. Deloria has influentially termed “playing Indian.” This essay also speaks to theoretical work from Indigenous studies avowing the importance of games. For example, Vera B. Palmer relates how her Tuscarora mother described games as “in fact turn[ing] upon matters of life and death” and claims that games “excite creative renewal … illuminat[ing] for a moment the dark detail of colonial apparatus” (293). More broadly, postcolonial scholars have found figures and concepts of games helpful in comprehending the dynamics of colonization and resistance. The complex interplay between colonizers and the colonized may be construed as a game; in The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon describes various games, including the “game of collaboration” into which intellectuals in Algerian brainwashing camps were coaxed (286). By considering games as central to the structure of colonization, these theorists uncover the subtle—and ludic—forms by which power is exercised and maintained.
This essay correlates the political implications of a childhood game presented in La Flesche’s story with broader political dialogues more explicitly represented by Zitkála-Šá. Thus, this essay also demonstrates how to place different genres in conversation, bridging a didactic, almost folksy, story for children and the work of one of the best-known Native activists of the early twentieth century. Critical works like Mandy Suhr-Sytsma’s Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature (2018) and a 2022 special issue in Studies in the Novel on “Indigenous young adult novels” have recently shown how Native YA literature does not reduce or sanitize Native political issues for their audience but instead illustrates how such problems exist across age groups in unique ways. These critics exemplify how to regard YA literature as a site of enculturation and deal with works that may fall by the wayside in the continuing critical examination of Native literature (for instance, Justice admits that Native children’s and YA literature are “notably under-represented” in his field-shaping book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter [30]). I examine an earlier incarnation of the dialogue surrounding literature for and about young people, in this case born amid the federal efforts at assimilation that treated Native peoples as childlike and in need of white tutelage. By representing play, authors like La Flesche and Zitkála-Šá reestablish Native conceptions of childhood, belonging, and property, thus offering a corrective to federal cultural indoctrination.
In what follows, I begin with an introductory section covering ethnographic and anthropological reports (from both the early twentieth century and more contemporary sources) about the plum-stone game, especially as it was played by the Great Plains tribes to which the authors considered here belonged. The center of this essay is a discussion of “Nedawi,” which shows how an initial depiction of the plum-stone game sets the practice against a Western culture deemed excessively objective and mathematical. It also sets up the rest of the story’s recurring use of the symbol of the plum, which buttresses claims to communal property but also reminds readers that such relationality may be threatened by the ludic. While the bulk of this essay is devoted to La Flesche, an ending section reads Zitkála-Šá’s plum-bush story to point at the broader significance of the game in turn-of-the-century Native literature. Though her depiction of the game suggests the dangers of too much play, Zitkála-Šá also ironizes this reactionary stance by using the plum as a central symbol in horticultural figurations of the government’s “cultivation” of Native people. Such swaying motions, back and forth, manifest the indeterminacies of the plum-stone game, whose players learn the lessons of failure and success.
Plum-Stone Culture in the Ethnographic Imagination
Variations of the plum-stone game are widely played among North America’s Native peoples. As the archaeologist Warren R. DeBoer notes, around a hundred different versions of the game are recorded across the continent (217). Much of the game’s social importance comes from the significance of the plum. Across the continent, dice games were played with a variety of materials, not only plum stones but also peach stones, beaver teeth, walnut shells, and corn (Culin 45). But, as DeBoer explains, plum stones were the “preferred and traditional material” for the game, a tradition so ingrained in the practice that some tribes referred to the game’s materials as “plum stones” no matter what was used (219). The plant from which the stones are taken—the wild plum Prunus americanus —has many uses in North American Native cultures. Not only is the wild plum’s fruit harvested and eaten, its bark was also used as medicine, and, among the Omaha specifically, its bloom was used as a natural signal for the correct planting of maize (DeBoer 238).
Ethnographers in the early twentieth century took great pains to detail each tribe’s plum-stone game, but no person more thoroughly studied games in particular than Stewart Culin, who wrote essays and books about traditional gaming practices in Asia, Africa, and North America. In 1907, Culin compiled Games of the North American Indians, a tome of over eight hundred pages. Culin divided what he called “games of chance” into two main categories: dice games and guessing games. The former were “those in which the hazard depends upon the random fall of certain implements employed like dice,” while the latter were “those in which it depends upon the guess or choice of the player” (44). Culin broadly distinguishes the two as “objective” and “subjective” and draws other distinctions of praxis (44). Dice games, for instance, were generally “played in silence,” while guessing games involved singing and drumming, which Culin judges to be the descendants of “incantations to secure the … favor of the divinity who presides over the game” (44). Culin notes how the dice games reproduce social dynamics, such as separation by gender: “Both men and women participate in the dice games, but usually apart” (45). Culin writes that dice games were “distinctively men’s games” when played in “their ceremonial forms” (45). Among the Omaha, dice games were also separated by age, “youths with youths” (73). But, as La Flesche shows, representations of the dice game played by girls played a vital role in the construction of socially cohesive communities. Indeed, by avoiding the realm of the ceremonial, the women’s incarnation of the dice game arguably emphasizes a less formalized camaraderie—the more quotidian but equally significant elements of social bonding.
Culin’s book draws on the work of dozens of experts and covers a wide range of North American tribes. For the Dakota, Culin quotes Z. T. Daniel, who was the Carlisle Indian School’s physician. The Dakota call the game “kansu,” a derivation of “kantasu,” the word for “plum seed.” Daniel reports that the name “kansu” was originally applied to “ordinary playing cards” when they were first introduced by Euro-Americans, as the Dakota noticed a similarity in “purpose” to “their original kansu” (Culin 181). For the version of the game played by the Omaha, Culin cites the work of the ethnographer Owen Dorsey. While the Omaha game mostly resembles other incarnations of the plum-stone game, Dorsey notices an especial facility among the tribe’s players: “The throws succeed each other with so much rapidity that we vainly endeavor to observe their laws of computation, which it was the sole business of an assistant to attend to” (Culin 187). For the Omaha the plum-stone game is a showcase of an impressive mental agility. La Flesche, who suggests the game’s didactic purposes, anticipates Dorsey’s recognition of the Omaha’s computational prowess.
Ethnographies by white writers generally affirm what Native representatives like La Flesche had pointed out about the plum-stone game. La Flesche’s brother, Francis La Flesche, worked with the white ethnographer Alice C. Fletcher on the landmark study The Omaha Tribe (1911). The book’s coverage of the plum-stone game suggests its importance by detailing its intricacy at almost tiresome length, as when it discusses the point values of the different combinations of the plum stones. A sampling: “One moon, 1 star, and 3 white counted 1. One moon, 1 star, and 3 black counted 1 in a game of 50, and 2 in a game of 100 …” (Fletcher and La Flesche 367). Fletcher and La Flesche’s work reveals the game’s complexity, belied by its extraordinarily simple maneuvers. The game’s extensive coverage speaks to its importance, as do Fletcher and La Flesche’s suggestive juxtapositions: they title one section “Introduction of New Foods, Games, and Diseases,” immediately moving from a discussion of “cards and checkers,” games “received from the white people,” to the more wretched novelty of “new diseases” like smallpox, which “wrought great havoc” (620). The Omaha Tribe elevates the importance of gameplay management among the Omaha, implying that one might explore games to comprehend European disruption in Indigenous culture.
Gaming, in other words, has high stakes. DeBoer frustratedly (though humorously) comments on the imprecision that emerges when games are treated as culturally serious, since gaming encompasses a wide range of meanings, from “novelty-seeking or boredom-averting” to “an enculturational device for installing conventional behaviors” (217). As befitting an archaeologist, he calls this a “ludic(rous) muddle” and focuses instead on “the very materiality of games, namely gaming equipment itself” (217). While I cannot blame him, it strikes me that play’s capacity as an “enculturational device” depends on its activation of those very “novelty-seeking” impulses that he places in opposition to it—there may be no better tool of indoctrination than entertainment, than boredom aversion. This oft-recognized connection is clearly seen in literary depictions of children playing and encountering games. Read separately and together, La Flesche and Zitkála-Šá mark out the plum-stone game as the arena in which leisure takes on existential implications.
“Common Property”: Nedawi’s Lessons in Community
Susette La Flesche (1854–1903), whose Omaha name was Inshata Theumba (“Bright Eyes”), was born to Joseph La Flesche, a half-Ponca, half-French man who was the Omaha tribe’s last recognized chief, and a mixed-race (Omaha and white) mother, Mary Gale. She attended white-run boarding schools, a major component of the intensified federal push toward assimilation of Native peoples in the latter half of the nineteenth century. La Flesche’s community was particularly involved in this project’s genesis: as Mark Awakuni-Swetland explains, after moving to a newly formed reservation in 1855, the Omaha were “immediately subjected to American colonial pressures of assimilation” and became the first US tribe to participate in land allotment (lii).Footnote 6 Nonetheless, La Flesche emerged as an advocate for Native rights. La Flesche’s engagement in politics began when several Ponca people in Nebraska were forcibly removed to Indian Territory and their chief, Standing Bear, led a group back to their homelands, which resulted in his arrest. After Standing Bear’s subsequent trial, where La Flesche served as a translator, she joined him on a tour of the east, where they spoke to reformist organizations and testified before the Senate (Kilcup 169). As a journalist and speaker, she continued her activist work over the decades to come, hand in hand with her husband, the tour manager Thomas Tibbles. “Nedawi (an Indian Story from Real Life)” was published in January 1881 in the magazine St. Nicholas (Kilcup 169).
Scholarly attention has begun to turn toward La Flesche as an intriguing author in various ways. Because of stories like “Nedawi,” she is often cast as a vital forerunner in Indigenous YA fiction, especially insofar as her work models the expression of sociopolitical themes in the genre. As Kelderman has recently argued, La Flesche strategically employs children in her writing to critique the dominant paternalism of the state—she engages with the Native child as a “discursive framework” by which to discuss or represent Native futurity (26). Kelderman reads more resistance into La Flesche’s story than critics like Siobhan Senier, who sees “Nedawi” as “invit[ing] non-Indian readers, whether intentionally or not, to feel privileged in their newfound knowledge about Indian lives,” ultimately rendering La Flesche a “gentle mediator between her culture and the dominant culture” (14, 12). Senier’s critique is well taken—and one might also argue that La Flesche reinforced assimilationist narratives about children in her support of Native education in American schools. But, as Kelderman contends, La Flesche “represent[s] parental and guardian relationships in which Native children do not figure as a ‘thing or ward’” to “explor[e] more reciprocal relationships between and among” different kin relationships; this is a significant counter to the paternalistic state, because it suggests that Native people might foster healthy kinship without that state’s intervention (27).
The political valence of “Nedawi” can be found in its most persistent object symbol: the plum. For La Flesche, the plum serves as the convenient nexus of ritual ceremony (through its ludic usage) and communal association (through the story’s commentary on property). The intended child reader of “Nedawi” is led through an iteration of the plum-stone game, which doubles as a critique of what La Flesche alludes to as white culture’s excessive materialism. The plum-stone game allows La Flesche to map a larger value of communality onto the Omaha’s relative privileging of play. She concomitantly suggests that the loss of play may signal the replacement of that communal ethic with what Jonathan Radocay (Cherokee) calls the “capitalist settler modernity” propounded by allotment’s “geography” (63). Other Native authors also attributed this profound cultural value to gaming: in Indian Boyhood (1902), Charles Eastman wrote that Dakota “sports were molded by the life and customs of our people,” so that children “practiced only what [they] expected to do when grown” (64). Against those forms of individual property holding that allotment had wrought on the Omaha and Ponca, communal life could be invigorated by willful play.
In the opening scenes of “Nedawi,” the plum-stone game activates its heroine’s spirit. La Flesche’s description of the plum-stone game is at once intricate and interruptive, a digressive moment told from the perspective of both an enraptured Nedawi and an omniscient narrator who tempers Nedawi’s emotions with allusions to white ways of life:
Yonder was a group of young girls playing a game of konci or dice. The dice were five plum-seeds, scorched black, and had little stars and quarter-moons instead of numbers. She went over and stood by the group, gently rocking herself from side to side, pretty much as white children do when reciting the multiplication table. The girls would toss up the wooden bowl, letting it drop with a gentle thud on the pillow beneath, the falling dice making a pleasant clatter which the baby liked to hear. The stakes were a little heap of beads, rings, and bracelets. The laughter and exclamations of the girls, as some successful toss brought down the dice three stars and two quarter-moons (the highest throw) made Nedawi wish that she, too, were a young girl, and could win and wear all those pretty things. (174)
La Flesche’s mention of the multiplication table used by “white children” is rather striking. La Flesche is not making this racial specification to throw into doubt the validity and internal logic of these mathematical systems—indeed, sophisticated mathematical competence was necessary for much Indigenous technology, from the outriggers of Pacific peoples to the burial mounds of North America.Footnote 7 Instead, La Flesche in this instance casts mathematics as the harbinger of a broader Western culture preoccupied with measurement and the values that such preoccupations engender. La Flesche positions the plum-stone game, a touchstone for Omaha play, in contrast to settler mathematics. She suggests a disjunction between the signs and practices of settler mathematical education (the use of numbers, the rote recitation of the multiplication table) and the form of learning or the tone of activity present in the plum-stone game. Her extensive description of the plum-stone game reveals Nedawi’s engrossment with the motions of the game while contrasting that engrossment with La Flesche’s perception of the values associated with mathematics. Nedawi’s captivation may even be a superior form of learning: play provokes interest while also generating structure, even if the approach appears to be less formalized than contemporaneous white methods of teaching mathematics. La Flesche’s detail that moons and stars, “instead of numbers,” are used as markers on the dice stands in for a basic difference in worldview between Native and Euro-American cultures. The Native emphasis on the natural world’s cycles—which, though somewhat formal and organized, account for the unsteady rhythms of environmental life—implicitly repudiates the abstraction that numbers exemplify. Here, La Flesche shows, is a kind of learning less stultifying than the memorization of multiplicative pairs. Through play comes a didactic potential connected to nature and to cultural community.
La Flesche’s critique of mathematics is most explicit in an ironic (and playful) narrative interjection she makes after Nedawi and the other young girls come to a tentative agreement among one another: “They all laughed. But alas for human calculations!” (175). In the light of La Flesche’s recurrent mention of white mathematics, what may seem like a common if not trite comment on the haphazard course of human events proves to have significant cultural stakes. Indeed, the statement submits that a recognition of that haphazardness is precisely what is lost by depending too much on calculating. Given the story’s overall playful tone, La Flesche’s comment celebrates life’s unpredictability, emblematized in the plum-stone game, in contrast to the staid certainty of the multiplication table.
Like many other works of children’s literature, “Nedawi” concerns itself with the problems of transitioning from childhood to adolescence. Yet by including details that point at larger cultural stakes in the plum-stone game, La Flesche uses Nedawi’s growth and development as an intriguing map for the replacement of Native cultures with white culture. Each dramatization in her coming of age can be analogized to some portion of the transposition of Native forms of being with the relentless march of white culture into the Omaha homelands. The rapid pace of white American imposition matches the abruptness with which Nedawi’s reverie is broken—while seeing the joy and excitement of the other girls, Nedawi, tasked with taking care of her brother, recognizes the loss of that liberated spirit of play within herself.
Elevating the status of games may lead readers into a dangerous rendering of Native cultures as more primitive—or childlike—than white ones, their emphasis on games indicative not only of immature children but of an immature form of being. Nearly contemporaneously to “Nedawi,” La Flesche articulated the problem facing the Ponca by rehashing the language cast on them by Marshall earlier in the century, describing their characterization by the US state as a “child” that “must be taken care of and fed” (qtd. in Brooks 526). Recent critics have echoed La Flesche’s characterization: besides Kelderman, who draws out the importance of this persistent coding, Lisa Brooks writes that “colonial dispossession” occurred exactly when the Ponca were rendered into “dependency” (526). La Flesche refuses to rebuke Nedawi, because she wants to disavow the pejorative connotations of being marked as a child. Nedawi’s games express an organic, less mechanical form of didacticism. La Flesche singles out the mournfulness of losing play not to admonish Omaha culture but to suggest that one of assimilation’s effects might be the unhealthy renouncement of an essential part of life.
To be sure, La Flesche does not draw ironclad cultural dichotomies. While she implicitly points out differences between white and Native cultures, at other times she discerns commonalities. “You see,” the narrator playfully writes, “she was no more perfect than any little white girl who gets into a temper now and then” (175). On the one hand, this is a fairly standard disputation of perceived stereotypical differences between racial groups—La Flesche counters notions of Native stoicism or noble savagery, affirming Nedawi’s emotionality and complexity of character. On the other hand, La Flesche uses this statement as a springboard for registering a cultural difference. For if Nedawi is not unlike the “little white girl” in “temper,” her cultural apparatus allows for a distinctly communal response to the problems of adolescence. To show this, let me return to La Flesche’s lighthearted lament: “alas for human calculations!” Readers soon discover what exactly disrupts the numerology, a plot turn that ropes La Flesche’s deployment of mathematics into ethical questions about individualism and communalism, especially in the realm of property:
During the last few minutes, a shy little girl, with soft, wistful black eyes, had been watching them from a little distance. She had on a faded, shabby blanket and a ragged dress.
“Metai,” said Nedawi, “let’s ask that girl to play with us; she looks so lonesome.”
“Well,” said Metai, doubtfully, “I don’t care; but my mother said she didn’t want me to play with ragged little girls.”
“My father says we must be kind to poor little girls, and help them all we can; so I’m going to play with her if you don’t,” said Nedawi, loftily.
Although Metai was the hostess, Nedawi was the leading spirit, and had her own way, as usual. (175)
The “leading spirit” exemplified by Nedawi is the aforementioned spirit of play, here more clearly defined as that which inherently includes and creates belonging and thus represents a motivating ethic of relationality. The game expands—unexpectedly, uncalculated. La Flesche’s preceding interjection about “calculations” casts the random appearance of the poor girl as an implicit rebuke of the supposed determinations made by mathematical operations. Nedawi’s “spirit” embraces the spontaneity imbued in the interjection’s abruptness. That which cannot be calculated is that which augments the play group, evident here in a way that also reveals the ethic undergirding play’s value: when play refutes gatekeeping, as Nedawi exemplifies, it models communality.
Indeed, the poor girl’s eventual contribution to the party engenders the continuation of the specific game du jour: Nedawi “walked up to the little creature and said, ‘Come and play with us, if you want to.’ The little girl’s eyes brightened, and she laughed. Then she suddenly drew from under her blanket a pretty bark basket, filled with the most delicious red and yellow plums. ‘My brother picked them in the woods, and I give them to you,’ was all she said” (176). Organically, without the help of the boarding school’s rote tables, the new playmate multiplies the possibility of play and thus also the relationality at the heart of a thriving community. If white and Native girls are driven by similar temperaments, there is a marked difference in how they dissipate such feelings. For the Native child, communality brings social support and resolves conflict, internal or interpersonal, more than the dominating results of competition do. Plums accrue in symbolic value as they thicken the bonds between people. Already that object at the center of an existing group at play, the plum is also the means by which that group is commemorated, marked, and remembered. Already the object used in an activity that rebukes the cold numerical ways of white schoolchildren, the plum displays the means by which warm solutions may be found to life’s inevitable surprises, its breaking of human calculations.
Their usage also depends on a facility with navigating nature—in this case, the poor girl’s brother’s plum harvest in the woods. La Flesche demonstrates that an Indigenous connection to nature need not merely be spiritual or mystical. Here it is a more materially specific aspect of a Native community’s social fabric. By gifting plums, the poor girl shows that nature’s fruits are not primarily commodities and can be used to foster relationships. Yet something like a system of economic organization is also at play here: the plums allow La Flesche to articulate what property might mean for Native peoples. It is, first and foremost, not a means of propagating individualistic claims that resemble the formal structure of the allotment system recently encouraged by Joseph La Flesche. The newcomer’s inclusion keys readers into the property ethic that the story endorses: objects are meant to be shared. That such a directive appears in a story by a nineteenth-century Native author is not surprising, but La Flesche’s countervailing rereading of the signifier “property” is particularly interesting as it relates to the story’s plums and thus to its games. The story poses the question, What if games were a way to learn about property relations? Some semblance of an answer comes with the poor girl—the game serves as the frame that expands and thus reveals an underlying elevation of growth over restriction. Plums denigrate an individualistic notion of property in favor of a distinct form mentioned by La Flesche after the girls receive the new girl’s plums: “‘Let us have them for our feast,’ said Metai, taking them. Little Indian children are taught to share everything with one another, so it did not seem strange to Nedawi to have her gift looked on as common property” (176). La Flesche destabilizes the word property in a didactic maneuver toward the reader. Property for the girls is common property. Such a classification may seem utopian—naively regarding property as simply something always in “common” may render the word property quite useless. If anyone can partake in property, an outside agent—say, a Euro-American settler—may well reign over the land and all its plums. Anticipating this rudimentary objection, La Flesche introduces a turn in plot that refines her conception of property—boys ruin things:
But, while the attention of the little group had been concentrated on the matter in hand, a party of mischievous boys, passing by, caught sight of the little tents and the tin pail hanging over the fire. Simultaneously, they set up a war-whoop and, dashing into the deserted camp, they sent the tent-poles scattering right and left, and snatching up what ever they could lay hands on, including the tin pail and its contents, they retreated. The little girls, startled by the sudden raid on their property, looked up. Rage possessed their little souls. Giving shrieks of anger, they started in pursuit. What did Nedawi do? She forgot plums, baby, and everything. The ends of the blanket slipped from her grasp, and she darted forward like an arrow after her companions. (176)
The “common property” that had marked the unification of the girls here drops its adjective. But the resulting “property” does not negate the goodwill of its former common possession. Rather, the scene articulates what La Flesche regarded as “property” in the first place. “Common property” might yet be offended, though what is broken is less some individual’s mastery over an object than the sense of trust embodied in and by the plums. This is a trust with several dimensions—a trust that people may be brought in and treated respectfully and inclusively, that the fruits of nature (literally) may be consumed without waste, and that playful competition may be held fairly. The boys’ actions are deplorable for their ruination of all these aspects of communality, emblematized by their upending of the game. Previously La Flesche had contrasted the benefits of the plum-stone game with the objectifying resolutions of white culture; here an additional enemy is found in the group of Omaha boys. La Flesche paints the boys with militaristic rapaciousness, their “raid” enacted with a “war-whoop,” conjuring up the century’s bloody conflicts.
But befitting a children’s comedy the girls and boys reconcile. The boys’ senseless toppling of the microcommunity built by the girls does not validate the victories of conquest. Once more, the conflict will be resolved by reaffirming communality, and once more the agent of construction is the plum:
The boys had stopped, too; and seeing the tears flow, being good-hearted boys in spite of their mischief, they surrendered at discretion. They threw back the articles they had taken, not daring to come near… . The boy who had the dinner brought the little pail which had contained it as near as he dared, and setting it down ran away.
“You have spilt all our soup. There’s hardly any of it left. You bad boys!” said one of the girls.
They crowded around with lamentations over their lost dinner.
The boys began to feel remorseful.
“Let’s go into the woods and get them some plums to make up for it.”
“Say, girls, hand us your pail, and we’ll fill it up with plums for you.”
So the affair was settled. (176)
Plums restore the ethic of communality among the children. Atonement comes through the fruit, the panacea to societal ills. In the workings of La Flesche’s story, the hallmark offering of reconciliation is also the vital object for children’s play, whose spirit stands in contrast to the imposition of a Euro-American culture. La Flesche presents that culture through mathematics, but her commentary on it may serve as a more general characterization of the process of modernity among Native peoples. To this end, La Flesche proves to be no mere reactionary. In “Nedawi,” the problem of modernity arises figuratively when Nedawi’s mother describes her daughter’s harmful tendencies. After Nedawi drops her brother and her mother has to come to his aid, her mother says, “I never did see such a thoughtless, heedless child as my Nedawi. She really has ‘no ears.’ I don’t know what in the world will ever become of her. When something new interests her, she forgets everything else. It was just like her to act in this way” (176). Nedawi’s failure is not the incorporation of new things per se, but the incorporation of new things at the risk of everything else. Read politically, as a consideration of the intersection of Indigeneity and the encroachments of Anglo-American culture, Nedawi’s mother evinces moderation: modernity is not to be dismissed out of hand or simply deemed contemptible, but ought to be carefully handled. Nedawi should thoughtfully approach new ideas—and new ways of being—incorporating novelty in ways consistent with tradition.
This compromise position helps orient my reading of the plum-stone game within the “modernity” of mathematical objective thinking. The game is set apart from mathematics yet possesses a utility quite like mathematical portability. The plum-stone game’s materials stand in for a communal relationality, which respects “property” insofar as it is held by groups. La Flesche warns, however, of the limits of play by introducing Mischief, a playmate of Nedawi’s who seems to exhibit an unbounded ludic energy. Readers never learn his real name, only that “[e]verybody called him ‘Mischief,’ because mischief appeared in every action of his” (177). Rendered as such, Mischief is less a fleshed-out character than a sprite or demigodlike specter. That very animating force of play that has signified communalism throughout the story is perverted in Mischief, who is defined by play: mischief “shone from his eyes and played all over his face” (177). As if to underscore the skepticism about play made manifest through Mischief’s characterization, La Flesche immediately follows up his first appearance with a telling pun—Nedawi’s brother White Hawk calls him a “little plague” (177).
When does play become plague? In part, as La Flesche shows, precisely when play interferes with the enactment of rituals—the embodiment of the tradition defended by Nedawi’s mother. Mischief “mimic[s] Nedawi’s grave dancing” as she participates in her “family circle,” making her laugh, “which was precisely Mischief’s object” (177). Play also becomes a plague when it fails to respect nature: Mischief throws a “poor little bird,” “almost dead” into Nedawi’s lap before going “off like a shot,” disappearing for the remainder of the story (178). Play may, as La Flesche implies, go too far and cause harm if not properly brought into line: what it harms is cultural practice, particularly the harmony with nature emphasized by Native spirituality writ large. But such a harmony may very well emerge from play, as shown through the plum in its various incarnations in “Nedawi.” The danger of overplay, however, is ever-present and always shall be, as Nedawi herself knows: “she of old knew that [Mischief] was irrepressible” (177).
Finding a balance between the two is advice for children in and of itself. Given the stakes of play in the story, however, one might read La Flesche’s dichotomy between mischief and the healthier spirit of plum-stone play as reflecting the struggle between cultural assimilation and preservation. What may be washed over given the seemingly innocuous detachment of the story’s genre cannot be mistaken for anything other than stern cultural commentary in the work of Zitkála-Šá. For Zitkála-Šá, the question of managing plum stones was, since childhood, a clear matter of life, death, and the significance that death could take on in its aftermath. For Zitkála-Šá, control over the plum doubles as control over Native culture and life writ large. The plum’s entrenchment in the popular pastime represented by La Flesche in a picturesque childhood could, when placed within more pointed discussions of federal government overreach, be directly connected to questions of self-determination. If the properly developed freedom of play—loaded into the symbol of the plum—stands in for the capacity to manage and care for one’s own community, then the government’s impingement on ludic Indigeneity was an attack on Indigenous autonomy.
Shameful Horticulture: Zitkála-Šá’s Problem Plums
How to make oneself the communal player, not the mischievous imp boy? There is a danger, La Flesche says, in giving oneself too far over to play. Perhaps such a hesitation is why Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938) observes the game only from a distance. Zitkála-Šá was the pen name of Gertrude Simmons, born on South Dakota’s Yankton Sioux Reservation. The opening narratives of American Indian Stories, collected in the section “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” relate Zitkála-Šá’s formative memories before moving off the reservation in 1884, when she began attending a series of schools—a Quaker mission school, a technical school in Nebraska, and Earlham College in Indiana. Zitkála-Šá’s earliest vignettes haunt the rest of her career in teaching, writing, and activism, culminating in her work with the Society of American Indians, serving as their secretary and treasurer and coediting their official journal (see Davidson and Norris xv, xxv).
Perhaps the most explicitly ghostly story that Zitkála-Šá tells from her childhood is the one in which she presents the plum-stone game. Zitkála-Šá’s formative encounter with the ludic comes with an implicit warning of its overreach. Some plums can be cursed—play taken too far becomes mischief. As with Nedawi, the plums spur desire in the young Gertrude Simmons: “On our way I ran ahead of my mother and was reaching out my hand to pick some purple plums that grew on a small bush, when I was checked by a low ‘Sh!’ from my mother. ‘Why, mother, I want to taste the plums!’ I exclaimed, as I dropped my hand to my side in disappointment” (American Indian Stories 80).
Her mother responds with a cautionary admonition:
“Never pluck a single plum from this bush, my child, for its roots are wrapped around an Indian’s skeleton. A brave is buried here. While he lived he was so fond of playing the game of striped plum seeds that, at his death, his set of plum seeds were buried in his hands. From them sprang up this little bush.”
Eyeing the forbidden fruit, I trod lightly on the sacred ground, and dared to speak only in whispers until we had gone many paces from it. (80)
The plum bush scene has received much attention from critics, but they bypass its imbrication with the historicity (and contemporary relevance) of the particular game played by the Native man. Martha Cutter reads the plum bush as reincarnating Eden, making the story legible to the West while recasting that origin in an Indigenous context. Cutter points out that the entire section “portrays a type of Eden—a world of perfect peace and cooperation between humankind and nature,” but also “blends and layers traditional Christian symbolism … with elements of Sioux cultural and tribal lore” (34). The scene displays what P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) has called a “continuing paradox,” that Zitkála-Šá writes with the “voice of resistance while incorporating mainstream values” (204). Whatever evaluation one might make of Zitkála-Šá’s intercultural representation, the scene undeniably dramatizes a tension between Western imagery and hidden, Native roots (the “forbidden fruit” emerging out of the Indian corpse). Echoing Cutter, other critics read the scene as fulfilling that autobiographical trope of adolescent tutelage, Zitkála-Šá’s mother taking the dead man as an opportunity to pass on cultural values (Kunce; Spack; Redmond). This scene thus helps set up the rest of American Indian Stories, in which Zitkála-Šá alternately critiques and partakes in the Euro-American world outside her homeland. Prior critics have unpacked much of what comes together in this scene—the environment, Zitkála-Šá’s relationship with her mother, and the various representations of Dakota culture. But all these significations emerge from the vital forces literally rooted in the legend of the dead man and his germinating seeds—to understand this scene requires an understanding of what Zitkála-Šá throws in by casting the plum-stone dice.
On the surface, the mother’s warning is a tale about the perils of becoming addicted to play, that innervating activity that, properly contained in “Nedawi,” helps delineate the particular values of Native cultures. Though the strength of the dead man’s obsession, continuing even in death, arguably gives vitality to the flourishing bush, the warning of Zitkála-Šá’s mother definitively taints this kind of life force. One could see the man as displaying the perils—but also the potentiality—of addiction, which manifests in the vibrant plum bush. This would be a revised version of the ethic of control over novelty that Nedawi’s mother had suggested. Read this way, Zitkála-Šá’s version of the plum-stone game is a skeptical gloss on play in Native societies, part of an aversion to leisure writ large. Zitkála-Šá certainly advocated for the value of work elsewhere: “Work is honorable. We must have a work and each day do it to the best of our ability,” she said in a 1919 speech to the Society of American Indians (American Indian Stories 214).
But Zitkála-Šá does not simply accept her mother’s injunctions without qualification. Immediately after her mother’s words, Zitkála-Šá remembers the plum bush not as a mere herald of trouble but as a touchstone for the past:
After that time I halted in my ramblings whenever I came in sight of the plum bush. I grew sober with awe, and was alert to hear a long-drawn-out whistle rise from the roots of it. Though I had never heard with my own ears this strange whistle of departed spirits, yet I had listened so frequently to hear the old folks describe it that I knew I should recognize it at once.
The lasting impression of that day, as I recall it now, is what my mother told me about the dead man’s plum bush. (80–81)
If the plum bush frightens Zitkála-Šá it also grips her, as ghosts at once horrify and transfix us. The dead man compels Zitkála-Šá toward memory, whether that be personal, as she writes in the last line, or more generalized, of the “departed spirits” from broken Native pasts. That history calls to her—or, more properly, whistles at her, a detail that underscores the alarm of the spectral call and the problematic duality of memory for a group suffering from collective trauma. These are themes that one finds when reading La Flesche alongside Zitkála-Šá: in the light of the plum-stone game’s significance, the stakes of Zitkála-Šá’s presentation of the dead man become clear. If memory is the means of preserving the past and maintaining a sense of identity, it is also that faculty that, weighing on the present, reminds the living of the dead’s warnings.
Readers do not learn how this man came to be addicted to the game, but his ruin signals a history of personal and societal dispossession. Elsewhere Zitkála-Šá makes the connection between plums and white governmental evil more clearly. In “The Sioux Claims,” a speech delivered in 1923, Zitkála-Šá uses a plum orchard to describe the Indian Bureau’s treatment of Native Americans:
It is not generally known to the average American citizen that the Indian Bureau is an autocracy in the heart of our democracy; it contains in itself the three branches of government combined, the legislative, judicial and executive, relative to all things Indian. It dictates legislation to Congress, interprets the laws and executes them whimsically to the defenseless Indians, victims of its paternalism. In reality, the Indian Bureau is a kind of an adventure in horticulture—a little plum orchard for politicians. (Letters 191)
The plum orchard metaphor critiques the Indian Bureau’s actions while suggesting how tight (and multifaceted) of a grip the Indian Bureau exerts over Native peoples—a relationship she fascinatingly calls an “adventure in horticulture.” Zitkála-Šá refutes the idyllic pastoral garden; here, instead, “horticulture” is oppression masked by a lovely face. If a plum orchard may be characterized as naturally beautiful, full of abundance, and useful for sustenance, here it is an apparatus of “paternalism,” the site of exploitation, control, and the stripping of Native autonomy. As horticulturalists shape and manipulate plants for desired vistas—working on projects that, as Mary Kuhn argues, “tamed and civilized inferior bodies and landscapes” (4)—so the Indian Bureau molds Native cultures and lives to be palatable by a white-dominated country. By calling the Indian Bureau an “autocracy” within the democracy, she marks it out as an especial cancer, unchecked in its power, that imposes its will without Native consent. She repeats this metaphor in another 1923 speech, “Our Sioux People”: “It is an autocracy, placarded to ‘educate and civilize’ the Indian but in fact is primarily occupied in a kind of horticulture,—a plum orchard for politicians” (Letters 210). Since her youth Zitkála-Šá had been primed to read decrepitude into the plum bush, but to also find in it a compulsion to reflect on the lessons of “departed spirits” ruined by the westward march of empire—thus, she draws on it here to represent Native disenfranchisement. Such a dispossession could be rendered in myriad ways: the loss of land, of sovereignty, or of cultural liberty.
But by using these figurative terms Zitkála-Šá argues that what had been taken away was something subtler: a spirit of play. La Flesche had shown that practices of play held much larger cultural stakes than usually assumed. Zitkála-Šá showed in turn that the domination of Euro-American culture could be discerned in the ruination of those activities. Native peoples who were made to forget the plum-stone game’s rules during the late nineteenth century’s intensification of federal assimilation were losing not just another ceremonial aspect of their culture. Enculturation through play vitally combined competition and community. As seen in “Nedawi,” the spirit engendered by and through the plum-stone game allowed for the incorporation of outcasts like the ragged girl. It could prompt reconciliation between disputing parties like the boys and the girls—the settlement in the aftermath of acknowledged harm. It embodied Native thought’s keen sophistication—and the more pronounced pleasure associated with such sophistication. These lessons were not automatically functional—and could be interrupted by the mischievous—but on the whole they fostered Native forms of belonging and property contrary to the individualist underpinnings of allotment that haunted Western lands. To threaten them was to risk the plum-stone game’s potential to gather together diverse participants, who in friendly competition learned the joys of play and community. In compelling Native people to assimilate out of cultural practices like this game of chance, federal officials and their bureau agents dispossessed the means by which children like Nedawi and Gertrude reckoned with the legion vagaries of life. One had to play the plum-stone game to learn how to win and how to lose—that is, how to grow up.
