The School Days Of An Indian Girl By Zitkala-Sa

Critical Analysis: “The School Days of an Indian Girl” By: Zitkala-Sa

In “The School Days of an American Girl,” by Zitkala-Sa, she writes about her childhood struggles to adapt into the white American society. The author who recreates a story of her younger self’s journey attending a paleface school in which she had a hard time adjusting to. She left behind her Native American culture and tried to conform to the national body, not by choice but by subtle pressure. Her new self and what she had become after attending boarding school would later alienate her from native ways and make her different than her mother and brother who were living on the plains. This change in herself would ultimately affect the relationship she cherished with her

mother, causing strife and hardship in the end. The process of change and adaptation to a society was an enduring hardship but one that produced some success in her on-going transformation. The author’s main arc is one of sadness and inability to find peace in the white world or that of her family.
The story opens up with a train ride from her native home on the plains of Dakota and ends in a school in Indiana also referred to as “The Land of Red Apples.” A young girl who was faced with aloneness on this journey was sent away for three years to a “paleface school,” as she described it. These schools attempted to strip away the culture of Native American children and groomed them to become westernized. On the train ride Zitkala-Sa finds it hard to avoid being stared at by children who point, however, she finds it even more difficult to avoid the parents scrutiny fixed on her. This process she was endured was not a choice, but a law handed down from the government. From 1879 until the early 1960’s, the federal government tried to assimilate American Indians by sending school-aged Indian children to distant boarding schools where, it was believed, the Indian in them would be slowly and forever replaced by Western traditions, language, education, and religion (conversion to Christianity was part of the indoctrination) (Bruchac and Smelcer 1). This ultimate ride was the ending of who she was raised to be and the beginning of a girl she was not ready to conform to.
While on the train ride, Zitkala-Sa sees a telegraph pole which reminds her of one not far from her village. She mourns the tree and takes a very poignant stance against white culture, their destructive forces, and reward for the mighty trees. By native ideology a tree is to be honored and not go to waste and this decimation of the forest seems to make a larger statement about the white man and Native American culture. Indian boarding schools were built to be places that would utterly transform Indian people, obliterating tribal identity, destroying Native languages, and eradicating Native religions, customs, and traditions (Bruchac and Smelcer 3). The change of the western landscape due to railroads and telegraph poles in the late 1800’s reflected the boarding school Indian period as a time of brutalization by the white man.
Upon arriving at the school, all Zitkala-Sa could do was to tremble with fear. The unknown was a frightful feeling especially when one of the palefaces began to jump Zitkala-Sa up and down with enthusiasm. She did not expect this kind of behavior as her own mother would not use her as a plaything. This was the beginning of a lot a sobs and tears that covered her face. With all these tears the school keeper assumed she was hungry and brought her to a table loaded with food, but she was misunderstood. As Laura L. Terrance in Resisting Colonial Education: Zitkala-Sa and Native Feminist archival refusal states, “they have so many important things to say and I very much wanted others to learn what I had come to know, except, they can’t be known, because they can’t speak; they can only be spoken for, about, and around, becoming subjects of study” (Terrance 622). The language barrier between the two was the beginning of a lot of misinterpretations. Due to Zitkala-Sa not being able to communicate in English, this would cause many misconceptions with how she was supposed to behavior or answering the palefaces in an accurate manner.
The morning of her first day approached and already much confusion and questioning poured through Zitkala-Sa’s mind.

The ringing of the bell in the early AM and marching as well as the replacement of her quiet moccasins with shoes were all a sort of torture and departure from her life on the plains with her mother and brother. As Zitkala-Sa stated, “And through my spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom, all was useless.” However, resistance emerges with interpellation, and with resistance, misrecognition and reconstructions of self (Terrance 623). One may think that these are small daily changes to conform to the western way of living but to Zitkala-Sa they were changes that had a deeper meaning. A meaning that meant a change of who she was, to a change of who she will be, by a reconstruction of herself. With these changes you would think these were her hardest trials but they

weren’t.
Zitkala-Sa’s resilience was tested often and in spite of all the marching to the beat for the paleface masters of this school, she remained true to herself. One episode where she went to the kitchen to mash turnips ended with her breaking the jar and mashing them with furious anger. The paleface master spared her with no scolding remarks. Zitkala-Sa vents and in a way goes without punishment. She developes resentment toward overly restrictive rules, willfully defying one in protest (Terrance 624). At the dinner table the small victory was in the announcement that there would be no turnips. In the eyes and ears to Zitkala-Sa this is a win on her behalf, as he disliked turnips. This small action helps her to build a bit more confidence and in some ways assures her that she is not dead inside and her spirit lives.
In her experience one way Zitkala-Sa illustrates this stripping of culture is when she writes about her hair being cut-off. The most difficult change and hardest to overcome was when her friend Judewin, who knew few words in English, informed Zitkala-Sa that she overheard the paleface woman discussing about cutting their long black hair off. Outside of her community she cannot dis-identify with cut hair’s stigma even though it carries none within the school community she now physically inhabits (Terrance 623). She immediately stated, “No, I will not submit. I will struggle first!” Because shingled hair signifies cowardice, her political consciousness, culturally informed, resists the stigmatization and impels her to struggle (Terrance 623). In her culture hair length and its vitality are a badge of honor among tribes. Cowards have shingled hair and mourners wore shaved heads in her tribe. When she resists, she retains a degree of articulation between self, culture, and community, preserving a measure of her original subjectivity and communal connectedness (Terrance 623). This was a clear departure from her native ways and it it was a scarring event that symbolizes a death of sorts of her native heritage. The suffering of this extreme indignity caused her to lose her spirit.
The resistance of fighting, was a losing battle. Zitkala-Sa could fight all she wanted but in the end the paleface women would conclusively win. However, this is about what the means, why resistance has a significance. Zitkala-Sa must reconstruct herself in a way that can reconcile who she is/was alongside the view of herself through the eyes of the school. The school’s refusal to accommodate the subjectivity of the student, imposing its objectives, leads to a power struggle forcing the student to assert the self: “Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known” (Terrance 623). Meaning she will fight for what she believes in, even though she will lose. Her classmates don’t acknowledge her and this was a way for herself to make her known.
As the days go by in the school of torment, Zitkala-Sa is listening to a paleface women describe evil from the Bible, she states,”the devil roams loose in the world and tortures little girls who disobeyed school regulations” (Zitkala-Sa 1414).

This was likely a scare tactic used to instill discipline based on fear of consequence. It likely backfired as Zitkala-Sa clings to a notion of her Native American spirituality and “the great spirit” as she calls it which comes from a place of good in the universe. Her questioning of Christianity leads her to dispel it as not a genuine path of goodness in the world. This new ideology made her feel stuck in culture and religion. Not only was she to adapt to western culture but now she was forced to listen and be threatened by a religion evil, in which she did not originally believe

in.
Her witness of a sick and dying school comrade and her ‘disconnected utterance of Jesus Christ’ allows Zitkala-Sa to peer into her state of disbelief. Where religion once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge” (Foucault 1977). Zitkala-Sa clearly was not interested in learning more of this religion and possibly following it. Instead, it was thought of as a religion of evil, so evil that when she got her hands on the Bible she began to destroy the sacred book by scratching out the eyes of the devil and leaving holes in the pages. She was only taught about the evilness of Christianity, however, if she took the time to read the Bible herself or if she was taught about the true meaning behind the stories of the Bible, she may have embraced the religion a bit more.
We do not hear much of Zitkala-Sa’s religion, only tidbits of some spirituality. One inkling that she is spiritual was the gift of roots worn around her neck which was given to her by a medicine man to help her make friends. She wears it for a year then it disappears from her neck without any fanfare or feelings either way. This showing that she was either giving up on her spirituality or that she could careless of it. With the passing of time even those things most sacred to her native roots has become meaningless and deserves no special statement of faith. In The Boarding School Experience in American Indian Literature, it discussed a bit about Captain Richard Henry Pratt, after the Red River war, he was given charge of 72 Indian prisoners. His philosophy was, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Bruchac and Smelcer 1). This resonates to me that the spirituality of the Indian must be killed before they can embrace and accept Christianity.
On a visit back home, Zitkala-Sa tries to hold back who she was conformed to be, however, she quickly realized that she was becoming more and more Westernized. She assumed her mother would want her to revert back to being a Native but when her mother saw how upset she was when her brother would not allow her to go the party. Her brother has adapted and semi-embraced the western culture but Zitkala-Sa was not a 100% she was ready for this change. Henry Dawes a former senator of Massachusetts, once stated, “ fit the Indian for civilization and to absorb him into it” (Burt 282). Clearly her brother was making this transition to become more westernized and was participating in activities known to this society. On the other hand, Zitkala-Sa still had some doubts and with all of her power and courage she wanted to retort to who she was when she originally left for the school. Unfortunately, that Zitkala-Sa had died inside and a new one was forming whether she approved it or not.