Zitkala-sa vs Pratt

Native American Zitkala-sa writes about her personal journey in the education system, during a time where schools were segregated as well as elitist among the major communities, predominantly Puritan-white.

Zitkala-sa (1876-1938) was a Yankton Dakota Sioux woman who dedicated her life to education and social activism between and among her original community of Native American heritage and the new settlers, made of Caucasian men and women.

Her motivation to write and tell her story is significant. Considering the time and location of her work, Zitkala-sa uses her personal narrative to educate her community and the one she entered into at a tender age, in order to ultimately denounce ad raise ethical questions on inclusion, diversity, and justice.

Its subversive tone contradicts Pratt’s rhetoric, because her words enable her experience to come on surface with transparency and authenticity. This fact can be proven by her use of tones and expression that clearly can held accountable her message and conditions’ report.

“There is what the paleface has done! Since then your father too has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun. We were once very happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither. Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us away.” (part 1, “My mother”, from American Indian Stories by Zitkala-sa)

With a hindsight, it is possible to prove the brutality and the harsh problematics that the new settlers had imposed on the Native communities. In “The Land of Red Apples” she mentions how she is welcomed in the paleface community. The following chapters highlight a different side of this apparent welcoming space, where her culture is being disrespected. For the first time she recognizes what the agenda of the new people coming in her lands is, and from now on she will use whatever tool she has to be a mediator between her original community and the new one she had just begun to be part of.

“Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

One remarkable episode is the one when her hair is cut.

“Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!” (part 2, “The cutting of my long hair”, under “The School Days of an Indian Girl” section).

Her ability to use the immigrants’ language (English) pushed her statements ahead and due to this choice she was able to spread the news and make her voice heard.