14. The melancholy of those black days have left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years
Zitkála-Šá, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (1900)
Last time: Jessmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)
This week: Zitkála-Šá, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (1900)
Next week: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900)
And we’re back! Thanks for the little break— I needed it!
This week and next are the two halves of my lecture on 20-year old women who, writing about their own experiences and the experiences of those in their communities, spoke truth to power in the year 1900. Zitkála-Šá (1876-1938) was 24 years old when she published her memoir of detribalization in the Indian Mission Schools in the The Atlantic Monthly in January of 1900. And Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), who we will talk about next week, was 21 when she first began publishing weekly reports on racism and Jim Crow in Memphis under the pen name “Iola,” while teaching in the Memphis Public Schools. We’ll return to her next week.
Zitkála-Šá was born Gertrude Simmons Bonnin on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, the daughter of Tate Iyohi Win. As an adult she took the name Zitkála-Šá (pronounced sha), which means “red bird” as her name.
The year of her birth was the year that the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne people defeated U.S. federal troops in the battle for Little Bighorn. In the opening chapter of her memoir, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Zitkála-Šá tells how her mother was “often sad and silent,” but will not tell her why. Following the battles, the tribe suffered a forced displacement, which had taken the life of her little sister, and the battles with the US Army took her uncle, a celebrated warrior. Of her mother she writes:
Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.
"Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears"; and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, "Now let me see how fast you can run today." Whereupon I tore away at my highest possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.
The following chapters detail a lost world of friendship and legends and social connection and craft. But in Chapter 7, the “The first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life occurred in an early spring.” When she was eight, “two paleface missionaries” who wore “big hats and carried large hearts,” as they said, had come to their village to offer education. Her brother Dawée has already gone East and come back with a warning that it was “too hard an experience for his baby sister.” But Zitkála-Šá best friend Judéwin is going to the East, to what the missionaries promised to be “a more beautiful country than ours” with big red apples you can eat directly from the trees.
“Alas!” She writes, “They came, they saw, they conquered.” The girl pushes her mother to agree to send her, which she reluctantly does, though she would rather not. Her mother’s reasons:
"Yes… my daughter, though she does not understand what it all means, is anxious to go. She will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces. This tearing her away, so young, from her mother is necessary, if I would have her an educated woman. The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education to our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment. For her sake, I dread to tell you my reply to the missionaries. Go, tell them that they may take my little daughter, and that the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward them according to their hearts."
The interrupted relationship between mother and daughter will serve as the backbone of this memoir. The excitement of leaving on the “iron horse” for Indiana distracts her, the shiny new moccasins, her friends in new blankets. Then of course, comes the moment she leaves home:
Soon we were being drawn rapidly away by the white man's horses. When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me. I felt suddenly weak, as if I might fall limp to the ground. I was in the hands of strangers whom my mother did not fully trust. I no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings. The tears trickled down my cheeks, and I buried my face in the folds of my blanket. Now the first step, parting me from my mother, was taken, and all my belated tears availed nothing.
I wish I could say that the horses stop, that she finds her way home. But that is not this story. Once at the hotel, she is startled by the sound of her feet on wooden floors, the sounds of metal forks, the strange rituals of prayer times and bed times.
It was night when we reached the school grounds. The lights from the windows of the large buildings fell upon some of the icicled trees that stood beneath them. We were led toward an open door, where the brightness of the lights within flooded out over the heads of the excited palefaces who blocked the way. My body trembled more from fear than from the snow I trod upon.
Entering the house, I stood close against the wall. The strong glaring light in the large whitewashed room dazzled my eyes. The noisy hurrying of hard shoes upon a bare wooden floor increased the whirring in my ears. My only safety seemed to be in keeping next to the wall. As I was wondering in which direction to escape from all this confusion, two warm hands grasped me firmly, and in the same moment I was tossed high in midair. A rosy-cheeked paleface woman caught me in her arms. I was both frightened and insulted by such trifling. I stared into her eyes, wishing her to let me stand on my own feet, but she jumped me up and down with increasing enthusiasm. My mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter. Remembering this I began to cry aloud.
They misunderstood the cause of my tears, and placed me at a white table loaded with food. There our party were united again. As I did not hush my crying, one of the older ones whispered to me, "Wait until you are alone in the night."
It was very little I could swallow besides my sobs, that evening.
At the school, the alienation and displacement of “detribalization” begins. This practice was intended to forcibly assimilate the children as quickly as possible, usually in three years, and to introduce them to Western life. From the outside, it looks like charity; from the heart of the girl, as Zitkala-Ša shows us, it feels like trauma.
In many places in the narrative, she reports how closely she is watched. Nothing she does feels right. It is a radical displacement and self-alienation, and it causes irreparable harm.
In one unforgettable scene, she is pulled fighting to have her hair shorn. “Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!” She tells her friend Judéwin that she will resist. The “palefaces” find her hiding under her bed, and drag her down “the upward incline of wooden boxes, which I learned afterward to call a stairway”:
I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.
I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. 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.
The heartbreak of these passages is evident even from these short pieces I am sharing. The confusion and alienation, the splitting off of a child and her identity. She depersonalizes the palefaces — they are the scissors, the hands tossing her in the air. The days are long and she begins to disassociate.
It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day's buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day's harness heavy-footed, like a dumb sick brute.
She loses a bunkmate to illness that first year.
There is a lot of news reports of the Canadian Mission Boarding Schools, and how many children died there. This report, coming out of 1900 in a national publication, was a warning bell.
I’ve said that the backbone of the memoir is the relationship between mother and daughter. The “four strange summers,” when she goes home to the village for the summer, lay out how hard it is for mother and daughter to reconnect over the divide of assimilation. Zitkála-Šá says that these were days “that seemed to hang in the heart of chaos” because her mother could not comfort her, now that she was “neither a wild Indian nor a tame one.” They have lost a common language for their experience.
Not knowing how to navigate this distance, she throws herself into her new life, into musical education and oratory, winning prizes and a place at college. This is against her mother’s wishes and further separates them. As she begins to reap the fruits of her education, as a violinist, as an award-winning orator, she also begins to face prejudice, in the audiences and her fellow classmates.
She began teaching at the Carlisle Institute, at the age of 21. The Carlisle Institute, led by Richard Henry Pratt, sought to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” But in 1900, at 24 years old she went home to visit the Yankton Reservation and found it in shambles, suffering from incursions of white settlers, the loss of her missing generation, and poverty. Upon her return to work, she comes into conflict with her school’s administration and policies, and Pratt dismisses her.
She turns to writing as a form of activism: Zitkála-Šá's articles in Atlantic Monthly were published from 1900 to 1902, including "An Indian Teacher Among Indians," published in Volume 85 in 1900. Included in the same issue were "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," "School Days of an Indian Girl," and "Why I Am a Pagan" in 1902. Other articles were published in Harper’s Monthly: "Soft-Hearted Sioux" appeared in the March 1901 issue, Volume 102, and "The Trial Path" in the October 1901 issue, Volume 103. A collection entitled Impressions of an Indian Childhood appeared in 1900, followed by Old Indian Legends, which includes the often anthologized “Iktomi and the Fawn” in 1901, and the opera Sun Dance. The University of Nebraska has been bringing her work back into print since 1985.
She chose to pour her energies in to political work in the decades that followed, including a position as secretary of the Society of the American Indian, then in 1920 after that group was disbanded, she worked as the head of the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. In 1926, she founded her own organization, the National Council of American Indians.
She was taken to the edge of disillusion through the process of assimilation, and stitched herself back together— from “those black days” — to a place of power, influence, and truth.