“The School Days of an Indian Girl,” “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” and “The Great Spirit” in the book American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa
In these stories, Zitkala-Sa describes contradictory feelings about the education system for American Indian tribal members. She feels differently about the system at different times, but the development of her feelings toward and her understanding of the system isn’t even or smooth. For example, even after she comes to certain conclusions about negative impacts of the American Indian boarding school system, she excels in that system, and even after she understands how the system’s purpose is to make its pupils less “Indian” and more “American,” she comes to teach for it.
How do you explain these paradoxes and contradictions? How do Zitkala-Sa’s writings show her caught between two different worlds with different values? How do her writings show her both harmed by the American Indian boarding school system and succeeding in it? How can her educational excellence be said to make her an example of the system even as she criticizes the system and what it’s done to her indigenous values and views? How and why can both points of view, even as they seem contradictory, be said to be valid? How does the stated educational purpose of the boarding school system for American Indians, to make its students less “Indian” and more “American” seem problematic? How does it call into question what it means to be “American”? Is “American” a cultural construction, because if not, who would be more “American” than the people who were here before European colonizers? Where does Zitkala-Sa, an “American Indian,” fit between “American” and “Indian,” and how does her experience with the boarding school system demonstrate that difficulty?
