The Writing: What She Actually Said
The essays she published in 1900 are remarkable documents, and they deserve attention not only as sources of biographical information but as literary achievements.
“Impressions of an Indian Childhood” opens with the specific physical world of her early years — the prairie, the sounds of the Dakota world, her mother’s tipi, the particular sensory texture of the life she describes. The writing is careful and vivid without being sentimental. She is not writing to produce nostalgia or to perform Native “primitivism” for a white audience. She is writing to make a world that many of her readers have never seen real and specific.
The essay leads the reader through the world of her childhood and toward the moment of the missionaries’ arrival and the decision to go to the school. It establishes the world that was being left before describing what replaced it.
“The School Days of an Indian Girl” picks up with the journey to the school and continues through the specific experiences of the boarding school — the culture shock, the haircut, the alienation, the education. It is in this essay that the now-famous account of hiding under the bed and having her hair cut appears. The writing is controlled and emotionally precise — she does not dramatize beyond what the events themselves contain. The understatement is one of the techniques that makes the account so powerful.
“An Indian Teacher Among Indians” is the most politically direct of the three essays. It describes her experience as a teacher at Carlisle and her growing disillusionment with the system. It is a critique of the boarding school model from someone who had been both its subject and, briefly, one of its agents. The essay positions her not as someone who has simply escaped the system but as someone who has understood it from the inside and found it damaging beyond what any good intentions could redeem.
These three essays, published in consecutive months in the Atlantic Monthly, announced a major literary voice. The editors of the Atlantic Monthly were not running Native American content as charity — they were publishing work they judged to be of high literary quality that would interest their readers. The essays were well-received, and they established Zitkála-Šá as a writer of national significance.
She followed the Atlantic Monthly essays with publication in Harper’s Monthly, another major literary magazine of the period, and with the collection Old Indian Legends in 1901 — a book of traditional Dakota stories that she had collected, translated, and retold in English for a non-Native audience.