The 2022 Gold Medal
In 2022, the United States Congress awarded Zitkála-Šá the Congressional Gold Medal — the highest civilian honor that Congress can bestow. The award was part of a broader recognition of the Native American boarding school survivors and their descendants, acknowledging the damage that the boarding school system had inflicted on Indigenous communities and cultures.
The Congressional Gold Medal recognition came more than eighty years after her death, more than a century after she published the essays in the Atlantic Monthly that first brought the boarding school experience to national attention, and more than a century after she began the political and organizational work that was the second major dimension of her public life.
The timing of the recognition is itself a historical fact. She spent her life fighting for the recognition of Native people’s rights and the exposure of the damage done by federal policies. The recognition she received in her lifetime was real but limited. The posthumous recognition has been more comprehensive.
The Congressional Gold Medal was awarded alongside recognition of the boarding school system’s broader history, including the Biden administration’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative launched in 2021, which produced a report documenting the history of the boarding school system and acknowledging the harm it caused. The investigation identified more than four hundred boarding schools that had operated under federal supervision, and documented more than fifty sites where children’s remains had been found.
The report confirmed, in the official language of a federal government investigation, what Zitkála-Šá had been saying in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly in 1900: the boarding school system had done damage, real and lasting damage, to the children and communities it processed.