The Significance of Being Heard
One of the things that makes Zitkála-Šá’s career remarkable is the specific context of who was speaking and who was expected to be silent.
In 1900, when her essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the expectation that a young Native woman from a South Dakota reservation would produce literary work of sufficient quality to appear in the most prestigious general literary magazine in the country — and that this work would describe the boarding school system in terms that critiqued its fundamental premises — was not a common expectation. The boarding school system was, in the view of its architects, providing Native people with an opportunity. Criticism of it from a Native person was, from that perspective, ingratitude.
Zitkála-Šá’s appearance in the Atlantic Monthly was a disruption of this framework. She was not performing the role of the grateful assimilate. She was using the literary skills the education system had given her to describe what that education system had done to her, and she was doing so in the venue of the Anglo-American literary establishment.
This is a specific kind of irony that she was clearly aware of. The education that was supposed to eliminate her voice gave her the tools to make her voice more audible to the people who needed to hear it.
The autobiographical essays, the political reports, the organizational work, the musical compositions — all of these were, in different registers, versions of the same basic move: using the tools that the assimilation project had made available while refusing to accept the premise that assimilation was the goal.