What the Boarding School Actually Gave Her
There is a dimension of Zitkála-Šá’s story that requires careful acknowledgment: the boarding school system, for all its violence, gave her tools she used against it.
The English language — which she was taught at the schools she attended, and in which she wrote the essays that exposed those schools — was one of those tools. The literary training she received — the reading, the exposure to the forms of Anglo-American writing, the practice of composition — was the foundation on which her literary career was built. The musical education that developed her violin skill was the background for the operatic work she later produced.
None of this means the system was good, or that the violence it did was acceptable, or that what was taken from her — her mother’s language, the uninterrupted continuity of her cultural life, the early years that might have been different — was a fair price for what she gained. That is not the argument.
The argument is more complicated: the boarding school system tried to strip her of one identity and replace it with another, and what actually happened was that she acquired tools that she then used to fight the system, while maintaining — imperfectly, painfully, with significant losses — a connection to who she was and where she came from.
She named herself Zitkála-Šá — Red Bird — in the years when she was beginning her public career. The name she chose for herself, in her own language, was not the name the school had given her. It was a statement, quiet but unmistakable, that she knew who she was.