The Institutional Recognition Decades Later
The full institutional recognition of Zitkála-Šá’s significance has come gradually and incompletely, but it has come.
In addition to the 2022 Congressional Gold Medal, her work has been the subject of academic attention that has placed her in the context of American literary history more appropriately than the neglect she suffered during the mid-twentieth century. The publication of reprints of her major works, the development of scholarly studies examining her writing, and the inclusion of her essays in major anthologies of American and Native American literature have all contributed to the recovery of her place in the literary record.
The National Park Service, which manages the Zitkála-Šá birthplace site in South Dakota, has produced interpretive materials that help make her story accessible to visitors and to the general public. The Library of Congress holds her papers — a collection that includes correspondence, manuscripts, and organizational records that document her career in the kind of detail that allows scholars to reconstruct what she was doing and thinking across the decades of her work.
The Women’s Suffrage National Monument in Washington, D.C. has been discussed as a venue for recognition of the full range of women who contributed to the suffrage movement, including Native women like Zitkála-Šá whose contributions to the broader movement for rights were significant.
The specific recognition associated with the boarding school system’s history has been one of the most significant developments. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report of 2022 — which documented the history of the system, identified the sites of schools and children’s graves, and acknowledged the harm the system caused — is a form of federal recognition that Zitkála-Šá spent her career working toward. The report essentially confirmed, with the authority of an official government investigation, what she was saying in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900.