The Missionaries and the Sales Pitch
The recruitment of Zitkála-Šá to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute was, in the specific way that such recruitment worked, a combination of persuasion, social pressure, and the exploitation of a community’s economic vulnerability.
The Quaker missionaries who came to the Yankton reservation in 1884 — when Zitkála-Šá was eight years old — came with a specific pitch. They offered red apples. They talked about the East, about “the big red apples” that grew there, about the opportunity for education and experience. To a child on a reservation who had never seen an apple orchard, the image had real appeal.
She wrote about this later. The writing captures the naivety of the moment — the way the offer sounded to a child whose world was bounded by what she had seen and known — and also the way the adults around her responded to the pitch with their own mix of hope and uncertainty. Her mother was uncertain. Zitkála-Šá herself was drawn in by the appeal of something new.
The older brother who was already at a school like this — the family had connections to the system already — added his encouragement. Eventually, the eight-year-old girl from the Yankton reservation left with the missionaries for Wabash, Indiana.
The mechanics of this recruitment process were not specific to her case. They were the standard operating procedure of the off-reservation boarding school system that Richard Henry Pratt had pioneered with the founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879. Pratt’s formula — “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” — was the explicit ideological framework of a system that was expanded across the country in the following decades, taking children from their families and their communities, moving them hundreds or thousands of miles away, and then systematically stripping them of the language, culture, and practices that constituted their Indigenous identity.
The red apples were a sales tool. What was being sold was assimilation, and the child being recruited did not understand what was actually being offered.