What the Haircut Was and What It Wasn’t
Return, at the end, to the image that opens the story: the eight-year-old girl hiding under the bed at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, knowing what was coming, trying to prevent it.
The haircut was many things. It was an act of institutional violence against a child who was not in a position to effectively resist it. It was a specific implementation of the boarding school system’s ideology of erasure — the physical marking of the transition from “Indian” to assimilate. It was a violation of a specific cultural practice that carried meaning for the community the child came from. And it was, in the way that traumatic experiences sometimes work, a wound that never fully healed but that was also never simply a wound.
Because the girl who had her hair cut in that dormitory grew up to write about it in a way that tens of thousands of Americans read. She grew up to become the person who put the specific reality of the boarding school experience in front of the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. She grew up to investigate corruption, to found organizations, to advocate in the halls of Congress, to compose music, to write stories, to give speeches — to do, in other words, everything the boarding school system was designed to prevent her from doing.
The system tried to make her into something smaller than she was. She declined.
The name she chose for herself — Zitkála-Šá, Red Bird — is the name by which history now knows her. Not Gertrude Simmons, the name she was born with, and not the name the school might have assigned her, but the name she chose in her own language, at the beginning of a public career that would last decades and leave marks on American literature, American music, and American political life.
The institution that cut her hair helped create the subject of some of her most powerful writing. It did not define the rest of her life.
She did that herself.