Arriving at White’s Institute
The school she arrived at — White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute — was in Wabash, Indiana, far from the Yankton reservation in South Dakota. The distance was not only geographic. It was cultural, linguistic, climatic, and social. A Yankton Dakota child who had grown up in the specific world of the reservation arrived in a place where everything was different.
The culture shock she described in her autobiographical writing is visceral and specific. The clothing was different — restrictive, unfamiliar, nothing like what she had worn. The food was different. The sleeping arrangements were different. The sounds were different. The people around her were strangers who did not speak her language.
And the rules were explicitly designed to eliminate the familiar and replace it with the foreign.
The boarding school system operated on a specific logic that its architects were explicit about: Indigenous children could not be transformed while they maintained contact with their communities, their languages, or their cultural practices. Therefore, everything from those communities had to go. The language was forbidden — children who spoke their Native languages were punished. The clothing of home was replaced with the uniform of the school. The names were replaced with English names. The religious practices were replaced with Christianity.
The haircut was part of this systematic replacement. Hair, in many Indigenous traditions, carried cultural meaning that was more than aesthetic. For the Yankton Dakota, long braided hair was the ordinary presentation of self. Cutting it short marked a specific kind of disruption — the kind that happened when someone died. To have it cut by strangers, without consent, was to have a meaningful cultural practice turned against itself.
She knew what it meant. She hid under the bed. They found her.