Why the Hair Mattered Then and Now
Return one final time to the specific incident that opens this account — the eight-year-old girl hiding under the bed, the forced cutting of her hair — to consider why this incident has become iconic in the history of the boarding school system.
The haircut is a concrete, specific, physical event that carries symbolic and cultural weight that extends beyond the physical act itself. It is the kind of event that makes visible what the boarding school system was doing — not in the abstract language of “assimilation policy,” but in the specific, immediate language of one child, one dormitory, one pair of scissors.
When Zitkála-Šá wrote about the haircut in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, she was doing something that required both courage and craft. Courage because she was describing her own experience of institutional violence in the most public literary venue she could access. Craft because the writing had to be good enough to reach and hold an audience that was not predisposed to engage with the experience she was describing.
The writing was good enough. The essay is still read today, more than a century after its publication, and the haircut incident is still the moment that readers carry with them after putting it down.
In the context of the boarding school system’s broader history, the haircut represents what the system was doing to thousands of children — a systematic assault on identity that worked through physical markers as well as through language and cultural practice. The hair was not the worst thing the system did. Children died in these schools, far from their families, in conditions of inadequate care. But the hair is the moment that Zitkála-Šá chose to write about, and in the hands of a writer of her ability, it became the moment that has endured.
She was eight years old under that bed. She was one of the most significant Native American public figures of the twentieth century when she died. The thread between those two points is the story of what a person can do when they refuse to be diminished by what has been done to them.