Her Relationship with Her Mother
The figure of her mother — Ellen Tate’iyohiwin Simmons — is one of the most emotionally resonant presences in Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical writing, and the relationship it describes is one of the most complex in the literature of the boarding-school era.
The mother in the essays is a figure of strength, love, and grief. She is a woman who has seen the world she grew up in transformed by forces she did not choose and could not easily resist. She loves her daughter and is ambivalent about the forces that are taking her daughter away. She is, in the moments when she appears in the essays, both a figure of maternal warmth and a figure of loss — someone who is watching something she cannot prevent.
The relationship between Zitkála-Šá and her mother became more complicated after the school. The essays describe the distance that the education created — the way the daughter who returned from school was different from the daughter who had left, in ways that created difficulty between them. The mother who had loved and nurtured her could not entirely reach the person the school had helped create.
This specific dynamic — the boarding school creating distance between children and parents, not only through the physical separation during the school years but through the cultural and psychological transformation that made return difficult — was one of the cruelest dimensions of the system. The explicit goal of assimilation meant that a “successful” product of the boarding school was someone who was different from their family in fundamental ways. The cost of that difference was borne by the family relationships that were disrupted.
Zitkála-Šá writing about her mother — with love, with grief, with the specific honesty of someone who understood what the system had done to their relationship — was bringing this dimension of the boarding school’s harm into public view alongside the more obvious harms of culture and language suppression.