The Earlham Oratory Win: What It Meant
The oratorical prize that Zitkála-Šá won at Earlham College in 1896 is a detail that might seem minor in the context of the larger arc of her career, but it is worth dwelling on for what it reveals about the specific dynamics of her position.
The competition she entered was an intercollegiate oratorical contest involving multiple Indiana colleges. She was competing against students from institutions with longer histories and more resources than Earlham, and she was doing so as a Yankton Dakota woman from South Dakota whose path to Earlham had run through the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute and the specific opportunities and obstacles of the boarding school system.
She won.
The specific content of the speech she gave is not fully preserved in the historical record. What is preserved is the fact that she won the competition and the fact that one of the competing schools responded with anti-Indian imagery designed to mock her presence in the competition.
The banner that appeared — mocking “the Indian” — was a specific demonstration of the racism that her success was navigating around. The competition was willing to let her enter, to evaluate her by the same standards as the other competitors, and to award her the prize when she performed best. The other school’s banner was a reminder that some people were not willing to accept the implications of that evaluation.
The episode foreshadows the pattern of her entire public career: achievement, recognition by some, contempt from others, and the specific exhaustion of having to navigate both simultaneously. She won the competition and was mocked for entering it. She published in the Atlantic Monthly and was criticized by Pratt for writing what she wrote. She advocated for Native rights in Washington and was chronically underfunded and underresourced in that work.
The oratory competition is a small-scale version of the larger dynamic of her life: she performed at the highest level available to her, and the world she was performing in was simultaneously offering her a platform and reminding her that she was not entirely welcome in it.