Pratt’s Response and the Debate About Assimilation
Richard Henry Pratt’s response to Zitkála-Šá’s Atlantic Monthly essays is a documented part of her story and deserves attention as evidence of the specific dynamics of her public career.
Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the architect of the most influential model of the boarding school system, was predictably hostile to the critique she was publishing in the Atlantic Monthly. He viewed the boarding school as an unambiguous good, the assimilation project as the only viable path for Native people in American society, and her critique as a betrayal of the opportunity the system had given her.
He was, in the historical record, vocal about his objections. The specific exchanges between Pratt and Zitkála-Šá — through the public channels of the debate they were conducting, through correspondence, through the institutional channels of her employment at Carlisle — documented a fundamental disagreement about what the boarding school system was for and what it had done.
Pratt’s position was not simply defensiveness about his institution. He genuinely believed in what he was doing. He believed that the elimination of Indigenous identity and culture was both necessary and beneficial — that it was the only way Native people could survive in the emerging American society. His phrase “kill the Indian, save the man” was not a cynical slogan. It was his sincere assessment of the situation.
Zitkála-Šá’s counter-argument was grounded in specific experience rather than abstract ideology. She was not arguing in theory that assimilation was wrong. She was describing, in specific and literary terms, what it had felt like to be subjected to it. The power of her argument was precisely its grounding in experience — in the specific memory of the eight-year-old girl under the bed, in the specific alienation of someone who was no longer fully at home in either world.
The debate between Pratt’s confident assimilationism and Zitkála-Šá’s experiential critique was a microcosm of the larger debate about federal Indian policy in this period. She did not win the debate immediately — the boarding school system continued for decades after her essays were published. But she established, in those essays, an argument that has proven more durable than Pratt’s position.