The Haircut: Her Own Words
The account of the haircut exists in Zitkála-Šá’s own writing, published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1900 as part of the autobiographical essay “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” This is the primary source, and it is worth understanding what she actually wrote and how she wrote it.
The essay describes her arrival at the school, the disorienting cascade of unfamiliar rules and practices, and then the specific moment when she learned that her hair would be cut. She had seen what happened to the other children. She knew what was coming. Her response, as she described it, was to hide — to retreat under the bed in the dormitory.
She was found. The details she recorded are not elaborated with theatrical detail. She described being “dragged out” and having her hair cut. The power of the account is in the precision of what it does not say as much as what it does: she records the fact, the resistance, the defeat, and then the specific meaning she attributed to it. She wrote that having her hair shingled (cut short in the style the school imposed) felt like the “coward” who “had no spirit.” In the value system she had grown up with, a warrior who was captured tied up his hair as a mark of dignity, and she understood the cutting of her hair in relation to that framework.
The essay’s publication in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 put this account in front of a national reading public. The Atlantic Monthly was one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country — a publication read by educated Americans who shaped public opinion. Zitkála-Šá was not writing for a sympathetic insider audience. She was writing for the broader American public, and she was describing, in language precise and literary enough to hold that audience’s attention, what the boarding school system had done to her.
This was a political act as much as a literary one. The choice to write about this experience, in this venue, at this moment in American history, was a choice to bring the reality of the boarding school system into the public discussion on terms that the system’s architects had not anticipated.