The System She Was Describing
The specific system Zitkála-Šá attended was part of a coordinated national program. Understanding the scope of what she was embedded in, and what she was later exposing, requires a brief account of the boarding school system.
Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879, and it became the model for a system that eventually included dozens of off-reservation boarding schools across the United States. The schools operated on Pratt’s explicit principle: the elimination of Indigenous identity and culture was necessary for the integration of Native people into American society. The problem, as he framed it, was “Indianness” itself — and the solution was its complete eradication.
The mechanisms of this eradication were systematic. Children were separated from families, sometimes very young, sometimes by force or through the economic and social pressure applied to communities that were entirely dependent on the federal government for basic sustenance. Once at the schools, they were forbidden to speak their Native languages. They were required to wear Anglo-American clothing, adopt Anglo-American names, and practice Christianity. They were trained in the “useful” skills deemed appropriate for their expected role in American society — domestic work for girls, manual labor and agricultural work for boys.
The physical conditions of many of the schools were inadequate. Disease was a persistent problem — tuberculosis was common, and mortality rates among students at some schools were alarming. Children who died at boarding schools were sometimes buried far from their home communities, and families were not always notified. (The discovery, in recent decades, of children’s graves at the sites of former boarding schools has become one of the most significant and disturbing aspects of the system’s belated historical reckoning.)
The number of schools and the number of children affected was substantial. Estimates suggest that more than ten thousand children were enrolled in off-reservation boarding schools at the peak of the system in the early twentieth century, and many tens of thousands of Native children passed through the system over the decades of its operation.
Zitkála-Šá was one of them. But she was also someone who could write about what happened to her — and what she wrote became part of the historical record that exposed the system’s reality to audiences who had not experienced it directly.