The Eight-Year-Old Girl and the Old Woman
The two images that bookend her story are stark in their contrast.
At the beginning: a girl of eight, hiding under a bed in a boarding school dormitory in Indiana, knowing what was coming and trying to prevent it. Afraid. Alone. Without the ability to communicate in the language of the institution she was in, without the power to resist what was about to happen to her.
At the end: a woman of sixty-one, buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., having published in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, having composed the first American opera by a Native person, having founded a national political organization, having investigated and exposed corruption in the administration of Native resources, having lobbied Congress on issues of citizenship and voting rights and land policy for decades.
The distance between those two images is the story of what a person can do when they refuse to accept the diminishment that is being imposed on them.
The boarding school cut her hair. It tried to cut her identity, her language, her connection to her people, her sense of who she was. It partially succeeded and spectacularly failed.
She took what it gave her — the English language, the literary education, the musical training — and she used all of it to fight back against the premise that giving her these things was the same as improving her. She was already someone before she arrived at that school. She remained herself through everything that was done to her. And she used the tools the system inadvertently provided to expose that system to the country that was running it.
The eight-year-old girl under the bed.
The woman buried at Arlington.
Zitkála-Šá.
Red Bird.
She was here, and what she did deserves to be known.