The Double Alienation
The boarding school experience did not simply strip Zitkála-Šá of her Dakota identity and replace it cleanly with an Anglo-American one. What it actually did was more complicated and more painful.
She wrote about this later with considerable clarity. The education she received — in English, in the literary and musical traditions of Anglo-American culture, in the institutions of a society that was simultaneously offering her access to its tools and denying her full membership in its world — gave her skills and knowledge that she eventually deployed with remarkable effectiveness. But the acquisition of those skills came at the cost of a disruption in her relationship to the community she had come from.
When she returned to the reservation, she was changed. Not in the way the school had intended — she had not become a middle-class Anglo-American woman who had left her Dakota identity behind. But she was no longer simply the girl who had grown up in the specific world of the Yankton community. The school had altered her in ways that the community noticed, and that she herself felt as a form of displacement.
The essays she later wrote about the return to the reservation are some of the most emotionally complex passages in her body of work. She describes her mother’s home, but also the distance she feels from it. She describes her love for her mother, but also the difficulty of bridging what the years away had created between them. She writes about feeling caught between two worlds — neither fully belonging to the Anglo-American world that had educated her nor fully belonging to the Dakota world she had come from.
This double alienation is one of the most significant themes in Native American literature of the boarding-school era, and Zitkála-Šá articulated it earlier and more powerfully than almost anyone else. The boarding school system did not produce assimilation. It produced something more damaging: a generation of people who were no longer at home in either world.
The recognition of this damage was part of what made her eventual advocacy work so effective. She was not speaking theoretically about the harm of the boarding school system. She had experienced it, she understood it in her body and her memory, and she could describe it in terms that made it real to audiences who had not lived it.