From Student to Teacher: Carlisle
After Earlham, Zitkála-Šá made a choice that has puzzled some later commentators: she went to work at Carlisle Indian Industrial School — the very institution that was the model for the system that had damaged her.
She joined the Carlisle faculty in 1899, teaching music. This was the period when she was simultaneously beginning to write and publish the autobiographical essays that would expose the boarding school system to a national audience. The two activities — teaching at Carlisle and writing about the harm of schools like Carlisle — were in obvious tension, and Zitkála-Šá was aware of this.
Her relationship with Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder and director, was characterized by exactly this tension. Pratt represented the ideological center of everything she was critiquing. He believed the boarding school system was unambiguously beneficial for Native people. She was publishing essays in the Atlantic Monthly that described her own experience of the system as traumatic and damaging. This was not a comfortable working relationship.
She left Carlisle in 1901. The tensions had become impossible to sustain.
But the Carlisle period was also significant for what it produced. It was during this time that she was writing and publishing the essays that would establish her as one of the most visible Native American literary voices of her era. The essays she published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 — “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” — appeared as a series that read collectively as an autobiographical account of her early life, her education, and her ambivalent position between worlds.
The choice of the Atlantic Monthly as her venue was significant. She was not publishing in a specialized publication for an Indigenous audience, or in a missionary magazine for people already disposed to take her perspective seriously. She was publishing in one of the most prestigious general-audience literary magazines in the country, reaching readers who might have no prior engagement with the realities of reservation life or the boarding school system.
Her strategy — bringing the Dakota perspective to a mainstream literary audience, in the literary form those readers most valued — was deliberate and effective.