Zitkala Sa Journal

By Jessica Granse
January 23, 2009

“Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one,” (Page 1118).

This quote is only one of the times in Zitkala Sa’s biography writing that she expresses her feelings of isolation, which is the reoccurring and main theme.

The works by Zitkala Sa that were biographical were stories about a culture and about the wrongs done to that culture, but ultimately they were stories of isolation and loneliness. At the beginning of Impressions of an Indian Childhood, she’s a very happy girl. She enjoys spending time with her mother and hearing Indian tales. It all changes with the introduction of the missionaries to her life. Her excitement over the red apples and going on the “iron horse” with them leads to the first disappointment in a line of letdowns. Her first feeling of isolation in this book seems to be when all of her friends are able to go East, but her mother doesn’t want her to. She is isolated from her friends in this sense, but only temporarily. When she finally is able to go in The School Days of an Indian Girl, she is stared at by the white people, or palefaces, as she likes to refer to them, making the ride not so easy. Due to the way she’s dressed, their stares announce her isolation from white society. Within the first day she’s isolated because she doesn’t know the routine and what the bell means in the classroom. The isolation from the whites seems to continue while she’s at that school, although she seems to find some friendly faces among the Indian children. The isolation doesn’t pause when she goes home. On her visits, she is set separate from her mom because she is taught to speak, read, and write English, while her mother doesn’t know any English. Also, when her brother goes to a party and she isn’t invited. She even feels as though nature has isolated her, as expressed in the above quote. The isolation seems to be a theme for the full length of these short biographies. In college, it’s because of her being called a “squaw”, although she does get a little more inclusion from the oratorical contest. Even as a schoolteacher she is alone in the sense that she understands what it means for an Indian child to be Americanized, while the white people who come through the school are amazed at the productions these supposed savages produce, but are unable to understand the pain they had to go through in order to become so “civilized”. Zitkala Sa is pulled from her culture in an attempt to teach her a separate culture and she ends up being all alone in her personal mixture of the cultures. In American Narratives by Molly Crumpton Winter, found on the google book search, she discusses the fact that this was normal for the Indian children in the boarding schools at this time. This isolation was a normal feeling among these children. This whole big group of people were all forced to feel alienated just for the goal of making them more “white”.