Zitkala Sa

My over all impression…that’s hard. I didn’t live in these times and reading the history of them nothing really good came out of us converting the Indians to our life style and these documents seem to prove it.

She was…free. In the literal sense she was free. She ran around daily with children her age. She lived by the river and didn’t need indoor plumbing, she didn’t need a grocery store, and she had all the company she could ever want. She was able to listen to the legends and or old tales at night before she slept. She was envious of her life but as I was reading I was envious of her life. She had nothing to care about at the age of the palefaces invading her land and converting her brethren. She had fields to run in, acres that belonged to no one so why not to her?

Once she starts getting older it seems as though she’s beginning to be sucked in. The missionaries come and convince the children that the lives they lead are insufficient to the ones that they could offer them. Looking back on it now, they lost so much when they left their traditional ways. Even the returning of her older brother brought more changes to her lifestyle. They went from the traditional teepee to a log cabin house, her mother went from the traditional garb to the cotton of the palefaces. The things she was used to were changing and she was okay with that. She was too young to understand what it really meant as her mother thought.

It reminds me of the book I am reading for my teaching reading class. We try to stamp out all the differences in our cultures and try to make them ‘correct’. It’s the same as telling black students that they speak insufficiently and labeling them ‘verbally corrupt’ because they don’t speak Standard English. Let’s face it, no one speaks Standard English. We wiped out her culture. They no longer have the roots that they for so long had without our interference.

Her last line was perhaps what touched me the most “I was as frightened and bewildered as the captured young of a wild creature.” In a way that was exactly what she was. We thought of them as savages and we wanted to correct them. That’s all we wanted to do but in the process we ‘fixed’ their entire lifestyle. Huge moments of their lives, their histories, their old stories, many are lost because they stopped passing them on in their traditional manner. She wasn’t expecting what we gave them. We fed them lies about our lives. Maybe not lives but we told her the truth in the way that we saw it. We never really told her what to expect, a huge culture shock to say the least.