Zitkala Sa's Analysis

After being torn from her family and home with the Sioux tribe as a young girl, Zitkala Sa enters a world unknown as a victim of institutionalized assimilation. With the aid of education provided to her through this institution, she chooses to share her experiences with the world, criticizing the fallacious conceit of race. Through her potent use of language and strategic storytelling, Zitkala Sa uncovers the nature of the concept of race and the truth about the fate of her people. While expressing her story, several factors influence, or coax, Zitkala to shape her narrative in a particular way. These influences, or “coaxers,” in the words of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson consist of “the person or persons, or the institution that elicits
Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” (Sa 437).The inhumanity of Pratt’s institutionalized assimilation becomes blatant here. We witness the pinnacle of these “extreme indignities” in the cutting of Zitkala’s hair which degrades her “like a coward” and cuts her from her people. Her “cries” and “moans” of anguish, as well as the reference to her mother in the passage reach out to the readers and remind them that while Indian, Zitkala never ceased being that which she truly was: a human being. Such profound exposure to humanity challenges any racist notions and leaves us completely shaken. Finally, at the conclusion of this terrible episode, Zitkala reveals her main point about the nature of institutionalized assimilation and race: “I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” (Sa 437). This sentence precisely expresses the relationship between assimilators and native Indians. By placing such a bold statement at the end of her intense passage, Zitkala juxtaposes all of her human expression, her pain and defeat, with the dehumanization that the Indian tribes had to undertake. Furthermore, by representing her narrated self as “one of many little animals driven by a herder,” Zitkala vividly illustrates that westerners dehumanized a peoples the kind of relationship that western assimilators and native Indians had according to the instituted rules of race. In the sights of race, Indians became animals.