"The School Days of an Indian Girl": Reproducing Resistant Assimilations
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2023-06-12T12:23:50-07:00
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*all images come from the public domain from the following: Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories. [Internet Archive] Brigham Young University, Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921.*
To consider the role of the child in Bonnin's American Indian Stories, I turn first to her most obvious pieces on childhood--that of the "Indian girl" whose tales open the book. I focus here particularly on her "School Days" section whereby the audience sees the constant battles the child must face as she moves between her reservation home and the missionary school system (which we soon find is not neatly separated). By paying attention to the missionary school as a particular ideological site, we can see how the battles of the individual narrator extend beyond and out into her Nation's fight for sovereignty and survivance in midst of painful, infuriating attempts at assimilation. As the young narrator grows, she sharply demonstrates what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in As We Have Always Done marks as refusal--an "appropriate response to oppression" that is "always generative...always the living alternative" (33). Through the process of refusal, the narrator finds physical expression of bent up anger and pain while not providing either the other characters not the (presumably white) audience the comfort of easy answers. In this section of the exhibit, I follow the narrator's repeated struggles in school as varied ways in which the figure of the child is the site upon which resistant assimilations--refusals which complicate flat understandings of acquiescence and subversion--are (re)produced.
