The School Days Of An Indian Girl By Zitkala-Sa

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Critical Analysis: “The School Days of an Indian Girl” By: Zitkala-Sa
In “The School Days of an American Girl,” by Zitkala-Sa, she writes about her childhood struggles to adapt into the white American society. The author who recreates a story of her younger self’s journey attending a paleface school in which she had a hard time adjusting to. She left behind her Native American culture and tried to conform to the national body, not by choice but by subtle pressure. Her new self and what she had become after attending boarding school would later alienate her from native ways and make her different than her mother and brother who were living on the plains. This change in herself would ultimately affect the relationship she cherished with her …show more content…

The ringing of the bell in the early AM and marching as well as the replacement of her quiet moccasins with shoes were all a sort of torture and departure from her life on the plains with her mother and brother. As Zitkala-Sa stated, “And through my spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom, all was useless.” However, resistance emerges with interpellation, and with resistance, misrecognition and reconstructions of self (Terrance 623). One may think that these are small daily changes to conform to the western way of living but to Zitkala-Sa they were changes that had a deeper meaning. A meaning that meant a change of who she was, to a change of who she will be, by a reconstruction of herself. With these changes you would think these were her hardest trials but they …show more content…

This was likely a scare tactic used to instill discipline based on fear of consequence. It likely backfired as Zitkala-Sa clings to a notion of her Native American spirituality and “the great spirit” as she calls it which comes from a place of good in the universe. Her questioning of Christianity leads her to dispel it as not a genuine path of goodness in the world. This new ideology made her feel stuck in culture and religion. Not only was she to adapt to western culture but now she was forced to listen and be threatened by a religion evil, in which she did not originally believe

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