The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  The teachers tied her to a chair, and soon Zitkala-Ša felt the “cold blades of the scissors against [her] neck… gnaw[ing] off” her “thick braids.”27

  Over the next weeks and months, Zitkala-Ša became acquainted with what she called “the iron routine” of “the civilizing machine.” It was unrelenting, grinding from 6:30 a.m. roll call until the bedtime bell, and it paused for no one. White’s Manual, like other off-reservation boarding schools, provided a strict industrial education. It emphasized cleanliness, promptitude, and Protestant Christianity. Sex-segregated training prepared boys to become carpenters, shoemakers, and farmers and taught girls the arts of domesticity. At White’s, girls spent half the day working in eight areas of bourgeois housekeeping, including baking, handling and making dairy products, and maintaining the standards of the Victorian-era dining room and its dizzying amount of serving ware and cutlery. All pupils were forbidden from speaking unless it was in English. Fatal illness plagued boarding school children. Of the seventy-three youth removed from the Shoshone and Arapaho nations of the mountain West in the early 1880s, only twenty-six survived.28

  Yet Zitkala-Ša continued to create little moments of resistance to express her anger. Sent to the kitchen as punishment for violating a school rule she found needlessly restrictive, she was assigned the task of mashing turnips, a vegetable whose very odor she found “offensive.” Furious, she “bent in hot rage over the turnips” with such force that she shattered the bottom of the brown earthen jar. Dinner that day was turnip-free, and Zitkala-Ša “whooped in [her] heart for having once asserted the rebellion within.”29 Nearly twenty years later, she would pen these scenes for the most prestigious literary magazines of her day (and ours), such as The Atlantic and Harper’s, of what befell her when, lured by red apples, she traveled east of Eden.

  Zitkala-Ša’s rage at the civilizing machine was well justified. Richard Henry Pratt took slavery and the prison as his models when he founded Carlisle Indian Industrial School, beginning off-reservation education. In his mind, enslavement had “forcibly transformed millions of primitive black people” into productive laborers through submitting them to “the care and authority of individuals of the higher race.” He sought to do something similar. Removing Native children from their tribes and assimilating them into civilization as workers, he reasoned, would be the most effective way to assume control of Native lives and eradicate backward Indigenous cultures.30

  When in 1879 Pratt approached the federal government for funding and the use of some military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to establish a boarding school for Native youth, Indian commissioner E. A. Hayt jumped at this chance to hold the children of the Lakota Sioux and other resistant tribes “hostages for the good behavior of their people.” It was only two years after the Black Hills War. While Sitting Bull and his band were evading capture in Canada, Pratt traveled throughout the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. He recruited pupils with false promises that his education would prepare the children of the Lakota to defend themselves so that a loss like that of the sacred Black Hills would not be repeated. Meanwhile, to fellow white reformers Pratt characterized the school as a fatal machinery that would bring about the “total annihilation of the Indians, as Indians and tribes.”31

  Yet it would not only be the military who benefited from taking Lakota and other Indigenous children hostage. Child removal proved to be a profitable career path for many white women. The civilizing machine required humans to run it: white women teachers. The boarding school movement presented them with significant new career opportunities. Middle-class white women in the mid- to late nineteenth century were still largely confined to the private sphere. But civilizing the West was deemed an appropriate extension of women’s domestic duties. This “manifest domesticity,” in scholar Amy Kaplan’s memorable phrase, thrust white women’s work into the center of the settler colonial enterprise. White women could respectably extend their own realm of power and influence through adopting a maternal attitude that saw Natives as children in need of their guidance. According to historian Margaret Jacobs, “the majority of boarding school employees nationwide” were white women.32

  Reformers, especially white women, appointed themselves the task of upwardly evolving the Indigenous. Evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century was overwhelmingly Lamarckian, meaning that everyone from Pratt and Fletcher to Charles Darwin believed that heredity was the result of repeated sensations and movements, not of a fixed, unchanging particle. They deemed childhood the most plastic stage of development, the period in which it was easiest to impress new traits into the flesh that would transmit down the generations. For reformers, environment during childhood, not inherent biology, determined heredity. Some schools thus removed Native youth from their parents at the astonishingly young age of three or four and only released them at the age of twenty-one in order to transform them, body and mind.33

  The belief that physical traits resulted from childhood impressions granted white women a new and forceful kind of power over the population and its future. White women gained authority as civilizers by contrast with Native women, who were portrayed as backward creatures trapped in prehistory who dragged their children down with them. Breaking the tie between Native mothers and their youngsters thus seemed imperative to white reformers. Few reformers realized the truth Fletcher had discovered: that many Indigenous cultures were free from patriarchy, and women enjoyed considerable agency, responsibility, and freedom in their tribes.34

  Boarding school children were acutely aware of the attempts to grind new experiences into their flesh through manual labor, physical beatings, and military-style discipline. A Sicangu and Oglala Lakota pupil whom Pratt recruited on his first trip to Rosebud, the writer Luther Standing Bear, later recalled, “The task before us was not only that of accepting new ideas and adopting new manners, but actual physical changes and discomfort had to be borne uncomplainingly until the body adjusted itself to new tastes and habits.” Zitkala-Ša’s accounts of her boarding school days are full of sensory detail bringing to life the trauma of her ordeal—an effective technique for enabling her readers to imagine that they, too, can feel the iron routine penetrating their flesh. She keenly apprehended both the scientific and military goals of Indian education. It is “heart rending,” she later wrote to her lover, the Apache physician Carlos Montezuma, “to see a government try experiments upon a real race” that rendered boarding school children “practically prisoners of war.”35

  A year into Pratt’s hostage experiment at Carlisle, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and other Lakota leaders traveled to Pennsylvania. They were horrified to discover their sons clothed in military dress, suffering from insufficient room and board, and subject to prison-style punishment. Spotted Tail’s youngest son had been locked in solitary confinement for a week. While they all tried to bring their tribes’ youth home, only Spotted Tail was permitted to withdraw his own children, and at his own expense.36 More than three dozen Lakota children from Rosebud and Pine Ridge remained at Carlisle and would not be able to return home, even for a summer visit, until they had remained captive at Carlisle for three full years.

  Alice Fletcher’s first paid position with the Indian reform movement was to accompany these thirty-eight Lakota children on their first trip back home to Pine Ridge and Rosebud three years later. She was also hired to recruit more children. Fletcher was returning to Sioux reservations she had visited the prior summer on her initial fieldwork trip, work that Pratt’s boarding school had made possible, for she had been hosted by the family of a Carlisle student. But now in the summer of 1882 she served as Pratt’s direct representative, the first phase of an alliance they maintained for decades. Fletcher then traveled south to the Omaha Reservation to round up more pupils for Carlisle and for Hampton (an industrial school for African Americans that recently had begun an Indian assimilation program). She removed at least three dozen children—more than had been planned. After escorting the children east to school she e
mbarked on a lecture tour to raise the extra $1,800 in funds needed to accommodate the additional children; her event in Springfield, Massachusetts, drew a crowd of two thousand people. Pratt paid her $50 per month for her work.37

  While at Red Cloud’s Pine Ridge Reservation, Fletcher worked as both an employee of Pratt’s and an unpaid anthropologist collecting for Harvard’s Peabody Museum. She arrived in the middle of the Sun Dance, the most important spiritual festival among Plains Indians. It was announced as the last Sun Dance to be held at Pine Ridge: both the US and Canadian governments were outlawing the sacred ceremony, among others, in hopes it would help destroy Indigenous culture. The brutal white agents in charge of Pine Ridge were particularly intent on withholding food rations and prohibiting ceremonies as retribution for Red Cloud and his people’s singular victory over US forces in the Bozeman War fourteen years prior. Over nine thousand people from the Oglala and Brule bands of the Lakota Sioux had gathered for this final Sun Dance, setting up their white tents in a circle three-quarters of a mile long that opened to the eastern sunrise. Red Cloud himself was adept at a mode of recruiting: when scientists entered his lands to dig for fossils or study his people, he tried to win them as allies in his own fight for survival. Fletcher was no exception, and Red Cloud informed her of the importance of the Sun Dance and its intention “to harden [our young men] to endurance” to fight their numerous enemies, both Indigenous and white.38

  The Sun Dance ceremony involved four days of fasting, abstinence, and group prayer in preparation for the main event: two days of dancing around a cottonwood pole rising forty feet in the center of their circle. Two red banners and two rawhide effigies, one of a buffalo and another of a warrior with an erect penis, flew from the pole. One or more male dancers pierced their flesh with eagle or buffalo bone and tied themselves to the cottonwood; their dance gradually tore the bones from the flesh, creating ecstatic pain that sacrificed their bodies for the sake of individual and tribal protection.

  Fletcher was determined to obtain the two effigies for the Peabody’s natural history collection. The buffalo and warrior figure were prized elements of the ceremony wanted by many, but Fletcher secured the help of the white reservation agent and the local police force to win them for herself. When the police detached the penis before handing the rawhide figure to Fletcher, she balked and demanded its return, wanting as authentic a specimen as possible. To Fletcher, these weren’t sacred or even obscene idols, but inert artifacts. She felt that collecting relics was necessary to preserve evidence of the primitive origins of society, which she was sure would soon vanish from the continent.39 Preserving Native culture, however, worked through her method of choice: severance. In this case, she removed sacred phenomena from tribes and transformed them into static museum objects.

  Fletcher didn’t stop at removing objects. For years, she made friends with Native leaders and cajoled them to share the details of secret spiritual ceremonies such as the vision quest and White Buffalo feast. Most were extremely reluctant to divulge this information. But she usually prevailed, and one of her tactics was to convince leaders that if whites had better knowledge of Native lifeways, they would better understand and sympathize with Native land struggles. Hers was a version of Pratt’s technique of persuasion. Both promoted the fantasy that better information, whether gained by Natives or settlers, would create a more equal power relationship between tribes and their colonizers. Yet data, like sympathy, do not break free of power: they are its result.

  Fletcher’s quest for knowledge knew few bounds, and she volunteered to have Indian graves dug up in order to extract skulls and skeletons from the Omaha and other tribes for interested friends back at the Peabody. Fletcher aimed to save Native culture, but as remnants of bodies and sacred objects preserved behind glass. In this act of theft, she had good company: over four thousand Native skulls amassed in East Coast museums during the period.40

  Fletcher sought to place both Native objects and Native children under the guardianship of settlers, and she was a particularly enthusiastic promoter of Pratt’s school. Over the next few years, Fletcher took men and women from Washington, DC, to Carlisle to observe firsthand the four hundred students learning to shoe horses, cook on wood-fired stoves, and march in military formation. When not organizing publicity trips to Carlisle, she lobbied to increase funding for the school and those like it. She sought to convince politicians that boarding schools were highly effective ways to assimilate Natives. Her efforts helped to double federal funding for Indian education in a few short years, and by 1885 the budget stretched to just shy of $1 million. By 1890, almost ten thousand Native children attended off- and on-reservation boarding schools that aimed to keep students for at least three years.41 Off-reservation boarding schools remained in operation until the 1970s.

  After three years at White’s Manual Labor Institute, Zitkala-Ša was eleven years old and permitted to return home for the summer. Perhaps she had been imagining a tearful reunion and days spent in companionable abandon in the hills. What she found, however, was that she “seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid.” The civilizing machine had ruptured her place in the world. Communication with her mother had become impossible. Her mother tried to soothe her daughter’s anguish by giving her the one book in her possession, an Indian Bible. But Zitkala-Ša “felt more like burning the book.” She was caught in the middle: unable to relate to her mother, yet “enraged” by the trappings of civilization that had penetrated her former idyll. A party on a moonlit night, as her friends gathered in their settler finery, only compounded her isolation. “They were no more young braves in blankets and eagle plumes, nor Indian maids with prettily painted cheeks,” for they, too, had spent three years away at school.42 Zitkala-Ša was desperate to join, but she had no hat nor close-fitting muslin dress trimmed with ribbons, and she had thrown away her hard-soled shoes in favor of moccasins. Excluded from her own peers, she cried and cried in the wigwam, to her mother’s visible distress. Boarding school hadn’t only changed her: it was changing the culture of her tribe.

  Zitkala-Ša remained at home for a year and a half until her restlessness and love of reading and classical music pulled her back to boarding school for another three years. During her years back at school, the target of Zitkala-Ša’s resistance began to shift. Increasingly, her frustration and rage were directed not at the civilizing machine but toward her mother, who now symbolized to her a preliterate, traditional way of life. For all its housetraining elements, White’s Manual also taught Zitkala-Ša skills that opened her world, such as writing, oratory, and playing the violin and piano. Her critical power led her to continue to find fault with civilization, as well. She used her graduation speech, “The Progress of Women,” as an occasion to voice her increasing feminist consciousness, objecting to the way women were relegated to a position of “subjugation” in white culture.43

  Despite her mother’s opposition, she enrolled at Earlham College, a coed Quaker institution located one hundred miles south of Wabash, where she excelled in public speaking. In 1896, she competed in the Indiana State Oratorical Competition as the official representative of Earlham. The evening contest took place at the city’s lavish English Opera House, but Zitkala-Ša found it filled with “strong prejudice” and “worse than barbarian rudeness.” As the crowd of more than one thousand gathered, her fellow students whispered anti-Indian “slurs” throughout the hall. With a dry “burn” gathering in her breast, she took the podium to deliver her speech “Side by Side.”

  “The universe is the product of evolution,” she began. “An ascending energy pervades all life.” Like Fletcher, Zitkala-Ša was well acquainted with the evolutionary paradigm that governed turn-of-the-century intellectual thought, though she used the framework to insist that Natives were innately capable of progress. Hers was an assimilationist vision, but one in which both races possess equal capacity for progress and march “side by side” into the future that belongs to all.44
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  A group of students had coordinated their hostility in advance. When she finished, they unfurled a large white banner. “SQUAW,” it read, with a racist caricature of an Indigenous woman. Ignorant drudge, sexless savage—this is the insult they hurled at her, “before [a] vast ocean of eyes.”45 Zitkala-Ša burned with anger, her teeth clenched. Yet she was to have some revenge, for she was awarded second prize in the state competition.

  Fluent in two cultures, Zitkala-Ša pursued the one career path available to an educated Indigenous woman: teaching at an off-reservation boarding school. Illness and a need to make money prevented her from completing her Earlham degree, but she refused to go home. Though she was still “frail and languid,” she traveled east to Pennsylvania, in 1897.46 Now twenty-one years old, she saw boarding schools as providing beneficial education despite their militaristic ways and was eager to help civilize Indigenous people by teaching for Pratt at Carlisle.

  Her misgivings began on the day of her arrival. Escorted to a small, “ghastly” white room whose insufficient windows were further covered by thick, dingy curtains, Zitkala-Ša sat in a stiff-backed chair in quiet horror, not even having removed her traveling hat when she heard a man’s boots tramping down the hall. The “imposing” but “kindly” man greeted her after eyeing her up and down, with apparent disappointment.

  “Ah ha! So you are the little Indian girl who created the excitement among the college orators!”

  She knew at once he was Captain Pratt, and her sense of “ill fortune” grew stronger. When he left the room she cast her hat aside and collapsed onto the bed. It was an inauspicious beginning to another difficult period in her life.47

  A month later, Captain Pratt summoned Zitkala-Ša to his office early one morning for a thirty-minute conversation during which only he spoke. At its close, one line rang in her ear.