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73 3 Resisting Scripts Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School As months passed over me, I slowly comprehended that the large army of white teachers in Indian schools had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected. It was one which included self-preservation quite as much as Indian education. —Zitkala-Ša, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” 1900 All that Zitkalasa has in the way of literary ability and culture she owes to the good people, who, from time to time, have taken her into their homes and hearts and given her aid. Yet not a word of gratitude or allusion to such kindness on the part of her friends has ever escaped her in any line of anything she has written for the public. By this course she injures herself and harms the educational work in progress from which she sprang. In a list of educated Indians we have in mind, some of whom have reached higher altitudes in literary and professional lines than Zitkalasa, we know of no other case of such pronounced morbidness. —The Carlisle Indian School’s Red Man, 12 April 1901 In 1900, Zitkala-Ša, a Sioux and former teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, published three autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians.” In these essays, Zitkala-Ša does more than simply discuss her life as an Indian student and teacher in the off-reservation boarding school system.1 She uses her writings, instead, to launch a strategic critique of off-reservation Indian education in general and the Carlisle Indian School more particularly, for it was at Carlisle that Zitkala-Ša was “an Indian teacher among Indians,” and it was during her time there that she realized the “large army of white teachers” had a “missionary creed” that “included self-preservation quite as much as Indian 74 Resisting Scripts education.” Moreover, by publishing her writings in the Atlantic Monthly, she reaches out to this predominantly white readership and offers them a depiction of Indian education from an Indian perspective—a perspective that institutions like Carlisle did not want to promote. As the second epigraph shows, Carlisle did not take Zitkala-Ša’s criticisms lightly.2 The Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the first and most prominent off-reservation Indian school in the country, and Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder and president, celebrated Carlisle for its “success” and for the example it set for all other off-reservation schools to follow. To promote his educational message, Pratt sent the school’s newspapers, the Indian Helper and the Red Man, to sites all over the country. These publications proudly informed supporters of Indian education of the ways Carlisle’s teachers were successfully “civilizing ” Indian “savages” by transforming them into self-sufficient individuals. Compounding this effort, Carlisle continually offered interested readers proof of its “good” work by presenting them with exemplary Indian students and teachers who were thankful for the education and opportunity that Carlisle had provided. It is no surprise, then, that when Zitkala-Ša published her essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Carlisle fervently objected to her portrayal of Indian education . Zitkala-Ša’s essays were particularly offensive to Carlisle because, through them, she not only offered an entirely new narrative about Indian education but also refused to carry out the gendered role Carlisle prescribed for her as an Indian female teacher. For Carlisle, the Indian woman as teacher was the greatest sign of educational success, because once the Indian woman became “civilized” enough to teach at Indian schools, she could then enact a shift in cultural pedagogy. Instead of initiating her students into Indian culture, this “civilized” female teacher could now introduce them to white, “American” culture and teach them to adopt new cultural and civic practices. Thus, Zitkala-Ša’s essays signaled a challenge both to Carlisle’s pedagogical program and to the gendered role she was to play inside it. In this chapter, I argue that when Zitkala-Ša resists her gendered role and speaks out against Carlisle’s educational narrative, she intervenes in the school’s iteration of rhetorical education by claiming what Scott Lyons has called “rhetorical sovereignty.”3 Specifically, Carlisle’s form of rhetorical education was one that promised both its Indian students and white America that these students could participate in and contribute to dominant white society if their teachers carried out two major...

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