Early Life and Education
Zitkala-Ša was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised there by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Sioux name was Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a European-American man named Felker, who abandoned the family while Zitkala-Ša was still very young.
Until 1884 Zitkala-Ša lived on the reservation, describing those days as ones of freedom and happiness spent in the care of her tribe. In 1884, when Zitkala-Ša was eight, missionaries came to the Yankton Reservation and brought several of the Native American children, including Zitkala-Ša, to the White's Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, a manual training school founded by Quaker Josiah White for the education of "poor children, white, colored, and Indian". She attended the school for three years until 1887, later detailing the experience in her work The School Days of an Indian Girl. In that later work she described both the deep misery of the experience of having her heritage stripped from her as she was forced to pray in the manner of the Quakers and cut her hair, and the joy she felt in learning to read, write, and play the violin.
In 1887 Zitkala-Ša returned to the Yankton Reservation to live with her mother. She spent three years there, dismayed to find that while she still longed for the native Sioux traditions she no longer fully belonged to them and that many around her were conforming to the influence of the dominant white culture. In 1891, desirous of continuing her education, Zitkala-Ša decided at the age of fifteen to return to White's Manual Labor Institute, though this time with a plan for her education beyond that of becoming a house-keeper as the school prescribed for young girls. She furthered her study of the piano and violin, taking the place of the music teacher at White's when the woman resigned. In 1895 she was awarded her first diploma and gave a speech on women's inequality, a subject often lectured on by the Quakers at White's, that received high praise from the local paper.
Though her mother wished her to return home after the completion of her education at White's, Zitkala-Ša decided instead to continue on and attend Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana after receiving a scholarship in 1895. The decision was an unusual one, as higher education for women was yet a very new phenomenon at the time. Though initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her predominantly white peers, she soon proved her oratorical talents once more with a speech entitled "Side by Side" in 1896. During this time she began gathering Native American legends, translating them first to Latin and then to English for children to read. In 1897, however, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health.
From 1897 to 1899 Zitkala-Ša played violin with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1899 she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she taught music to the children and conducted debates on the treatment of Native Americans. In 1900 she played violin at the Paris Exposition with the school's Carlisle Indian Band. In the same year she began writing articles on Native American life which were published in such popular periodicals as Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly. Also in 1900 Zitkala-Ša was sent by Carlisle's founder, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, back to the Yankton Reservation for the first time in several years to collect students. She was greatly dismayed to find there that her mother's house was in disrepair, her brother's family had fallen into poverty, and that white settlers were beginning to occupy the land promised to the Yankton Dakota by the Dawes Act of 1877. Upon returning to the Carlisle School she came into conflict with its founder, resenting the rigid program of assimilation into dominant white culture that he advocated and the fact that the curriculum did not encourage Native American children to aspire to anything beyond lives spent in menial labor. In 1901 Zitkala-Ša was dismissed, likely for an article she had published in Harper's Monthly describing the profound loss of identity felt by a Native American boy after being given an assimilationist education at the school.
Concerned with her mother's advanced age and her family's struggles with poverty, she returned to the Yankton Reservation in 1901.
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