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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 Sa, "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 for the race 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.
Red Man, 12 April 1901(1)
These epigraphs capture a distinct moment of Indian pedagogical resistance to white education at the turn of the twentieth century.' The first is an excerpt from Zitkala Sa's autobiographical essay, "An Indian Teacher among Indians." The second illustrates the Carlisle Indian School's reaction to Zitkala Sa's publications, a reaction that attempted to repair the reputation of off-reservation schooling from the accusations Zitkala Sa made in her essays. Carlisle (and throughout this essay my use of "Carlisle" signifies the forces that drove the educational imperatives at the Carlisle Indian School, the most influential of these being Carlisle's founder, Colonel Richard Pratt) reacted vehemently to Zitkala Sa's essays not only because she "harm[ed] the educational work" that schools like Carlisle promoted, but also because Zitkala Sa was one of Carlisle's former teachers. It was at Carlisle that she was "an Indian teacher among Indians," and it was during the months Zitkala Sa spent at Carlisle that she realized that their "missionary creed" had much more to do with the "self-preservation" of white culture than with the education of Indian students. Carlisle was right to think Zitkala Sa had that particular school in mind as she wrote and published her essays. Her letters to one-time...