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"Connecting Students to Zitkala-Sa: From Her 'School Days' to Theirs." Abstract: This paper discusses the manner in which I have taught Zitkala-Sa's accounts of her boarding school experience to undergraduate students at two large state universities, Wayne State University (an urban, open-admissions university in Detroit) and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. While these two institutions have many differences, my experiences teaching Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical accounts have been similar. First- and second-year students are generally unaware of the history of forced assimilation to which Native school children were long subjected; additionally, my students have never heard of Zitkala-Sa. To surmount these challenges and to create a rewarding learning experience, I provide my students with a historical context for Zitkala-Sa's narratives and I pair the autobiographical accounts with other pertinent writings of their day, particularly, and most dramatically for my students, with the text of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act and Henry Dawes's 1899 Atlantic Monthly essay "Have We Failed with the Indian?" I begin by introducing my students to the Dawes Severalty Act, with which some of them are familiar from their history classes. By requiring that students read the Act itself, I aim for them to understand the pressures Native peoples endured concerning land, education, and assimilation in the late-nineteen and early-twentieth centuries. Before I introduce Zitkala-Sa's writings, students are aware that within the provisions of the Dawes Act itself were appropriations for boarding and day schools for Native children. After they read the Dawes Act, students read Dawes's Atlantic Monthly essay and thereby become aware of the government's attitude toward Native populations and understand Dawes's perspective on the "success" of the act that bears his name. Zitkala-Sa, then, enters this discussion. She effectively responds to Dawes. My students, once they read her essays, feel that to Dawes's question "Have We Failed with the Indian?," she would answer a resounding "yes." Allowing students to make these intertextual connections provides them with a richer experience of both text and history. As a result of their knowledge of the context out of which they emerged, students find that Zitkala-Sa's narratives serve as shocking, resonant, honest, beautiful, and memorable autobiography. When students do engage with Zitkala-Sa's essays (and I use "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," "The School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher Among Indian"), they can begin to understand the ways in which her experience functioned within the broader context of the Dawes Era and recognize her as an activist and survivor. The students are alert to the conversation into which Zitkala-Sa entered when her first autobiographical essay of 1900, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," was published in the Atlantic Monthly the very month after Henry Dawes's essay was published there. My students take away from their engagement with Zitkala-Sa's texts a better understanding of Native survivance (although as first- and second-year college students they do not know it as survivance, a notion presented by Gerald Vizenor) and an awareness of the inherent violence and racism of the Dawes Era, the ramifications of which they begin to recognize as persisting today.
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