Zitkala-Sa | School Days Of An Indian Girl & “On Being Brought From Africa To America” By Phillis Wheatley
Zitkala-Sa was a Yankton Dakota Sioux writer, translator, musician, educator, and political activist.Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. Zitkála-Šá was born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She lived with her mother and brother on the reservation until 1884. That year, she and several other Yankton children began to attend to Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana.
One of her most prominent writings, “School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900), was analysed by Nadine Smith on education. Seattle: An Analysis of the Autobiography “The School Days of an Indian Girl” by Zitkala-Sa.
A Coming-of-Age Story
The story begins with Zitkala-Sa as a young girl riding a steam engine east to a residential school, leaving her family and village behind. A View of Indian Life
Indian vs White Culture and Religion
Zitkala-Sa goes so far as to gain support for her people that she makes Indian spiritual beliefs and practises appear nobler and more genuinely Christian than white people’s Christianity.
Zitkala-Sa as “the Representative Indian”
Zitkala-story Sa’s represents many natives who suffered in the white residential school system.
Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) embodies such an experience of alienation in her short poem‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’ Wheatley was fortunate to receive the education she did when so many enslaved Africans fared far worse, but she also clearly had a natural aptitude for writing.
She was freed shortly after the publication of her poems. To not in her poem ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, Wheatley casts her soul as ‘benighted’ or dark, playing on the blackness of her skin but also the idea that the Western, Christian world is the ‘enlightened’ one. She is writing in the eighteenth century, the great century of the Enlightenment.
