Zitkala-Sa vs. Pratt: Blog Post 2

When looking at Zitkala-Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and Richard Pratt’s “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” the common theme connecting the two pieces is civility vs. incivility. The core difference is who is considered civilized and who is considered uncivilized in each. I view the two narratives linearly, wherein the peoples discussed start off either as humans or animals, and, in the end, are transformed into the opposite.

In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkala’Sa considers herself and the other young Native Americans to be civilized humans from the start, but Pratt considers them to be uncivilized from the start. We see this distinction through the ending line of “The Cutting of My Long Hair,” when Zitkala-Sa writes, “Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” The word “now” is the key word in this transformation from civilized to uncivilized or, in other words, human to animal. She did not previously consider herself or her people to be animals, but since she was treated like one, she felt that she became one.

Richard Pratt’s narrative in “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” has a different starting point. He considers the Native Americans to be “animals” or “uncivilized” from birth, but then believes that white schooling can convert them into “humans” or “civilize” them.

“The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.”

Pratt, Paragraph 8-9

In this quote we can see that Pratt only believed “English-speaking” white people, the colonizers, were civilized, and that it was their responsibility to civilize the Native Americans, “as they did the blacks.”

Another key distinction is how each author qualifies both groups as either “humans” or “animals.” Pratt’s view is that the Native Americans are uncivilized animals because they hadn’t been exposed to white education and assimilated into the colonized society. Zitkala-Sa’s view is that the white people are uncivilized animals because of the violence they expose her to during her schooling, like cutting her hair, throwing her around, dragging her across the floor, and holding her down. The commonality of why each author believes their people are civilized is because each group has culture, and those cultures create societies, and therefore civilizations. Where Zitkala-Sa is writing against Pratt’s work is in showing that culture of the Native Americans that Pratt never thought to consider or understand.