The School Days of an Indian Girl.

Vanessa Cabrera Narvaez

In the book American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa exposed some critical events that marked

the lives of Indian children inside a colonized world. The culture of colonialism acts as a

control system, in which there are the ones who are in power, and the rest who is subjugate as

the story explained very clear. In fact, if there are opponents or fighters, they would be

eliminated. Colonialism seeks for domesticated weak people’s mind as zombies in order to

have the entire supremacy.

In the story we can see that Indian children were forced to experience some situations, in

which their emotions were fear, sadness, humiliation, and others. For instance, some of these

moments were embarrassing as this, “Their mothers, instead of reproving such rude curiosity,

looked closely at me, and attracted their children's further notice to my blanket. This

embarrassed me and kept me constantly on the verge of tears.”

Despite the protagonists were children with no experience or preparation to face life’s

misadventures, they had to grow up, understand, and adapt themselves to the new reality.

With this, they would ‘survive’ in a world that did not offer opportunities to the less fortunate.

In my experience, the colonialist people are the ones that are fearful by the people who can

be above them. This is because they think that others are going to trample on them as weak

minds. Indeed, rumor has it that Hitler committed suicide as an act of cowardice.