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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West
Twenty-one-year-old Gertrude Simmons sat in a stiff-backed chair in her small room at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and stared out at the students hurrying to class. The young men and women attending the institution were from Native American communities across the country. None of them were wearing the traditional clothing of their people; all were dressed in suit jackets, pressed trousers, or high collar dresses with ruffled bottoms and matching tights. The Indian children of various ages from six to sixteen had been transported to the facility as an “experiment in educating and assimilating Native American young people.”
Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt, founder and superintendent of the boarding school was convinced his method of “civilizing” the Indian was the best. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres,” General Pratt told those in attendance at the Nineteenth Annual Session of the National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in June 1892. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
When Gertrude had been lured to General Pratt’s institutions at eight years old, she had no idea she would be forced to abandon the language she grew up speaking, have her long hair cut off, and made to dress like non-Indian children. More than a decade after being enrolled at the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, Gertrude applied to teach school to Native American boys and girls. She had mixed feelings about her duties. She wanted her pupils to learn how to read and write English but not at the expense of sacrificing their own culture.
Born in 1876, in Yankton, South Dakota, Gertrude was a Sioux Indian and was given the name Zitkala-Sa. Her father was a white trader named Felker Simmons and her mother a Nakota Sioux called Tate I Yohin Win or Reaches for the Wind. Her father passed away when she was still a toddler, and her mother became her sole support.
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To learn more about Gertrude Simmons and her career in teaching read
Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West
