Hair Part III: Assimilation

Today's quote is taken from Sioux Indian Zitkala-Sa's "American Indian Stories."  This scene describes one of  her experiences as a student at a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana--an institution that required assimiliation.  In this scene, Zitkala-Sa is hiding under a bed at the mission, and is forceably removed for a haircut:

     Women and girls entered the room.  I held my breath and watched them open closet doors and peep behind large trunks.  Some one threw up the curtains, and the room was filled with sudden light.  What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know.  I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly.  In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. 
     I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.  Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities.  People had stared at me.  I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet.  And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's!  In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me.  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.

---Zitkala-Sa ("Red Bird") (b. 1876), American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris