There are two variations of the American Dream: the first is the mere idea. This is the American Dream in its pure form, because the dreamer has not yet experienced it. The second form is the true American Dream. This is only brought about through an attempted experience of the first form. For most, their American Dream will not follow the ideal path of the first variation. This is the case for Zitkala-Sa when she writes about her “School Days of an Indian Girl.”
Her story commences in the hopeful light of the pure American Dream. Though she is being separated from her home and family, the separation will be a prosperous one. She will gain knowledge and prestige not just for her, but also for her whole family. Naturally, events do not continue along this progressive path, as is clearly stated when Zitkala-Sa says “I had arrived in the wonderful land of rosy skies, but I was not happy, as I had thought I should be” (430). Every immigrant who has ever travelled to the United States in hopes of fulfilling their American Dream has felt this same angst as Zitkala-Sa. She had been fed the heavenly images of “rosy skies” and liberating bliss, but this is never encountered. She says that she was “not happy, as I had thought I should be.” All that she had been told about her new life was not true, and after having to be disjointed from the only life she had ever known, she felt that she deserved to have her Dream.
Zitkala-Sa did achieve one form of the American Dream. In her later life, she continued to rise above expectations and reinvent the norms for her race and gender. Whether she herself believed to have achieved the American Dream or not is nebulous. The closing paragraph of the excerpt from “The School Days of an Indian Girl” reveals that even victory and triumph in the eyes of her peers could not satisfy the discontentment that events and choices in her life had caused her and her mother.
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