A commentary on the lives of two children around the world who are met with their first experience of discrimination of their communities and a discussion on the life-long scar such an ordeal leaves.

1. MEMORIES OF
CHILDHOOD
Instances of racial and caste-based discrimination in
the young lives of Zitkala Sa and Bama

2. Efforts by:
Saumya Panwar, S7-B
Submitted to:
Ms. Gita Bhasin
2

3. “Man is by nature a social
animal; an individual who is
unsocial naturally and not
accidentally is either beneath
our notice or more than
human. Society is something
that precedes the individual.
~Aristotle
3

4. INTRODUCTION
No man can live alone. He has to enter into relationships with his fellowmen for living a
life. No man can break the shackles of mutual dependence. This begins perhaps between
the embryo and the mother and continues till his last breath. For this need of a sense of
fraternity, he creates a society. For his sense of belonging & authority, he divides these
pieces of tectonic plates for different societies and further dissects these societies into
groups of people who look similar, speak similar or profess similar, with boundaries
manifested only in his imagination.
And for the rights of those smithereens of his own fancy, he doesn’t think twice before
becoming a bloodthirsty predator of his own species. If not in wars or battles, men who
possess greater influence on minds and lands, habitually indulge in discrimination by
reason of skin color, mother tongue, fraternity, only to air their pride, turning willfully
blind eyes to the scars they leave on many a lives.
4

5. ZITKALA SA
a Native American girl in residential school in
the late-nineteenth century

6. NATIVE AMERICANS
Years before Christopher Columbus
stepped foot on what would come to be
known as the Americas, the expansive
territory was inhabited by Native
Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th
centuries, as more explorers sought to
colonize their land, Native Americans
responded in various stages, from
cooperation to indignation to revolt.
6

7. By the early 20 century, the American-
Indian Wars had effectively ended, but
at great cost. Though Indians helped
colonial settlers survive in the New
World, helped Americans gain their
independence and give up land and
resources to pioneers, tens of thousands
of Indian and non-Indian lives were lost
to war, disease and famine, and the
Indian way of life was almost
completely destroyed.
WHAT ENSUED…
Indian boarding schools were founded
during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries to eliminate traditional
American Indian ways of life and replace
them with mainstream Euro-American
culture, while also imparting European
style education.
7
Before After

8. But antiquities are witness that
settlers or invaders have tried
gaining control by destroying
the people’s identity and
stripping them off their
culture; in short, Cultural
Genocide…
8

9. AMERICAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
These boarding schools were part of a
long history of U.S. attempts to kill,
remove, or assimilate Native Americans.
They forbade the children from using
their own languages and names, as well
as from practicing their religion and
culture. They were given new Anglo-
American names, clothes, and haircuts,
and told they must abandon their way of
life because it was inferior to white
people’s. Students were also susceptible
to tuberculosis and flu, thousands died
and were simply buried in cemeteries at
the schools.
9
(vi) Girls were forced to
attend cooking classes
(iv) An everyday
residential school scene
(v) Two sick friends
sharing perhaps
their last embrace

10. “Kill the Indian in him, and
save the man.”
o 30,000 Native American children were
thrown into boarding schools between
1880 and 1902.
o Since their culture regarded one’s hair as
sacred, the settlers began targeting them
through their ethnic sentiments.
o Hair of the children taken to these schools
were cut to make them ‘more civilized’.
Many even suffered sexual abuse.
o Since traumatic impressions of childhood
never fully heal, these children were
scarred for life, like in Zitkala Sa’s case.
10

11. 11
Zitkala Sa writes with passion
about what she experienced the
day when her long tresses were
chopped up. It is an incidence
she would fail to forget, just like
all other reminiscences of
childhood. She can only mourn
for the untroubled child she
didn’t get to be. These ordeals
collectively affected the psyche of
many like Zitkala Sa so much
that they later gave way to
generations of families that were
dysfunctional, with high rates of
alcoholism, diabetes and other
health issues and school drop
out, continuing even to this day.

12. A blithe Tamil Dalit girl who receive her first
encounter with untouchability
12
BAMA

13. 13
CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA
Dalit, meaning "broken/scattered" in
Sanskrit and Hindi, is a term used for
those aboriginal ethnic groups who have
been subjected to untouchability. Since the
creation of the caste system in Hinduism,
they have performed spiritually
contaminating work that nobody else
wanted to do, such as preparing bodies for
funerals, tanning hides, and killing rats or
other pests. Gradually, the system that
had been prepared for division of labor
seeped so deep in the fabric of society that
people lost all social mobility: individuals
were born into, worked, married, ate, and
died within those groups.
Kshatriya Brahmin
Vaishya
Shudra
Dalits

14. 14
There are first-hand accounts
of Dalits not being allowed to
eat or bathe at the same place
as the other castes; people
would consider themselves
‘polluted’ if touched by them
or their shadows.

15. DALITS IN TAMIL NADU
Ever since then, Dalits all over the country
have been discriminated, ostracized and
have even faced violence. During the mid-
twentieth century, leaders like Immanuel
Sekaran, Iyothee Thass, and even B R
Ambedkar fought for their rights, gaining
them equal access to public places, voting
rights and reservation. Today, they account
for 21 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s population,
However, Dalits in the State continue to be
at the receiving end; and there seems to be
no let-up in atrocities against them.
15
(vii) “Mooknayak” is a 100 year old
fortnightly started by Ambedkar in
Tamil Nadu to raise Dalit issues.
(viii) To this day, newspapers are
filled with cases of lynching,
violence and abuse against Dalits.

16. BAMA’S WOE
Fateful was the day of Bama’s childhood when
she came to terms with the reality of her caste.
Earlier, she had just been a carefree child,
fascinated by the clamor of the bazaar. But, when
her brother tells her the truth behind their local
chief carrying the package so far-flung from his
body, nothing about it remained amusing.
16
When Annan told her that everyone asked
for their address so that they could know
their caste, Bama was filled with a
concoction of puzzlement and a burning
frenzy. She could not stomach the futility of
the practice of untouchability; she says,
“The thought of it infuriates me.”

17. CONCLUSION
17
After these incidents, both our protagonists – Zitkala Sa and Bama, must have been
deeply shaken. Zitkala Sa completely lost her spirit; she felt powerless like “one of the
many animals driven by a herder.” As a child, her mother had always comforted her
when she used to sob but this time, there was no one but her shingled hair all around. In
Bama’s case, a firm resolve was set in her to earn the respect she deserved; her brother
had told her that education was the only way to live with dignity and from that day on,
she studied like her life depended on it, because in a way, it did.
In both the stories, these ghastly incidents slayed the child somewhere within both of
them and made them move towards adulthood, with all its drudgery and distress, faster
than they should have had. However, what is empowering is the realization that both of
them endured the turmoil to tell its story to the world and did not succumb to their
circumstances.

18. “
A scar does not form on
dying. A scar means I
survived.
~Chris Cleave
18

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