When I first started reading “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” my first reaction was that there was no way that this story resembles the American Dream. The “Civilizing” School sounds to me like pure hell. It was a place where the Indian girls could not express themselves and individuality was frowned upon. The sentence, “for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder” expressed how the girls were all forced to be the same. The episode where the girls are creatively playing in the snow and summoned inside the school for discipline again reinforces how individual expression is frowned upon. But as I kept reading, through the part about the girl choosing to attend college against her mother’s will, I realized that this could fit in as an American Dream. This girl had not wanted to become civilized at first. But once she realized the power of education, she extended her education and even went on to win first place in an oratorical contest. This girl realized what she wanted and worked hard at it to get it; and I will call that an American Dream.
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