Zitkala-S̈a, 1876-1938

Zitkala-S̈a (Zitkála-Šá, Lakota for Red Bird), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (her English and married names), was a Lakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist.

Born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota, she was raised by a single mother. At eight years old she was taken by Quaker missionaries to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, in spite of her mother's disapproval. The missionaries' stories about riding trains and picking red apples in large fields appealed to children who had never been off the reservation. Zitkala-S̈a’s mother did not want her daughter to leave and did not trust the white strangers, but feared that the Dakota way of life was ending. She wanted her daughter to have an education but the reservation did not have any schools.

According Zitkala-S̈a, she regretted her decision almost instantly. She was to spend years away from everything she knew. She did not know English, and tribal languages were banned at the school. She would be forced to give up her Dakota culture for an “American” one. Zitkala-S̈a’s arrival at the school was traumatic. Upon learning the children would all be required to have their hair cut, knowing in Dakota culture, the only people to get haircuts were cowards who had been captured by the enemy, Zitkala-S̈a resisted. When she was found hiding underneath a bed, she was dragged out, tied to a chair, and had her braids cut off as she cried out loud. Later in life, she wrote that the staff at the school did not care about her feelings. At the residential school, Zitkala-S̈a was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. She stayed at the Institute until 1887. Her experience brought a lot of trauma and grief in losing her heritage, being forced to pray as a Quaker and cutting her hair. She also reflected on the joys of learning to read and write and play the violin.

In 1887, Zitkala-S̈a returned to live with her mother on the Yankton Reservation, but left three years later. She felt out-of-place after her experiences at the Institute. While she still longed for the native Yankton traditions, she no longer fully belonged to them. Additionally, she believed that many on the reservation were conforming to the dominant white culture.

Wanting to pursue a higher education beyond becoming a housekeeper as was expected of Native American girls, she returned to the Institute. At age fifteen, Zitkala-S̈a began to study the piano and violin, which led the Institute hiriing her as a music teacher. When graduated in 1895, Zitkala-S̈a gave a speech advocating for women’s rights.

Zitkala-S̈a accepted a scholarship to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana and began to collect stories from Native tribes translating the stories into Latin and English for children to read. While she initially felt isolated and uncertain among her primarily white peers, she proved to be an excellent orator, giving a speech entitled "Side by Side". Zitkala-S̈a had to leave Earlham before graduation because of financial and health issues. Choosing not to return to the Reservation, she moved to Boston, where she studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music for the next two years.

After completing her formal musical education, she took a job as music teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1899. The following year the school sent Zitkala-S̈a back to the Yankton Reservation to gather more students. She was dismayed to find the widespread poverty on the Reservation, including the dilapidation of her family home and white settlers occupying land given to the Yankton Dakota people by the federal government. She began to facilitate debates on the treatment of Native Americans.

She played violin with the school's Carlisle Indian Band at the Paris Exposition in 1900, her last affiliation with the school. Upon returning to the Carlisle School, Zitkala-S̈a came into conflict with the school's founder, Richard Henry Pratt. She resented his rigid program of assimilation into dominant white culture and the limitations of the curriculum which prepared Native American children only for low-level manual work, assuming they would return to rural cultures.

She began writing about Native American life as she had experienced it. In autobiographical and Lakota stories, she presented her people as generous and loving instead of the common racist stereotypes portrating Native Americans as ignorant savages, contradicting the arguments used to force Native Americans to assimilate into white American society. Zitkala-S̈a was critical of the boarding school system, writing about the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School. Her stories were accepted by national magazines like Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly.

After being dismissed from her position at Carlisle in 1901 and returning to the Reservation, she spent her time taking care of her mother and collecting stories for her book, Old Indian Legends. From 1900 to 1904, she published books of legends collected from Native American culture, as well as autobiographical narratives. Her autobiographical writings of this period included "An Indian Teacher Among Indians," "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "School Days of an Indian Girl". Harper's Monthly published her stories "Soft-Hearted Sioux" (March 1901, Volume 102), and "The Trial Path" (October 1901, Volume 103). She "A Warrior's Daughter", published in 1902 was published in Volume 6 of Everybody's Magazine. In 1902, Zitkala-S̈a published "Why I Am a Pagan" in Atlantic Monthly (volume 90), a treatise on her personal spiritual beliefs. She challenged the contemporary idea that Native Americans readily adopted and conformed to the Christianity forced on them. She continued to write but she did not publish any of these writings in her lifetime. The unpublished writings, along with others were collected and published posthumously in 2001 as Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera.

While living in Yankton, Zitkala-S̈a also worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a clerk. She married Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin, a man of Yankton-European ancestry and culturally Yankton, in 1902 and moved to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. Zitkala-S̈a and Raymond lived and worked there for the next fourteen years. Their son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin, was born during this time. Zitkala-S̈a joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship. She became the Society’s secretary in 1916, corresponding with the BIA and expressing criticism of the Bureau’s assimilationist policies and practice. She reported abuse of children when they refused to comply with the schools' assimilation policies.

In 1910, Zitkala-S̈a collaborated on an opera with William F. Hanson, a Brigham Young University Professor. Entitled the Sun Dance Opera, it was based on the sacred Sioux ritual that the federal government had prohibited. Composed in romantic musical style, and based on Sioux and Ute cultural themes, Zitkala-S̈a wrote the libretto and songs. She also played Sioux melodies on the violin, which Hanson then used as the basis of his musical composition. In 1913 the opera, featuring members of the Ute Nation, premiered at the Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah to high praise. The Sun Dance Opera was the first Native American opera written. The oepra symbolized how Zitkala-S̈a lived in and bridged both her traditional Native world and the world of white America in which she was raised. She believed music was a powerful way to share her family’s values and reach a new audience just as her mother passed down traditionals orally.

In 1916 her husband Raymond was fired from the BIA and the family moved to Washington, DC, where Zitkala-S̈a continued her work with the Society of American Indian, serving as editor of their journal, American Indian Magazine from 1918-1919. From 1916 to 1924, Zitkala-S̈a wrote and published political works. Some of her most influential writings include American Indian Stories (published in 1921). Topics covered included the contribution of Native American soldiers to World War I, issues of land allotment, and corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She called for recognition of Native cultures and traditions, while also advocating US citizenship rights to bring Native Americans into mainstream America, believing this was the way that they could both gain political power and protect their cultures.

Zitkala-S̈a lectured across the country promoting the preservation of Native cultural and tribal identities, however, she was adamant the traditional use of peyote had the same destructive effects of alcohol in Native American communities. While she was sharply critical of assimilation, she was firm in her belief that Indigenous people in America should be American citizens, and that as citizens, they should have the vote. She argued as original occupants of the land, all Indigenous people needed to be represented in the current system of government. While her wish seemed to come true with the passage in 1924 of the The Federal Indian Citizenship Act, it only granted US citizenship rights to Native Americans but did not guarantee the vote. Only states had the authority to decide who could and could not vote.

In response to the lack of suffrage for Natives, in 1926, Zitkala-S̈a and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians. Zitkala-S̈a served as president, fundraiser, and speaker until her death in 1938. The Council worked to unite the tribes across the United States to gain suffrage for all Native Americans. She worked with white suffrage groups and was active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, working to maintain a public voice for the concerns of diverse women. In 1924, Zitkala-S̈a created the Indian Welfare Committee of the Federation and ran a voter registration drive among Natives, encouraging those who could to engage in the democratic process and support legislation that would be good for them. Zitkala-S̈a co-authored a piece titled "Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery," an article which was instrumental in getting the government to investigate the exploitation and defrauding of Native Americans by outsiders for access to oil-rich lands. The article was also instrumental in the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Zitkala-S̈a continued to work for improvements in education, health care, and legal recognition of Native Americans as well as the preservation of Native cultures. Zitkala-S̈a has been noted as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century. She died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, DC and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, with her husband.

Her legacy as an activist is seen as a vital link between the oral cultures of tribal America and the literate culture of contemporary Native Americans. She has been recognized by the naming of a Venusian crater "Bonnin" in her honor; was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Month Project in 1997. As Zitkala-S̈a lived part of her life in the Lyon Park neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, DC, in 2020, a park in that neighborhood previously been named for Henry Clay was renamed in her honor. Melodia Women's Choir of New York City performed the world premiere of a commissioned work based on the story of Zitkala-S̈a, Red Bird by Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian in 2018. She was also honored by Google Doodle with an illustration by Chris Pappan that incorporated ledger art for use in the United States on February 22, 2021, to celebrate her 145th birthday.