Zitkala-Ša

Zitkala-Ša, also Zitkála-Šá (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird; February 22, 1876 – January 26, 1938), was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist. She was also known by her anglicized and married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity, and the pull between the majority culture in which she was educated, and the Dakota culture into which she was born and raised. Her later books were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white English-speaking readership.

She was co-founder of the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which was established to lobby for Native people's right to United States citizenship and other civil rights they had long been denied. Zitkala-Ša served as the council's president until her death in 1938. Zitkala-Ša has been noted as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century. Working with American musician William F. Hanson, Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), the first American Indian opera. It was composed in romantic musical style, and based on Sioux and Ute cultural themes.

Early life and education

Zitkala-Ša was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised by her Dakota mother Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ ("Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind"), whose English name was Ellen Simmons. Her father was a Frenchman named Felker, who abandoned the family when Zitkala-Ša was very young.

For her first eight years, Zitkala-Ša lived with her mother on the reservation and learned the Dakota language. She later described those days as ones of freedom and happiness, safe in the care of her mother's people and tribe. In 1884, when Zitkala-Ša was eight, missionaries came to the reservation. They recruited several Yankton children, including Zitkala-Ša, taking them to be educated at the White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. This training school was founded by Josiah White for the education of "poor children, white, colored, and Indian" to help them advance in society.

Zitkala-Ša attended the school for three years until 1887. She later wrote about this period in her work, The School Days of an Indian Girl. She described the deep misery of having her heritage stripped away when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and to cut her traditionally long hair. By contrast, she took joy in learning to read, write, and play the violin.

In 1887, Zitkala-Ša returned to the Yankton Reservation to live with her mother. She spent three years there. She was dismayed to realize that, while she still longed for the native Yankton traditions, she no longer fully belonged to them. Besides, she thought that many on the reservation were conforming to the dominant white culture.

In 1891, wanting more education, Zitkala-Ša decided at age fifteen to return to the White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. She planned to gain more through her education than becoming a housekeeper, a role the school anticipated most female students would pursue. She studied piano and violin and started to teach music at White's after the music teacher resigned. In June 1895, when Zitkala-Ša was awarded her diploma, she gave a speech on the inequality of women's rights, which was praised highly by the local newspaper.

Though her mother wanted her to return home after graduation, Zitkala-Ša chose to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she had been offered a scholarship. While initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her predominantly white peers, she proved her oratorical talents with a speech titled "Side by Side.” During this time, she began gathering traditional stories from a spectrum of Native tribes, translating them into Latin and English for children to read. In 1897, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health and financial difficulties.

Music and teaching

From 1897 to 1898 Zitkala-Ša studied and played the violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1897, she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she taught music to children for about 18 months. She also facilitated debates on the treatment of Native Americans.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition, she played violin with the school's Carlisle Indian Band. In the same year, she began writing articles on Native American life, which were published in national periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly. Her critical appraisal of the American Indian boarding school system and vivid portrayal of Indian deracination contrasted markedly to the more idealistic writings of most of her contemporaries.

Also in 1901, Zitkala-Ša was sent by Carlisle's founder, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, to the Yankton Reservation to recruit students. It was her first visit in several years. She was troubled to find her mother's house in disrepair, her brother's family had fallen into poverty, and white settlers were beginning to occupy lands allotted to the Yankton Dakota under the Dawes Act of 1887.

Upon returning to the Carlisle School, Zitkala-Ša came into conflict with Pratt. She resented his rigid program to assimilate Native Americans into dominant white culture and the limitations of the curriculum. It prepared Native American children only for low-level manual work, assuming they would return to rural cultures. That year she published an article in Harper's Monthly describing the profound loss of identity felt by a Native American boy after undergoing the assimilationist education at the school, a story called "The Soft Hearted Sioux," which Pratt called "trash." In 1901, Zitkala-Ša was dismissed from the Carlisle School.

Soon after, she took a job as a clerk at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation where she likely met Bonnin.

Marriage and family

Zitkala-Ša returned to the Yankton Reservation after her time at the Carlisle School and cared for her ailing mother. Her relationship with her mother was strained after a disagreement over Zitkala-Ša's decision to continue her education. She also spent this time gathering material for her collection of traditional Sioux stories to publish in Old Indian Legends, commissioned by the Boston publisher Ginn and Company.

In early 1901, she was engaged to Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapi (Mohave-Apache) doctor and Indigenous activist. Her letters to Montezuma verify that the Carlisle school and its president and founder were a major cause of concern. In her letters, she repeatedly mentions Pratt and Carlisle, calling Pratt "woefully small" and "bigoted" (5 March 1901) and writing that she "imagines Carlisle will rear up on its haunches" after one of her stories is published (Summer 1901). Zitkala-Ša explains to Montezuma that even though she "offends the Col.," she "won't be another's mouthpiece-[she] will say just what [she] thinks" (5 March 1901). It is both because of and through her rejection of Pratt and his educational plan that Zitkala-Ša inscribes her strategic rhetoric of pedagogical resistance. She broke off her engagement and relationship with Montezuma by August. He had refused to give up his private medical practice in Chicago and relocate with her to the Yankton Indian Agency, where she wanted to return.

In 1902, she met and married Raymond Talephause Bonnin, who was of Yankton-European ancestry and culturally Yankton. Soon after their marriage, Bonnin was assigned by the BIA to the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah. The couple lived and worked there with the Ute people for the next fourteen years. During this period, Zitkala-Ša gave birth to the couple's only child, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.

Her husband, Bonnin, enlisted in the US Army in 1917 after the United States declared war against the German Empire during World War I. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1918. He served in the Quartermaster Corps in Washington, D.C., and was honorably discharged with the rank of captain in 1920.

Writing career

Zitkala-Ša had a fruitful writing career, with two major periods. The first period was from 1900 to 1904, when she published legends collected from Native American culture, as well as autobiographical narratives. She continued to write during the following years, but she did not publish any of these writings. These unpublished writings, along with others including the libretto of the Sun Dance Opera, were collected and published posthumously in 2001 as Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera.