"Zitkala-Ša" (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

An author, editor, translator, musician, and advocate for women’s and Indigenous rights, Zitkala-Ša was born on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota on 22 February 1876. Although primarily known by her married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, she also gave herself the name “Red Bird,” which she occasionally used to sign correspondence. Bonnin’s father abandoned the family, and she was raised by her mother until the age of eight, when Quaker missionaries recruited her to be educated at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash. Zitkala-Ša’s school days were busy and, in many cases, sorrowful, as those at the boarding school attempted to strip her of her cultural and tribal identity. Even so, at school she developed her loves of music, writing, and public speaking, winning a state oratory competition. After White’s, she studied violin at the New England Conservatory and became an educator and musician at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Zitkala-Ša also attended Earlham College, where she began collecting and translating into English and Latin stories from Native tribes that would be published in 1901 as the children’s work, Old Indian Legends. That same year, she lost her teaching job because she challenged the pedagogies of assimilation embraced by the institution’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt. After this, she returned to the Yankton reservation and married Bureau of Indian Affairs agent Raymond Talephause Bonnin. Zitkala-Ša wrote prolifically and across genres. In the years before her marriage, she published numerous narratives on teaching, spirituality, and forced cultural assimilation, including “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” in Volume 85 of the 1900 Atlantic Monthly and “Soft-Hearted Sioux” in Volume 102 in the March 1901 Harper’s Monthly. For a few years after marriage and while living in Utah, she primarily focused on her family and only child, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin. In 1913 she collaborated with William Hanson on the Sun Dance Opera, and she became increasingly active in politics, petitioning Congress for Indigenous health care and voting rights, creating the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and serving as the editor for and frequent contributor to the American Indian Magazine, the voice of the Society of American Indians (SAI). One of her best-known and most-loved works, the autobiographical American Indian Stories, was published in 1921, and two years later, Zitkala-Ša wrote a reform pamphlet, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians, about the defrauding and murdering of members of the Osage tribe by whites for the oil on their lands. This stark and well-written accusation influenced members of Congress and, along with many other factors, both allowed more room for the persistence of tribal traditions and recognized tribal governments and paved the way for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, a policy that returned some lands to tribes and encouraged tribal sovereignty. After her death on 26 January 1938, Zitkala-Ša was buried as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in Arlington National Cemetery because her husband had been a captain in the Army. Additional works were published posthumously.