Those of you who read the previous post by Doris McCraw (writing as Angela Rains) will understand my next sentence. I started out researching the former Western Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller. I stumbled onto another amazing woman and will report on her instead.
Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938), also known as Gertrude
Simmons Bonnin, her missionary-given and later married name, was a Yankton
Dakota Sioux writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political
activist. Her Lakota name means Red Bird or Cardinal. One of
the most outspoken voices raised on behalf of Native Americans during the early
twentieth century, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was a granddaughter of the famous
Sioux chief Sitting Bull. She was born the year of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural
identity and the pull between the majority culture she was educated within
and her Dakota Sioux 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, and she 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.) This opera incorporated some
of the traditional Ute dances that had been banned by the government.
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.
Zitkála-Šá was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian
Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised by her mother, Ellen Simmons,
whose Dakota name was Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ (Every Wind or
Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a German-American man named Felker, who
abandoned the family while Zitkala-Ša was very young.
For her first eight years, Zitkála-Šá lived on the reservation.
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 Yankton Reservation. They recruited
several of the Yankton children, including Zitkala-Šá, taking them for education
to the White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a missionary Quaker school
that taught speaking, reading, and writing English, in Wabash, Indiana. This
training school was founded by Josiah White for the education of
"poor children, white, colored, and Indian," with the goal of helping
them advance in society.
Zitkála-Šá 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 both the deep misery of having her heritage
stripped away when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her traditionally
long hair. By contrast, she took joy in learning to read and write, and to play
the violin.
In 1887 Zitkála-Šá 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. In addition, she thought that many on the reservation were
conforming to the dominant white culture.
In 1891, wanting more education, Zitkála-Šá 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, as the school
anticipated girls would eventually do. She studied piano and violin and
started to teach music at White's after the teacher resigned. In June 1895,
when Zitkála-Šá was awarded her diploma, she gave a speech on the inequality of
women’s rights, which received high praise from the local newspaper.
Though her mother wanted her to return home after graduation,
Zitkála-Šá chose to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she
had been offered a scholarship. Higher education for women was quite limited at
the time. While initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her
predominantly white peers, she soon proved her oratorical talents again with a
speech entitled "Side by Side" in 1896. During this time, she began
gathering traditional stories from a spectrum of Native tribes, translating
them first to Latin and then to English for children to read. Some
sources say that In 1897, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to
leave Earlham College due to ill health and financial difficulties. Other
sources say it was her mother’s ill health that forced her to leave school.
Another source says she was awarded her diploma from the college.
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| With her violin in 1898 |
I was struck by how peaceful and happy she appears in the photo above. She must have been torn between music and politics on behalf of her tribe. From 1897-1899 Zitkala-Ša studied and played the violin at
the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
In 1899 she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in
Pennsylvania, where she taught music to the children. She also conducted
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 such national periodicals as Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly.
Her critical appraisal of the American Indian boarding school system and vivid
portrayal of Indian deracination were markedly contrasting to the more
idealistic writings of most of her contemporaries.
In 1900, 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, and she was greatly dismayed to find that her
mother's house was in disrepair, her brother's family had fallen into poverty,
and that white settlers were beginning to occupy lands allotted to the Yankton
Dakota under the Dawes Act of 1887. Upon returning to the Carlisle
School, she came into conflict with Pratt. She resented his rigid program of
assimilation 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. In 1901 Zitkala-Ša was dismissed.
That year she had 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.
In order to care for her ailing mother and gather material for
her collection of traditional Sioux stories, she returned to the Yankton
Reservation in 1901.
In 1901 Zitkála-Šá began collecting stories to publish in Old
Indian Legends, commissioned by the Boston publisher Ginn and Company. She
took a job as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Standing
Rock Indian Reservation.
In 1902 she met and married Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin. Of
mixed race, he was culturally Yankton and had one-quarter Yankton Dakota
ancestry. Soon after their marriage, Captain Bonnin was assigned 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 son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.
Also during this period, Zitkála-Šá met American professor and
composer William F. Hanson, who taught music at Brigham Young University in
Utah. Together, in 1910, they started their collaboration on the music
for The Sun Dance Opera, for which Zitkala-Sa wrote the
libretto and songs. She based it on sacred Sioux ritual, which the federal
government prohibited the Ute from performing on the reservation. The
opera premiered in Utah in 1913, with dancing and some parts performed by the
Ute; lead singing roles were filled by non-natives. It was the first opera to
be co-authored by a Native American. It debuted to high local praise.
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Zitkála-Šá by photographer
Gertrude Kasebier, 1898 |
Zitkála-Šá 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. 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, edited by P. Jane Hafen.
Zitkála-Šá's articles in the Atlantic Monthly were
published from 1900 to 1902. They included "An Indian Teacher Among
Indians," published in Volume 85 in 1900. Included in the same issue
were "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "School Days
of an Indian Girl". All of these works were autobiographical in
nature, describing in great detail her early experiences both on the
reservation and her later conflict in struggling with assimilation to the
dominant American culture.
Zitkála-Šá's other articles ran in Harper’s Monthly. "Soft-Hearted Sioux" appeared in the
March 1901 issue, Volume 102, and "The Trial Path" in the October
1901 issue, Volume 103. She also wrote "A Warrior's Daughter",
published in 1902 in Volume 6 of Everybody's Magazine. These
works also were largely autobiographical in nature. Some recounted stories of
people she knew or taught, in addition to her own personal story.
In 1902 Zitkála-Šá published "Why I Am A Pagan" in Atlantic Monthly, volume 90. It was
a treatise on her personal spiritual beliefs. She countered the contemporary
trend that suggested Native Americans readily adopted and conformed to the
Christianity forced on them in schools and public life.
Much of her work is characterized by its liminal nature:
tensions between tradition and assimilation, and between literature and
politics. These tensions are expressed particularly in her autobiographical
works. In her well-known American Indian Stories, for example,
she both expresses a literary account of her life and delivers a political
message. The narrative expresses her tension between wanting to follow the
traditions of the Yankton Dakota while being excited about learning to read and
write, and being tempted by assimilation. This tension has been described as
generating much of the dynamism of her work.
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| Society of American Indians |
The second period was from 1916 to 1924 after Zitkala-Ša and her
husband had moved to Washington, D.C., where she became politically active. She
published some of her most influential writings, including AMERICAN INDIAN
STORIES (1921), with the Hayworth Publishing House. She
co-authored OKLAHOMA’S POOR RICH INDIANS: AND ORGY OF GRAFT AND
EXPLOITATION OF THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES, LEGALIZED ROBBERY (1923), an
influential pamphlet, with Charles H. Fabens of the American Indian
Defense Association and Matthew K. Sniffen of the Indian Rights
Association. She also created the Indian Welfare Committee of the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs, working as a researcher for it through much of the
1920s.
AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES is a collection of
childhood stories, allegorical fiction, and an essay, including several of
Zitkála-Šá's articles that were originally published in Harper's
Monthly and Atlantic Monthly. First published in
1921, these stories told of the hardships which she and other Native Americans
encountered at the missionary and manual labor schools designed to
"civilize" them and assimilate them to majority culture. The
autobiographical writings described her early life on the Yankton Reservation,
her years as a student at White's Manual Labor Institute and Earlham College,
and her period teaching at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Her autobiography contrasted the charm of her early life on the
reservation with the "iron routine" which she found in the
assimilation boarding schools. Zitkala-Ša wrote: "Perhaps my Indian nature
is the moaning wind which stirs them [schoolteachers] now for their present record.
But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a
curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with
compassion to hear it."
Commissioned by the Boston publisher Ginn and Company, OLD
INDIAN LEGENDS (1901) was a collection of stories which she learned as
child and had gathered from various tribes. Directed primarily at
children, the collection was an attempt both to preserve Native American
traditions and stories in print and to garner respect and recognition for those
traditions from the dominant European-American culture.
One of Zitkála-Šá's most influential pieces of political
writing, OKLAHOMA'S POOR RICH INDIANS, was published in 1923 by the
Indian Rights Association. The article exposed several American
corporations that had been working systematically, through such extra-legal
means as robbery and even murder, to defraud Native American tribes,
particularly the Osage, to their rights to leasing fees from development of
their oil-rich land in Oklahoma. The work influenced Congress to pass the
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged tribes to re-establish
self-government, including management of their lands. Under this act, the
government returned some lands to them as communal property, which it had
previously classified as surplus, so they could put together parcels that could
be managed.
Zitkála-Šá was an active member of the Society of American
Indians, which published the American Indian Magazine. From 1918 to
1919 she served as editor for the magazine, as well as contributing numerous
articles. These were her most explicitly political writings, covering
topics such as the contribution of Native American soldiers to World War I,
issues of land allotment, and corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
the agency within the Department of Interior that oversaw American Indians.
Many of her political writings have since been criticized for favoring
assimilation. She called for recognition of Native American culture and
traditions, while also advocating US citizenship rights to bring Native
Americans into mainstream America. She believed this was how they could gain
political power and protect their cultures.
In 1910 Zitkala-Ša began collaborating with American composer
William F. Hanson, who taught at Brigham Young University. She wrote the
libretto and songs. She also played Sioux melodies on the violin, and Hanson
used this as the basis of his music composition.
In February 1913, the premiere performance of The Sun
Dance Opera was presented at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah. The
production featured members of the Ute Nation, who lived on the nearby Uintah
and Ouray Indian Reservation. It was significant for adapting the Native
American oral musical tradition to a written one. Its debut was met with
critical acclaim. Few works of Native American opera since have dealt so
exclusively with Native American themes. However, in 1938 the New York Light
Opera Guild premiered The Sun Dance Opera at The Broadway
Theatre as its opera of the year. Its publicity credited only William F.
Hanson as composer.
Bonnin also
commented on the quality of education available to young Native Americans in a
speech to a meeting of the Indian Rights Association in Atlantic City, New
Jersey in December of 1928 : "The Indian race is starving-not only
physically, but mentally and morally. It is a dire tragedy. The government
Indian schools are not on a par with the American schools of today. The
so-called 'Indian Graduates from Government Schools' cannot show any
credentials that would be accepted by any business house. They are unable to
pass the Civil Service examinations. The proviso in Indian treaties that
educated Indians, wherever qualified, be given preference in Indian Service
employment is rendered meaningless. Indians are kept ignorant and 'incompetent'
to cope with the world's trained workers, because they are not sufficiently
educated in the government schools."
Zitkála-Šá was politically active throughout most of her adult
life. During her time on the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah, she joined the
Society of American Indians, a progressive group formed in 1911. It was
dedicated to preserving the Native American way of life while lobbying for the
right to full American citizenship. The letterhead of the council
stationary claimed that the overall goals for the Society of American Indians
was to "help Indians help themselves in protecting their rights and
properties".
Zitkala-Ša served as the SAI's secretary beginning in 1916. She
edited its journal American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919. Since
the late 20th century, activists have criticized the SAI and Zitkala-Ša as
misguided in their strong advocacy of citizenship and employment rights for
Native Americans. Such critics believe that Native Americans have lost cultural
identity as they have become more part of mainstream American society.
As the secretary for the SAI, Zitkála-Šá corresponded with the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. She began to criticize practices of the BIA, such as
their attempt at the national boarding schools to prohibit Native American
children from using their native languages and cultural practices. She reported
incidents of abuse resulting from children's refusal to pray in the Christian
manner. Her husband was dismissed from his BIA office at the Ute
reservation in 1916. The couple and their son relocated to Washington D. C.,
where they thought to find allies.
From Washington, Zitkála-Šá began lecturing nationwide on behalf
of the SAI to promote the cultural and tribal identity of Native Americans.
During the 1920s she promoted a pan-Indian movement to unite all of America's
tribes in the cause of lobbying for citizenship rights. In 1924 the Indian
Citizenship Act was passed, granting US citizenship rights to most
indigenous peoples who did not already have it. (About two-thirds of Native
Americans were already citizens by the implementation of land allotment and
other measures.)
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She lectured wearing
traditional dress |
In 1926 she and her husband founded the National Council of
American Indians, dedicated to the cause of uniting the tribes throughout the
U.S. in the cause of gaining full citizenship rights through
suffrage. From 1926 until her death in 1938, Zitkala-Ša would serve as
president, major fundraiser, and speaker for the NCAI. She was the major figure
in those years. Her early work was largely disregarded after the organization
was revived in 1944 under male leadership.
Zitkála-Šá was also active in the 1920s in the movement for
women's rights, joining the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in
1921. This grassroots organization was dedicated to diversity in its
membership and to maintaining a public voice for women's concerns. Through the
GFWC she created the Indian Welfare Committee in 1924. She helped initiate a
government investigation into the exploitation of Native Americans in Oklahoma
and the attempts being made to defraud them of drilling rights and leasing fees
for their oil-rich lands.
Its influence contributed to Congressional passage of the Indian
Reorganization Act of 1934 under the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He
had high-level aides also working on American Indian issues to improve their
lives. Sometimes described as the 'Indian New Deal,' the law encouraged tribes
to restore and adopt self-government, along a model of elected representative
government. It returned management of their lands to Native Americans.
In her work for the NCAI in 1924, Zitkála-Šá ran a
voter-registration drive among Native Americans. She encouraged them to support
the Curtis Bill, which she believed would be favorable for Indians. Though the
bill granted Native Americans US citizenship, it did not grant those living on
reservations the right to vote in local and state elections. Zitkala-Ša
continued to work for civil rights, and better access to health care and
education for Native Americans until her death in 1938.
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Still attractive as
she aged |
Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, DC at the age
of sixty-one. She is buried under the name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in
Arlington National Cemetery. Since the late 20th century, the University
of Nebraska has reissued many of her writings on Native American culture.
She has been recognized by the naming of a Venusian crater "Bonnin"
in her honor. In 1997 she was designated a Women’s History Month Honoree
by the National Women’s History Project.
Zitkala-Sa's legacy lives on as one of the most influential
Native American activist of the twentieth century. She left with her an
influential theory of Indian resistance and a crucial model for reform. Through
her activism, Zitkala-Sa was able to make crucial changes to education, health
care, legal standing of Native American people and the preservation of Indian
culture.
Sources:
Caroline Clemmons writes western romance and mystery. Her latest release is ALEXANDRA'S AWAKENING, at the Universal Amazon link of
http://mybook.to/Pearson
