Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876—1938), better known by her pen name, Zitkala-Sa (Dakota: pronounced zitkála-ša, which translates to "Red Bird"),[1] was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist. She published in national magazines. With William F. Hanson, Bonnin co-composed the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance (composed in romantic style based on Ute and Sioux themes), which premiered in 1913.[2] She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which she served as president until her death.[3]
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Zitkala-Sa was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised there by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Yankton Dakota name was Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a European-American man named Felker, about whom little was known. Zitkala-Sa lived a traditional lifestyle until the age of eight, when she left her reservation to attend Whites Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana. She went on to study for a time at Earlham College in Indiana and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.[3]
After working as a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, she moved to Boston and began publishing short stories and autobiographical vignettes. Her autobiographical writings were serialized in Atlantic Monthly from January to March 1900 and later published in a collection called American Indian Stories in 1921. Her first book, Old Indian Legends, is a collection of folktales which she gathered during visits home to the Yankton Reservation. Much of the early scholarship on her life is based on the American Indian Stories and, more recently, Doreen Rappaport’s biography The Flight of Red Bird.
In 1902 during a period when Zitkala-Sa had returned to her reservation, she met and married Captain Raymond Bonnin, who was also mixed-race Nakota. An Army captain, he worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). They had one son whom she named Ohiya.[4]
Bonnin's BIA assignment to Utah led to Zitkala-Sa's meeting composer William F. Hanson, who taught at Brigham Young University. Together in 1910 they started their collaboration on the music for The Sun Dance, an opera for which Zitkala-Sa wrote the libretto and songs. The opera was produced in Utah in 1913.
Zitkala-Sa had a fruitful writing career, throughout her life, that can be seen as chronologically separated into two publishing periods. The first period, which began at the turn of the century, was from 1900 to 1904. She wrote mainly legends and 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,[2] have been collected and published in Dreams and Thunder by P. Jane Hafen.
The second period was from 1916 to 1924; this period was almost exclusively made up of political writings. In this period, Zitkala-Sa moved to Washington, D.C. and published some of her most influential writings, including: American Indian Stories. She co-authored Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An 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 was then working as a research agent for the Indian Welfare Committee and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
Her "Atlantic Monthly" articles 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." They are discussed in more detail below.
Zitkala-Sa's other articles ran in Harper's Monthly. Two appeared in the October 1901 issue, Volume 103. They were titled, "Soft Hearted Sioux" and "The Trial Path." She also wrote "A Warrior's Daughter".
In 1902, she published another article in Atlantic Monthly called, "Why I Am a Pagan." It is about her beliefs and counters the trend of showing Indian writers conforming to traditional Christianity. She talks of her connection to the nature around her and of her cousin's coming to talk with her, to implore her to avoid the pit fires of hell. She comments on the interwoveness of all mankind, regardless of who they are or what race they show. There is even mention of her mother's choice of "superstition".[5]
Her work and life received more attention since the so-called "canon wars." New scholarship by and about ethnic groups who had been largely excluded from the traditional American literary canon has brought attention to writers telling different American stories.
American Indian Stories offered an account of the hardships which she and other Native Americans encountered when they were sent to boarding schools designed to “civilize” the Indian children. The autobiographical writings described her early life on the Yankton Reservation, her years as a student at boarding schools, and the time she spent teaching at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first and most well-known of boarding schools for Native Americans. It was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, whose famous slogan offers the philosophy of the manual labor educational program in a nutshell: “Kill the Indian and save the man!”.[6]
Her autobiography contrasted the charm of her early life on the reservation with the “iron routine” which she found in the assimilation schools off the reservation. Zitkala-Sa 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."[7]
Zitkala-Sa described herself as a free and innocent young girl. All of the older Yanktons treated her with love and respect. Even when she mistakenly "made coffee" on the ashes of a dead fire, for a visitor while her mother was away from their dwelling, she was not scolded or even given the notion that she had done anything wrong. When she was with her friends, they were free to run after their shadows and the shadows of the clouds. In the evening, she listened to the stories of the elders while she gazed out into the open universe above her. She was surrounded with people she could trust.
When Gertrude Simmons was eight years old, Quaker missionaries were visiting her reservation. Young eight-year-old Gertrude was strongly lured by their promises of apple orchards. Having never been deceived, she trusted them despite her mother’s warnings. The young child’s innocence led her to desire the apple orchards and to choose to be educated by the missionaries. Taté Iyòhiwin finally gave in. She knew that it would be a hard transition for her child from innocence to experience, but she also believed that her child would need the education when there were more Euro-Americans than Native Americans.
In American Indian Stories she said, "It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day’s buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day’s harness heavy-footed, like a dumb sick brute."(66) As one example of this disconnect, she described a scene in the chapter titled "The Cutting of My Long Hair." During the breakfast of her first day at the Quaker school, her friend Judewin told her that their hair was to be cut by the teachers that day. Zitkala-Sa wrote, “when Judewin said, ‘we have to submit, because they are strong,’ I rebelled. ‘No, I will not submit’ I will struggle first!” She then snuck upstairs and found a place to hide under a bed so that they could not find her and “shingle” her hair. They found her. Zitkala-Sa wrote, “I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.” (55) In the Native American culture that she came from, cutting or shingling one’s hair was symbolic for shame or mourning.
In 1887, after three years of schooling at White’s Manual Labor Institute, Gertrude was allowed to return home to see her family. She stayed home for four years. During this time, she felt increasingly alienated from her tribal heritage. In American Indian Stories she said, “[D]uring this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid.” She felt alienated within Euro-American culture due to her heritage, but she began to feel alienated within Native American culture due to her education. In 1891, after her "four strange summers", she returned to her education in the Euro-American culture, received her high school diploma and went on to college at Earlham College in 1895.
While attending Earlham, she entered an oratorical contest at the college and won first place. Then, in 1896, she entered the Indiana State Oratorical Contest as the representative from her college. She won 2nd place in the statewide competition. People not only made racist comments to her, but some members of the audience also waved a flag ridiculing her and her college with the picture of a “forlorn” Indian and the word “squaw” on the flag. She felt a sense of victory and accomplishment in the face of an American audience when the flag was lowered at the announcement of her award. Her speech, “Side By Side”, was published in The Earlhamite on March 16, 1896. She was considered an alien because her tribe was not yet accepted as citizens of the United States.
In 1897 Zitkala-Sa went to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania to teach. During her first summer at Carlisle, she returned to the Yankton Reservation to recruit students for the next school year, saying, “I am going to turn you loose to pasture!” (85). After returning home, seeing her mother, and the encroaching settlements of Euro-Americans, Zitkala-Sa decided that she should not continue teaching at Carlisle. When she stayed with her mother, at night, the nearby hills around Taté Iyòhiwin’s reservation home were peppered with the “twinkling lights” of the settlers. Her mother had become resentful of the Euro-American settlers as they encroached upon the reservation. During her stay, Gertrude found out that her brother had lost his job as a government clerk on the reservation.
In 1910 Bonnin began collaborating with composer William F. Hanson, who taught at Brigham Young University. She wrote the libretto and songs. She played Sioux melodies on the violin. Together they collaborated to transcribe them and create variations and harmonies with Western musical notation. On February 1913, the premiere performance of The Sun Dance Opera was presented at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah, a town in the northeast. The production featured members of the Ute Nation living on the nearby Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation.
In 1938 the New York Light Opera Guild premiered The Sun Dance Opera at the Broadway Theatre. Publicity mentioned only William F. Hanson as composer.
She died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, DC.[8]
She has been recognized by the naming of a Venusian crater "Bonnin" in her honor.[9] In 1997 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[10]
For a more comprehensive listing of all her writings see the American Native Press Archives maintained by the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.