Zitkala-Sa in 1898. Photo credit - Wikipedia

A Dakota writer, orator, educator, musician, political activist, and reformer. One of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century.

Zitkála-Šá was born and grew up on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her mother was a Yankton Dakota, and her father was a Frenchman who left the family when she was young. In 1884, at the age of eight, she was sent to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. At school, she was forced to cut her long hair, forbidden to speak any language other than English, and given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. She found joy in learning to play the violin and read and write.

In 1887, after years of forced assimilation, Zitkála-Šá returned to the reservation, realizing that she was no longer related to the Yankton traditions. At 15, she returned to the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute. After graduation, she joined a teacher training program at Earlham College in Indiana, one of a few Native American students. She continued to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. At the time, Zitkála-Šá began collecting traditional oral stories of various Native tribes and translating them into English and Latin.

In 1899, at 23, she began to teach music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a similar institute to the one she attended as a child. She felt uneasy with the school’s discipline methods, which stripped children of their Native American cultural identities and treated them harshly. She began writing essays for numerous national magazines, including Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly, expressing her criticism of the American Indian boarding school system and shattering the racist portrayal of Native Americans as ignorant savages by presenting them as generous and loving people. As a result of her publications, she got fired, not before they sent her to the Yankton Reservation to recruit new students. On her arrival, she discovered that her family had fallen into poverty and that white settlers had occupied the Dakota lands under the Dawes Act of 1887.

In 1901, at 25, she returned to the reservation to take care of her mother and began to work as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office (BIA) at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In that same year, she published Old Indian Legends, a collection of Dakota stories she gathered over time.

In the following year, she married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, who was half Sioux and half Euro-American. The BIA sent them to the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah. There, Zitkála-Šá worked at the reservation’s school and became involved with the Society of the American Indians (SAI), which worked to preserve the Native American culture and fought for full citizenship rights for American Indians.
In 1916, Zitkála-Šá and her husband relocated to Washington, DC, where she worked as a liaison between the SAI and the BIA and edited the SAI’s magazine, writing articles on issues such as land allotment, the contribution of Native American soldiers in WW1, and corruption within the BIA. Over the next decade, she published her most famous work, including American Indian Stories (1921), Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes (1921), Legalized Robbery (1923), which detailed the mistreatment of Native Americans in Oklahoma.

In 1924, she founded the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, working there as a researcher, and traveling on speaking tours on its behalf, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural identities and citizenship rights. She lobbied for a government investigation of the exploitation of Native Americans in Oklahoma after discovering oil on their lands and advocated for voter registration among Native Americans. In 1926, she founded and served as president of the National Council of American Indians, promoting citizenship rights, health care, educational opportunities, and cultural recognition and preservation.

Zitkála-Šá’s persistence paid off in 1928 when she was chosen as an adviser for the Meriam Commission, which passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which returned some lands to their original populations, and encouraged tribes to re-establish self-government and manage their lands. She continued to be active and served as a spokesperson for the Native community for the rest of her life. She died at the age of 61.

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Fun Facts

She had one child.
Her name, Zitkála-Šá, is Lakota for Red Bird.
At her high school graduation, she gave a speech on women's rights.
Her unpublished writings were collected and published in 2001, Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera.
In 1913, at the age of 37, she collaborated with the composer William F. Hanson and wrote the libretto of the opera The Sun Dance, based on her essays. It was the first opera written by a Native American.
In 1997, she was the Women's History Month Honoree of the National Women's History Project.
She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery under the name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.
A park in Arlington County, Virginia, is named in her honor.
Google honored her with a doodle for her 145th birth anniversary.