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Birth
Zitkála-Šá was born and grew up in South Dakota Yankton Indian Reservation. She was raised by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Dakota name was Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ which in English means Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind. Her father was a Frenchman named Felker, who abandoned the family when Zitkala-Ša was very young. -
Abduction
In 1884, when Zitkala-Ša was eight, missionaries came to the reservation. They kidnapped several Yankton Sioux children, including Zitkala-Šá, taking them to be held 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 strip them of their culture where they could effectively live as white people. -
Left the Missionary
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 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 and write, and to play the violin. -
Going Back Home
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. Besides, she thought that many on the reservation were conforming to the dominant white culture. -
Back to School
In 1891, wanting more education, Zitkála-Šá decided at age fifteen to return to the White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. She studied piano and violin and started to teach music at White's after the music teacher resigned. -
Graduation
In June 1895, when Zitkála-Šá was awarded her diploma, she gave a speech on the inequality of women's rights, which was praised highly by the local newspaper. -
College
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. 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. -
All for Nothing
In 1897, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health and financial difficulties. -
Pastime
From 1897 to 1899 Zitkala-Ša worked, studied, and played the violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. -
First Job
In 1899, she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she taught music to children. She also facilitated debates on the treatment of Native Americans. -
Rising to Fame
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. -
Homeland
Also 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. 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. -
Homeland PT.2
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. -
Relocation
In early 1901, she became engaged to Carlos Montezuma, whom she likely met when he served as the caretaker of the Carlisle band in 1900 after he had completed medical school. She broke off the relationship 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. -
Family
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, Alfred Ohiya Bonnin. -
Sun Dance Opera
In 1902 Zitkála-Šá also met American composer William F. Hanson, who was a professor of music at Brigham Young University. Together, in 1910, they started their collaboration on the music for The Sun Dance Opera, for which Zitkála-Šá wrote the libretto and songs. She based it on sacred Sioux rituals, which the federal government prohibited the Ute from performing on the reservation. -
Opening Night
The opera premiered in Utah in 1913, with dancing and some parts performed by the Ute, and lead singing roles filled by non-natives. According to historian Tadeusz Lewandowski, it was the first Native opera. It debuted in Vernal, Utah, to high local praise. -
Writing Career
The second phase of her writing career was from 1916 to 1924. During this period, Zitkala-Ša concentrated on writing and publishing political works. She 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 with the Hayworth Publishing House. -
WWl
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 Quarter Master Corps in Washington, D.C., and was honorably discharged with the rank of captain in 1920. -
Woman's Rights
Zitkála-Šá also studied women's rights, 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
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 that she and other Native Americans encountered at the missionary and manual labor schools designed to "civilize" them and assimilate them to the majority culture. -
Zitkála-Šá: Quote
Her autobiography contrasted the charm of her early life on the reservation with the "iron routine" which she found in the assimilation boarding schools. Zitkála-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." -
Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians
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. During the 1920s, numerous Osage were murdered. -
Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians Pt.2
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. -
A Lifetime of Glory
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 a composer. -
Death and Legacy
Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938, in Washington, D.C., at the age of sixty-one. She is buried as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in Arlington National Cemetery with her husband Raymond. In the late 20th century, the University of Nebraska reissued many of her writings on Native American culture. -
Death and Legacy pt.2
In 2018, Melodia Women's Choir of New York City performed the world premiere of a commissioned work based on the story of Zitkála-Šá, Red Bird by Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian. -
Death and Legacy pt.3
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. Zitkála-Šá lived part of her life in the Lyon Park neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, DC. In 2020, a park in that neighborhood previously been named for Henry Clay was renamed in her honor. -
Death and Legacy pt.4
Chris Pappan illustrated a Google Doodle that incorporated ledger art for use in the United States on February 22, 2021, to celebrate her 145th birthday. -
In Conclusion
Zitkála-Šá was one of the most powerful Native American activists of the twentieth century. She left behind an influential ideology of Indian resistance as well as a critical reform model. Zitkála-Šá's work resulted in significant advancements in Native American education, health care, and legal status, as well as the preservation of Indian culture.