Gertrude "Zitkala Sa" Bonnin

Read the works of Gertrude Bonnin here: http://www.readbookonline.net/books/Zitkala-Sa/1280/

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WIKIPEDIA REFERENCE

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (February 22, 1876 – January 26, 1938), better known by her pen name, Zitkala-Sa (Lakota: pronounced zitkálá-ša, which translates to Red Bird), was a Native American 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. She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which she served as president until her death.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Bonnin/Zitkala-Sa was born and raised on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Yankton-Nakota name was Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a white man named Felker, about who 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, Indian. She went on to study for a time at Earlham College in Indiana and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

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 scholarship on her life based on the American Indian Stories and, more recently, Doreen Rappaport’s biography The Flight of Red Bird.

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

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 who she named Ohiya.

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.

WRITING CAREER

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, 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”. (Zitkala-Sa, 1902).

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. Scholars such as Dexter Fisher, Agnes Picotte, Kristin Herzog, Doreen Rappaport, P. Jane Hafen, and Dan recognized by the naming of a Venusians crater “Bonnin” in her honor.

AMERICAN INDIAN 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!” (Peyer 284)

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 (school teachers) 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.” (67-8).

IMPRESSIONS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD

Zitkala-Sa described herself as a free and innocent young girl. All of the older Yankton’s 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.

SCHOOL DAYS OF AN INDIAN GIRL

When Gertrude Simmons was eight years old, “paleface” 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 time 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 and/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, “During 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 a 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 in March 16, 1896. She was considered an alien because her tribe was not yet accepted as citizens.

AN INDIAN TEACHER AMONG INDIANS

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 reservation home were peppered with the “twinkling lights” encroached upon the reservation. During her stay, Gertrude found out that her brother had lost his job as a government clerk on the reservation.

MAKING OF AN OPERA

In 1910 Bonnin began collaborating with composer William F. Hanson, who taught at Bringham Young University. She wrote the libretto and sons. 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

Writings by Zitkala-Sa

• Old Indian Legends. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985

• American Indian Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985

• Zitkala-Sa, Fabens, Charles H. and Matthew K. Sniffen.

• Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery. Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1924

• Zitkala-Sa - Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera. Edited by P. Jane Hafen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001: ISBN 0803249187

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.

SCORES

• Hanson, William F., and Zitkala-Sa. The Sun Dance Opera (romantic American Indian opera, 1913, 1938). Photocopy of the original piano-vocal score, from microfilm (227 pp.). Library of Bringham Young University, Provo, Utah.

NOTES

1. Buechel, Eugene; Paul Manhart (2002) [1970]. Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English/English-Lakota (New Comprehensive Edition ed.) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1305-0. OCLC 49312425.

2. “Gertrude Bonnin, Zitkala-Sha, Yankton Nokota.” Native Authors. (retrieved 12 April 2010)

3. Norton Anthology of American Literature (5th edition ed.)

4. Paula Geise, “Gertrude Bonnin”, Native American Resources, 1997, accessed 4 Dec 2008

References

• Fear-Segal, Jacqueline (1999). “Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism versus Evolutionism.” Journal of American Studies vol. 33, no. 2 (August 1999), pp. 323-341.

• Fisher, Dexter (1979). “Zitkala-Sa: The Evolution of a Writer.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3 (August 1979), pp. 229-238

• Hafen, P. Jane (2001). “Zitkala Sa: Sentimentality and Sovereignty,” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1997), pp. 31-41

• Hafen, P. Jane (2001). Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera. By Zitkala-Sa. Ed. P. Jane Hafen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

• Henderson, Melissa Renee and Lauren Curtwright (1997). “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa)”. Washington State University. Online. Internet. Posted: 12-4-97. Updated: 8-19-04

• Peyer, Bernd C. (1997) The Tutored Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Rappaport, Doreen (1997). The Flight of Red Bird: The Life of Zikala-Sa. New York: Puffin.

• Smith, Catherine Parsons (2001). “An Operatic Skeleton on the Western Frontier: Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson, and the Sun Dance Opera.” Women & Music, January 2001.

• Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin). “Why I Am a Pagan”, The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings, Ed. Glynis Carr. Online. Posted: Winter 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa

Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938) (Lakota: Red Bird = Cardinal (bird)), 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. 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.

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.

Early life and education

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. In 1897, however, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health and financial difficulties.

From 1897 to 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 early 1901, she became engaged to Carlos Montezuma, whom she likely met when he served as 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.

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, 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.

Marriage and family

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.

Literary career

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.

The second period 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 (1921), with the Hayworth Publishing House. 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 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 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."

Old Indian Legends

Commissioned by the Boston publisher Ginn and Company, Old Indian Legends (1901) was a collection of stories which she learned as child </ref> 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.

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, 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.

Articles for American Indian Magazine

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.

Making an opera

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.

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.

Political activism

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.)

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. Zitkala-Ša was co-author of "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribe-Legalized Robbery". The article exposed several corporations that had robbed and even murdered Native Americans in Oklahoma to gain access to their 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.

Death and legacy

Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938, in Washington, D.C., 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 activists 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.

Writings by Zitkala-Sa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa#Writings_by_Zitkala-Sa