Remembering Zitkála-Šá: Champion of Native American Rights and Culture
- May 12, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
On 22nd February, 1876, on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, a child was born who would grow up to challenge the very system that tried to erase her. She would become known to the world as Zitkála-Šá, meaning “Red Bird” in the Dakota language. At various points in her life she was called Gertrude Simmons, Gertrude Bonnin, a violinist, a teacher, a writer, an agitator, and a reformer. But through it all, she chose to sign her most powerful work with her Dakota name. That decision alone tells you something about who she was.
Her life unfolded during a period when the United States government was aggressively pursuing assimilation policies designed to dismantle Native cultures. Boarding schools, land allotments, restrictions on ceremonies, and enforced English language education were all part of a deliberate effort to reshape Indigenous identity. Zitkála-Šá not only experienced that system first hand, she became one of its earliest and most articulate critics.
Childhood on the Yankton Reservation
Zitkála-Šá was born to a mother of Yankton Dakota heritage. Her father, who was of Anglo American descent, left the family while she was still young. She grew up in a world shaped by Dakota traditions, oral storytelling, and close ties to community life. In later years, she wrote warmly of these early experiences in essays such as Impressions of an Indian Childhood, recalling the open prairie, the rhythms of seasonal life, and the stories told by her mother.
That early stability would not last.
At the age of eight, missionaries arrived from the White’s Manual Labour Institute in Indiana. They painted vivid pictures of life at boarding school. There would be train journeys, orchards heavy with red apples, new clothes, and education. The promises were persuasive. Despite her mother’s reservations, particularly after her older brother’s difficult experience at a similar school, Zitkála-Šá wanted to go.
She later admitted that as the train pulled away from the reservation, regret overtook her. In her autobiography she described the sinking realisation that she was leaving everything familiar behind.
The Boarding School Ordeal
At White’s Institute, she encountered the machinery of assimilation in its most intimate form. Children were forbidden from speaking their own languages. Dakota was replaced with English. Traditional clothing was exchanged for uniforms.
Then came the haircut.
In Dakota culture, hair carried deep meaning. It was cut only in mourning or when someone had been captured by an enemy. Upon arrival, the children were told their hair would be shorn. Zitkála-Šá resisted. She hid under a bed, refusing to comply. Staff found her, dragged her out, tied her to a chair, and cut her braids as she cried.
She later wrote in The School Days of an Indian Girl:
“I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck.”
Reflecting years later, she described how the staff treated the children “as if we were little animals.”
Her essays in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900, including Impressions of an Indian Childhood, The School Days of an Indian Girl, and An Indian Teacher Among Indians, were among the first autobiographical accounts by a Native woman published in a major national magazine. They were not sentimental recollections. They were political testimony.
Education, Music, and Intellectual Formation
Despite the trauma, she excelled academically. In 1895 she graduated and enrolled at Earlham College in Indiana, one of the very few Native students there. She later studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, immersing herself in European classical traditions.
Music became one of her tools for cultural preservation.
By 1900 she was teaching music and speech at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most famous of all boarding schools. Founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle operated under the philosophy summarised in his notorious phrase: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Working there forced her to confront the system from the inside. She watched new groups of children arrive, endure haircuts, lose their languages, and be funnelled into manual labour training. In An Indian Teacher Among Indians, she criticised the institution openly. She accused it of stripping children of their cultural identity and preparing them for low paid roles in white society.
Pratt responded publicly, accusing her of ingratitude. The dispute unfolded in print, marking one of the earliest public intellectual confrontations between a Native reformer and a federal assimilation advocate.
Her break with Carlisle was decisive. She left after less than two years.
Old Indian Legends and Cultural Preservation
In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends, a collection of Dakota stories drawn from oral tradition. At a time when Indigenous cultures were often portrayed as vanishing, she insisted on documenting and celebrating them. The book was not merely folklore. It was preservation.
She deliberately published under the name Zitkála-Šá. In an era when Native children were routinely assigned Anglo names at school, reclaiming her Dakota name in print was a political act.
Marriage and Political Partnership
In 1902 she married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, a Yankton Sioux man who had also experienced boarding school education. They had one son, Raymond. Their marriage became a partnership rooted in shared political commitment.
The family relocated to Utah, where she taught on a Ute reservation school where children lived with their families rather than in dormitories. This difference mattered to her. Education without forced removal was possible.
It was in Utah that she met William F. Hanson, a music professor at Brigham Young University. Together they created The Sun Dance, first performed in 1913. The opera combined Western musical form with Dakota themes and melodies.
This was daring. The Sun Dance ceremony had been suppressed by federal authorities in previous decades. By transforming it into opera, she preserved cultural memory in a form that could circulate publicly.
Investigative Activism and Reform
By 1916, the Bonnins moved to Washington, D.C., determined to advocate directly at the national level. She became active in the Society of American Indians, one of the first pan tribal Native organisations composed largely of educated Native professionals.
Her activism went beyond speeches.
In 1923 she co authored Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes. The report exposed corruption surrounding oil leases on Native land. It detailed how white guardians controlled Native finances, manipulated legal systems, and sometimes facilitated violence to seize control of oil wealth.
The findings were disturbing. The report helped build pressure for federal investigation and contributed to the climate that led to the Meriam Report of 1928, which criticised federal Indian policy, especially the boarding school system.
Citizenship and Sovereignty
In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act on 02nd June, 1924, granting United States citizenship to Native Americans born within the country. Zitkála-Šá had advocated strongly for its passage.
But she understood its limits. Citizenship did not automatically guarantee voting rights. Many states continued to bar Native voters for decades. Nor did citizenship resolve issues of tribal sovereignty.
In 1926 she founded the National Council of American Indians and served as its president until her death. The organisation sought legal representation for tribes and defended land rights against further erosion through allotment policies.
Her approach combined assimilation era education with unyielding defence of Indigenous autonomy. She navigated both worlds deliberately.
Later Years and Legacy
Zitkála-Šá died on 26th January, 1938, in Washington, D.C. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The symbolism is complex. A Dakota woman who had once been tied to a chair and forced to surrender her braids was laid to rest in one of the most recognisable national cemeteries in the United States.
Her writing remains foundational in Native American literature and feminist scholarship. Scholars now regard her as one of the earliest Indigenous intellectuals to use English language publication not as surrender, but as strategy.
Her essays are frequently cited in discussions about boarding schools in both the United States and Canada. They stand as first hand testimony of cultural suppression and as evidence of resilience.
Zitkála-Šá once wrote of her childhood self as a girl caught between two worlds. Over time, she turned that tension into influence. She was not merely shaped by federal policy. She helped reshape it.
Her story continues to resonate, particularly as governments and institutions revisit the legacy of residential and boarding schools. Through writing, music, political organising, and investigative reporting, she ensured that the Dakota voice would not be silenced.
In reclaiming her name, her stories, and her culture, Red Bird did more than survive. She documented, challenged, and transformed the system that tried to redefine her.
