Zitkála-Šá

“Red Bird” is the English meaning of Zitkála-Šá, and this painting returns to the same woman as “Zitala Sa” — not a different subject but a different moment. In 1898, twenty-two years old and studying violin in Boston, she sat for Gertrude Käsebier, one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of her era. Käsebier made about a dozen exposures: in some, Zitkála-Šá wears a fitted Victorian dress and holds her violin or a book; in others she wears traditional Yankton dress. The painting follows the profile in which she raises a hand to her brow, gazing past the edge of the frame.

The sitting has become a touchstone for how a Dakota intellectual met the camera on her own terms. Rather than pose as a curiosity, she presented both worlds she actually moved between — conservatory musician and Yankton woman — months before the essays that made her famous. The photographs stayed in Käsebier's family until her granddaughter gave them to the Smithsonian in 1969; they are now in the Photographic History Collection of the National Museum of American History. Painted from the 1898 profile and titled with her name's translation, this portrait and “Zitala Sa” bracket a single life: the young artist at the threshold, and the seasoned writer of 1921.