Zitkála-Šá

Zitkála-Šá was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Reservation in what is now South Dakota, and named Gertrude Simmons. At eight she was taken to White's Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker boarding school in Indiana — an uprooting she later wrote about with unsparing clarity, holding in one hand the joy of learning to read and to play the violin, and in the other the grief of losing language, hair, and home. She went on to Earlham College and the New England Conservatory of Music, and she chose her own Dakota pen name: Zitkála-Šá, Red Bird.

At the turn of the century she became one of the first Native writers to reach a national audience in her own voice, publishing autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, retelling Dakota stories in Old Indian Legends (1901), and gathering her work in American Indian Stories (1921). She taught music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and broke with it publicly over its assimilationist mission. In 1913, with the composer William F. Hanson, she co-created The Sun Dance Opera, writing the libretto and songs — often called the first American Indian opera.

The second half of her life belonged to politics. With her husband, Raymond Bonnin, she settled in Washington, served as secretary of the Society of American Indians, edited the American Indian Magazine, and pressed the causes of citizenship, suffrage, and land rights. Her 1924 investigation, Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians, exposed the organized robbery of allottees and helped force federal review. In 1926 she founded the National Council of American Indians and led it until her death on January 26, 1938. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. This portrait follows a photograph made in 1921, the year her collected stories reached the world.