Zitkala-Ša

Works

• 1902Why I Am a Pagan

  A short essay in the Atlantic Monthly that sets the Dakota experience of the Great Spirit in nature and kinship against a converted preacher’s threats of hellfire and declares for the former; later reprinted as “The Great Spirit”.

• 1921American Indian Stories

  Collects her autobiographical essays of 1900 on childhood, boarding school and teaching at Carlisle, together with stories and the essay on paganism: a testimony to the loss imposed by assimilation, written for a white readership.

Position

Zitkala-Ša is on the map as a Dakota writer who turned autobiography, story and polemic into arguments against assimilation. Her essays of 1900 describe the boarding school from the child’s side – the cutting of her hair, the loss of language, the feeling of belonging neither among her own people nor among the whites – at a time when such schools were praised as the way to “civilise” Native children. In “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902) she sets the Dakota experience of the Great Spirit in nature and kinship against the threats of a converted preacher and declares for it, a public refusal of mission Christianity that was unusual for a Native author of her time. Her later work was political: she argued for citizenship and self-determination, documented the robbery of Native landowners in Oklahoma and organised Native voters through the National Council of American Indians. In 1918 she testified in Congress against the use of peyote, which set her against defenders of the emerging Native American Church; her collaboration on the “Sun Dance Opera” and her reformist positions are judged differently by historians. Recent scholarship reads her as one of the central Native intellectuals of the Progressive Era. No documented links yet connect her with others on the map.

Life & context

Zitkala-Ša, “Red Bird”, was born on 22 February 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, the daughter of the Yankton Dakota Ellen Simmons (Táte Iyóhiwin) and a white father, and grew up under the name Gertrude Simmons; the Lakota name Zitkala-Ša she later chose for herself. At the age of eight she went to White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker boarding school in Wabash, Indiana; she later studied at Earlham College and the violin at the New England Conservatory, and from 1897 to 1899 she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 1900 the Atlantic Monthly published her three autobiographical essays, followed by “Old Indian Legends” (1901) and “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902). After her marriage to Raymond Bonnin, a Yankton Dakota, in 1902 she lived for years on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where she wrote the libretto of “The Sun Dance Opera” (1913) with William F. Hanson. As secretary of the Society of American Indians from 1916 and editor of its magazine she moved to Washington. In 1924 she co-wrote an investigation into the defrauding of Native landowners in Oklahoma, and in 1926 she founded the National Council of American Indians, which she led until her death on 26 January 1938 in Washington.

Further main works

• Impressions of an Indian Childhood; The School Days of an Indian Girl; An Indian Teacher Among Indians (Atlantic Monthly, 1900)
• Old Indian Legends (1901)
• The Sun Dance Opera (libretto, with William F. Hanson, 1913)
• Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians (with C. H. Fabens and M. K. Sniffen, 1924)