Zitkala-Sa

Zitkala-Ša, who also published under the name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, musician and political activist. Born in 1876 on a reservation in South Dakota and dying in Washington, D.C., in 1938, she mattered because in the early twentieth century she was one of the first Native voices to reach a mainly white English-reading audience with traditional stories and a critique of forced assimilation.

Her mother, Ellen Simmons, raised her on the Yankton reservation, where she learned Dakota until about the age of eight. She was then taken to a Quaker boarding school in Indiana, where she learned English and the violin, and where she later recalled the painful loss of her heritage. She went on to Earlham College and taught music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, and from there she began publishing essays in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly. These pieces questioned the boarding school model and wrote openly about the tension between two cultures, a rare stance at the time.

She married Raymond Bonnin in 1902, and the couple spent fourteen years working among the Ute people in Utah, where their son was born. Her writing mixes legends drawn from several traditions, autobiographical narratives and spiritual and political essays. With the musician William F. Hanson she wrote the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), usually described as the first American Indian opera.

In 1926 she co-founded the National Council of American Indians, which campaigned for citizenship and civil rights, and she led it until her death. After she died, the University of Nebraska Press reissued many of her texts. She is now seen as an early figure in Native American literature and as one of the most influential Native activists of the twentieth century.