Zitkala-Sa to appear on newly minted quarters

WASHINGTON DC—Old photographs reveal Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird) to be one of the most beautiful women of the 19th Century, but she has been selected as one of five women to appear on newly minted US Treasury Department 2024 quarters for more than just her exceptional looks.

Zitkala-Ša was born in 1876, five months before the Battle of the Greasy Grass, on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Her mother was known as Ellen Simmons, but her Dakota name was Tate Iyowin (Reaches for the Wind). Zitkala-Ša’s father was a Frenchman named Felker who abandoned the family.

Zitkala-Ša spent the first eight years of her life on the Yankton reservation, and in later years described that time as one of freedom and happiness, but a style of life that was quickly drawing to a close. She was then selected to attend a boarding school in Indiana, where she felt her tribal-ness was being stripped from her, but she did appreciate learning to read and write and play the violin. When she returned home three years later, Zitkala-Ša realized two things: she had changed and could not return to who she was before going to Indiana, and that the people were changing, slowly conforming to the standards of the dominant culture.

But unlike so many writers and thinkers of the 20^th Century, Zitkala-Ša had actually lived in the traditional environment of her tribe, during her key, formative years, and however educated and refined she would later become, that core identity did not have to be borrowed from ancestors—she had lived it.

Wanting to further her education, Zitkala-Ša returned to Indiana, thinking she would become a housekeeper, because that was what the school considered Native students fit for, but Zitkala-Ša realized she had an exceptional mind, and the local paper praised the speech on the equality of women she gave at her graduation ceremony.

She received a college scholarship, which she accepted and stayed in Indiana, although her mother wished her home. Her time at Earlham College proved two things—she was an excellent writer and orator. But despite translating Native stories into English and Latin, she struggled with poor health and limited finances and had to drop out of school only weeks before being graduated.

But it is often darkest before the dawn. By 1897 Zitkala-Ša found herself in Boston, studying and playing violin at the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1899, she was teaching music at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. She honed her oratory skills by hosting discussions and debates on Native culture.

There is little doubt her good looks opened doors otherwise closed to a woman with her background, but internally, Zitkala-Ša was developing a highly sophisticated, realistic comprehension of how the world operates. She wrote essays for major publications like the Atlantic and Harper’s Monthly, and missing from her writing are all the romanticized perspectives so prevalent in her time, and prevalent still today. She used simple but eloquent phrasing to scrutinize the raw, ugly truths of assimilation. Zitkala-Ša was a woman out of step with her time; had she lived today, she would have been the darling of social media worldwide.

One of her responsibilities at Carlisle was to recruit students from her home reservation. Zitkala-Ša did not like what she found when sent there in 1901. Her mother’s home was falling apart, her family was mired in poverty, and the Dawes Act had restricted tribal members to specific allotments, all the land between these allotments being declared “surplus” and opened to white settlement.

After returning to Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša began to understand the true nature of Native education. She understood that the Doctrine of Discovery must assimilate the Indian for his own good, and she rejected that assimilation objective, which brought her into conflict with Carlisle, who epitomized that objective. She wrote an article for Harper’s Monthly, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” which described the frightening loss of identity students were subjected to at Carlisle, and this article resulted in her dismissal from Carlisle in 1901.

She eventually got a clerk position on the Standing Rock Reservation where she met her future husband, Raymond Bonnin, a Yankton Iyeska like herself. The BIA assigned Bonnin to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah, where he relocated with his new wife and the Bonnins worked with the Ute people for 14 years. A son was born, destined to be an only child, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.

Zitkala-Ša’s writing career occurred in two phases. In the first, she wrote for major periodicals, and her work described the tension between traditional belief and assimilation, but not in flowery, romanticized language. In 1902 she wrote an article “Why I am a Pagan,” which was highly controversial for its time, exploring the non-Christian specifics of her beliefs.

Radiating from much of this early writing was an elemental energy that engaged and challenged the reader at the same time. Zitkala-Ša formed a unique and sagacious insight into the Iyeska reality in which she lived, and that insight revealed deeper truths about the dominant culture and tribal culture than other writers of her day were willing or able to consider.

Starting in 1916, Zitkala-Ša turned her focus on politics. A fully mature intellectual, she could now explore social structures and policies once beyond her comfort zone. The family moved to Washington, DC. Her major accomplishment was being a co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians in 1926. She was chairman of that council until her death in 1938.

Two major writings were published during these years. In 1921, American Indian Stories, explored the happy life she knew on the reservation compared to the iron routine of the boarding schools. In 1923, she wrote a political pamphlet: Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians. This writing revealed what a deep understanding she had developed of all tribal problems across the country. Zitkala-Ša exposed how corporations had corrupted law into a system of legalized theft from Indians. She showed how they were willing to even stoop to murder to exploit the Osage tribe for their oil lands.

In 1918-19 Zitkala-Ša was editor of American Indian Magazine, and in her writings, she does her best job of exploring the critical issues of her time in great depth and with great insight. She called for citizenship for Natives, and that would be achieved five years later. She felt, perhaps mistakenly, that this would be the best way to gain political power and defend their interest.

Zitkala-Ša did not ignore her music, and besides playing the piano and violin, and teaching music, in 1913, working with composer William Hanson, she wrote an opera. In 1938 this opera would be performed by the New York Light Opera Guild at the Broadway theater and declared its opera of the year.

Zitkala-Ša died in 1938 at the age of 61. She has been called the most influential native activist of the 20^th Century, but she was more of an advocate than an activist. She was able to work within Native hostile systems designed to thwart her very objectives, and find ways to open people’s minds, even alter the political landscape. She was a deep thinker, escaped from a prison where she could never expect to be more than a housekeeper, freed by the dint of her intellect, eloquence and larger than life persona.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

The post Zitkala-Sa to appear on newly minted quarters first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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