Gertrude Simmons Bonnin

1876-1938

A life-long activist who challenged US government policies toward Native Americans, she was the first American Indian woman to write her own story and other works of literature without help from an editor, interpreter or ethnographer. She wrote under the pen name, Zitkala Sa ("red bird" in the Sioux language).

Born and raised to the age of eight on the Yankton (Nakota) Sioux reservation, located in what is now South Dakota, over her mother's objections she attended a Quaker boarding school and then Earlham College, graduating in 1897. Through her experience as both a student and teacher in the Indian boarding schools, Bonnin came to understand her mother's opposition and became an ardent critic of the system of Indian education.  Her essays published in national magazines exposed the physical and cultural brutality through which Indian children were robbed of their people's language, religion, and traditions. To defend these traditions and demonstrate their value to white readers and reformers, in her first book Old Indian Legends, Bonnin translated Nakota Sioux stories that she had heard as a child.

An accomplished speaker, in 1911 she helped to found the Society of American Indians and later edited the society's journal for two years. In 1920 she published her second book, American Indian Stories. Based on autobiographical essays and short stories, in this volume, Zitkala Sa contested the prevailing stereotypes of Native American women and offered compelling and complex accounts of their lives. She used these stories as a vehicle to demonstrate how women’s power in traditional Sioux society was undermined by the encroaching white world.

Bonnin worked with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, lecturing their local groups about Indian issues, and in 1921 persuaded the leadership of the GFWC to form an Indian Welfare Committee. The research done by this Committee helped to force the US government to commission an independent study, the Meriam Report, which was highly critical of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and led to some changes in the BIA and its policies in the 1930s. In 1924 she coauthored an expose of the theft of oil-rich Indian land entitled Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians, an Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery. She continued her passionate advocacy as President of the National Council of American Indians, a position she held until her death.

Sources: Liz Sonneborn, A to Z of Native American Women (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1998), Ruth Spack, Re-Visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Sa's Revolutionary American Indian Stories, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 14.1 (1997): 25-42.