[On 21 July 2026, I posted
“250 Years of Theater History,” which was an article from the Theatre Communications
Group’s quarterly magazine American
Theatre entitled “We the (Theatre) People” by Charlotte M. Canning. Late in the semiquincentennial survey,
Canning introduces Zitkála-Šá, a Native American theater artist and activist. Canning’s mention is brief, but I found her
biography fascinating and compelling, so I first added a rather long note about
her and now, I’m going to write up what I can find on her life and work.
[I’ve published several posts on Native American theater, including two series, “Staging Our Native Nation” (six parts with eight articles: 24, 27, and 30 March, and 2, 5, and 8 April 2018) and “Superheroes on Native Land” (three parts and two supplements: 21, 24, 27, and 30 January, and 2 February 2024). There are more, if you search the archive.
[One of particular note relative to this entry is “Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924)” (23, 26. and 30 December 2024), a post similar to “Zitkála-Šá” in that it’s also about the life and work of a little-known American Indian theater artist—an actress and playwright in this case.]
Zitkála-Šá (pron.: zit-KAH-lah-shah; 1876-1938), a Yankton Dakota Sioux whose name in Lakota means ‘Red Bird,’ was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in the Dakota Territory in what’s now Charles Mix County in southeast South Dakota. She was also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a name she was given at the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana.
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was her married name; her husband, Raymond Talephause Bonnin, was also a Yankton Sioux. We’ll see that she condemned the cultural erasure she suffered at the hands of the missionaries and teachers at the school and rejected her English name. So I’ll call her by her Yankton name, Zitkála-Šá, as she did herself.
Though she suffered anti-Indian prejudice, discrimination, and attempts to erase her native culture, Zitkála-Šá became a musician, music teacher, composer, writer, librettist, editor, translator, and educator. She was also a lobbyist for indigenous peoples’ right to United States citizenship and other civil rights, and one of this country’s most influential political activists for Native Americans.
Zitkála-Šá was born on 22 February 1876, ironically, George Washington’s birthday and a federal holiday from 1879 until 1970, and the year (on 25-26 June) that the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations defeated the U.S. Army under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer (1839-76; brevetted brigadier and major general [1963-66] during the American Civil War [1861-65]) at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Her mother, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ (tha-TAY ee-YOH-hee-wing; 1828-1914), ‘Reaches for the Wind’ (aka: Ellen Simmons), was of Dakota Sioux heritage and her father, William Felker (1830-?), was a transient white trader of European (likely German) descent. Felker, who wasn’t legally married to Zitkála-Šá’s mother—they had what was characterized as a common-law marriage—abandoned the family when his daughter was very young, and she was raised by her Dakota mother and aunts on the reservation in her native language.
Because Zitkála-Šá’s father left, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ did not use the surname Felker for her daughter when she was growing up. Her mother later took the surname of her previous husband, a man named John Haysting Simmons (d. 1874).
When Zitkála-Šá was taken to a Quaker missionary boarding school at age eight, the administrators forced her to register under her anglicized name Gertrude Simmons. Later in life, she cast off this identity and named herself Zitkála-Šá.
(Just for the record, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ was first married to François St. Pierre [dates unknown]. He was a French-Canadian or Métis [member of a Canadian mixed-heritage ethnic group] fur trader. Zitkála-Šá had three older half-brothers: Henry St. Pierre [1848-1925], Peter St. Pierre [1851-1930], and David S. Simmons [1866-1946].
(That last is “Dawee,” whom Zitkála-Šá writes about fondly in her memoirs, American Indian Stories [Hayworth Publishing House (Washington, D.C.), 1921]; also in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” [Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 (February 1900)]. Dawee, ten years Zitkála-Šá’s senior, was at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute with his sister.)
[nb: The layers of Zitkála-Šá’s family history feature conflicting documentation, in particular the marriages and relationships of Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ, including the correct names, marital status, life dates, and ultimate fates of the fathers of her children. I have tried to keep to academic consensus and genealogical studies to follow the correct lines and omit errors and perpetuated misreadings.]
In 1884, when Zitkála-Šá was 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children for their boarding school, the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana (775 miles east of the reservation), established in 1861 through the bequest of Josiah White (1781-1850; Pennsylvania industrialist and philanthropist). The “recruitment” was a Mephistophelean bargain hidden behind a snake-oil sales pitch.
The Quaker “recruiters” articulated a highly targeted, deceptive, and manipulative sales pitch that promised children like Zitkála-Šá western knowledge, wonder, the thrilling prospect of riding on the “iron horse” (the train), “all the red apples she could eat,” and a glamorous life.
Just as in Damn Yankees, Applegate was selling Joe Hardy a life as “Shoeless Joe,” baseball star—with the devil lurking in the background ready to take his soul—Zitkála-Šá willingly, even eagerly, signed the contract, despite her mother’s disapproval, blinded by the immediate, glittering prize of a free education.
Just as Joe Hardy didn’t initially grasp the horror of losing his soul to become a baseball star, 8-year-old Zitkála-Šá didn’t understand that the “land of red apples” was actually an engine of institutional erasure designed to “kill the Indian, save the (wo)man.”
[“Kill the Indian, save the man” was the motto of Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924; U.S. Army officer: 1861-1903), founder (1879) and superintendent (1879-1904) of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania where Zitkála-Šá later taught. The school closed in 1918.]
Zitkála-Šá begged her mother to let her go, and her mother, aware of the advantages that an education offered, reluctantly agreed. The missionary school, however, wasn’t the adventure that the recruiters had seemed to promise.
At White’s Institute, she was registered under the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. There she was forced to speak English, wear only Western dress, adopt the customs of her Quaker teachers, and to pray as a Quaker.
At the school, the practice of indigenous cultural and religious traditions was banned. While the missionary school taught her English literacy, Zitkála-Šá was beaten and punished for speaking her tribal language or practicing her Sioux culture.
Perhaps the most humiliating and traumatic indignity was the cutting, or “shingling,” of her hair. In most Native American cultures, long hair is deeply sacred, serving as a physical extension of the soul, representing cultural identity and a connection to the Creator and ancestors.
Shingling meant cutting the hair into a severely short, severely cropped “bob,” the result of which was the elimination of traditional signifiers like long braids, intricate parts, or tribal hair ornaments. Indian children were instantly stripped of their unique tribal appearance.
While shingling became a popular fashion trend for Western women in the 1920s, because the school staff or older students performed these haircuts rapidly and en masse, the results were often jagged, uneven, and unattractive, adding to the humiliation.
In “The School Days of an Indian Girl: The Cutting of My Long Hair” (Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 [February 1900]; republished in American Indian Stories), Zitkála-Šá recounted:
I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.
She added: “Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy.”
Studious and talented, Zitkála-Šá excelled at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration. Zitkála-Šá slowly adapted to her new environment, but the price of success was estrangement from her cultural roots.
The off-reservation boarding schools like White’s Institute deliberately made it difficult and expensive for students to return to their homes for holidays and family visits or for parents to make the journey to the school to see their children. The great distance between Wabash and the Yankton Reservation, as well as the cost of the train trip, meant that Zitkála-Šá was pretty much isolated from her mother and aunts, not to mention her tribe.
She later learned that the government paid the schools a bounty for every child successfully removed from reservations. Zitkála-Šá realized that the schools were operated for cultural erasure.
Alongside the racism and ridicule she encountered, Zitkála-Šá felt a deep conflict between her native identity and the dominant white culture, the sorrow of being separated from her mother, and her joy in learning to read, write, and play the violin. She later wrote that she quickly came to regret her decision to come to White’s Institute.
In 1887, she returned to the reservation. She found that after her three years at the Institute, she no longer fit in her native home. The forced assimilation was taking its toll.
So, after three years at home, Zitkála-Šá decided she wanted to continue her education and at age 15, returned to Wabash. For the rest of her life, Zitkála-Šá lived in two worlds.
She studied piano and violin, and taught music from 1891 to 1895 when the Institute’s music teacher resigned. She earned her first diploma and made a speech at graduation that advocated for women’s equality. It was praised in local newspapers. She had a gift for public speaking and music, and it was recognized.
Instead of returning home after graduation as her mother wished, Zitkála-Šá accepted a scholarship at Earlham College—a Quaker school like White’s Institute—in Richmond, Indiana, where she was one of the few indigenous students, and enrolled in a teacher-training program. At Earlham, she began to collect stories of Native American tribes, which she translated into Latin and English.
In 1897, six weeks before she was to graduate, Zitkála-Šá had to leave Earlham for financial and health reasons. Again, she chose not to return to the reservation but moved to Boston, where she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music to study and play violin.
In 1899, she took a job as music teacher at Richard Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. She also hosted debates there on the issue of Native American treatment and assimilation, a fundamental principle of Pratt’s and his school’s that caused her great grief and pain from the loss of her heritage.
Ironically, the school used Zitkála-Šá to impress the world and recruit students, and in 1900, it sent her back to the Yankton Reservation. She was distressed to find her family home poverty-stricken and some of its land occupied by white settlers.
Zitkála-Šá returned to Carlisle and began writing about Native American life in publications like Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly. In 1901, she wrote a piece for Harper’s, “Soft-Hearted Sioux” (Volume 102 [1 Dec. 1900]), that described the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School. Pratt called it “trash,” and she was fired from Carlisle that year.
Zitkála-Šá wrote pieces that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation. She went back to the reservation to look after her mother, who was in failing health, and continued to collect Sioux stories.
In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends (Ginn and Company [Boston]), a collection of 14 Sioux tales, some she learned as a child and others she gathered from different tribes. It was directed principally at children in an attempt to preserve Native American traditions and stories, and to gain respect for Native cultures from Euro-Americans.
At this time, Zitkála-Šá also took a job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, inhabited by Sioux peoples approximately 320 miles northwest of the Yankton Reservation.
Working at Standing Rock, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a mixed-race Yankton Dakota and former U.S. Army officer (1914-20) who followed Yankton culture; they married in 1902. For the next 14 years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe in Vernal, Utah, where Bonnin served as the BIA school superintendent.
In 1910, while she was living and teaching on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá attended a local Ute performance of the Ute Sun Dance ritual. There, she met William F. Hanson (1887-1969; composer and music teacher), later a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who specialized in Native American music.
[Hanson was in Vernal, near which he was born and raised, after completing a two-year program in music at BYU and his two-year stint as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He was teaching at the Uintah Academy, a private LDS-operated school in Vernal, at the time that Zitkála-Šá taught music at the federal Uintah Boarding School located in Whiterocks, on the reservation.]
Hanson and Zitkála-Šá began discussing the cultural significance of the ceremony, which led the Native American musician to propose they co-write an opera to preserve the music and rituals. Over the next three years, they collaborate on The Sun Dance Opera, the first opera co-written by a Native American. She wrote the libretto and the songs, while Hanson wrote the score.
Zitkála-Šá played melodies on the violin and flute, and Hanson wrote them out and orchestrated them to use as the basis of his composition. The songs were based on the sacred ritual of the Sioux Sun Dance to explore Ute and Yankton Dakota cultures. The Sun Dance was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978, so by folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.
[There were several Sun Dance rituals, including a Ute ceremony and a Sioux ceremony. The Ute dance is derived from the Plains version, brought home by a Shoshone visitor, who passed it on to the Utes. While there are distinct Sioux and Ute variations of the ritual, they share the same Great Plains root.
[In the Sioux tradition, on which the opera is based. the Sun Dance is the most sacred spiritual ceremony practiced among the Plains Indian nations. It’s held during the summer solstice and serves to renew the community’s connection with the Earth, the spirit world, and the Creator.
[Tribe members unite for prayer, healing, and cultural renewal. A specially chosen cottonwood tree is erected at the center of a circular dance lodge to represent the connection between earth and sky. Participants fast from food and water for several days while dancing continuously.
[To demonstrate ultimate devotion, male dancers often endure flesh piercings on their chests or backs. They are attached to the sacred pole by leather thongs, dancing until the skin tears away as an offering for the well-being of the tribe. (The Utes don’t practice this ritual.) Dancers look directly at the sun to absorb its spiritual power, offering their personal sacrifice so that the earth, the buffalo, and the tribe will be spiritually renewed for the coming year.]
The storyline of The Sun Dance Opera takes place in the Pipestone Quarry near Yankton, South Dakota, in some unspecified, pre-colonial time. The plot centers on the pursuit of Winona, a chief’s daughter, by two suitors: Ohiya and Sweet Singer. (nb: Zitkála-Šá and Raymond Bonnin’s son was named Raymond Ohiya Bonnin [1903-39].) The climax features the Sun Dance ritual.
In the prologue, Sweet Singer, a Shoshone man, violates his nation’s religious rules and travels to the land of the Sioux. Sweet Singer is set up as the piece’s villain. He commits blasphemy by stealing and misusing sacred medicine. He steals “sacred love-leaves” belonging to a holy Medicine Man and uses them selfishly and “lightly.”
By doing so, he unwittingly forces a Shoshone maiden to fall deeply in love with him. This spiritual transgression brands him an immoral outcast, forcing him to flee his homeland and travel into Sioux territory, where he sets the main plot in motion by pursuing Winona.
The narrative proper starts off with the Sioux protagonist, Ohiya, pledging to win Winona’s affections. To win her hand, Ohiya must prove his endurance and bravery in the grueling Sun Dance. The opera culminates in this intense physical and spiritual ritual (the singers and actors feigned the body piercing), and the chief sanctions the union of Ohiya and Winona, as Ohiya has fulfilled his Sun Dance vow.
The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation. The performance received immense regional praise and community pride locally.
The enthusiastic reviews, however, often carried a highly patronizing tone typical of the assimilation era. The Vernal Express reviewer wrote very positively about the artistic spectacle but viewed the ritual through a lens of exoticism.
The writer said that the indigenous performers “danced and forgot the present while they dreamed of battles, a trail of blood and a pile of scalps,” mirroring the government rhetoric that stereotyped Native traditions as inherently violent.
The LDS-owned Deseret News of Salt Lake City, the major state paper, framed the première as an “event of more than passing importance to the people of Utah.” The review-writer focused heavily on the deep emotional impression the opera left on the audience and praised the “sympathy with which the native peoples are represented.”
The opera was performed several times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935. Then, on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death), the opera débuted at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera. Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.
At the New York production, the critical elite universally dismissed the work, entirely failing to understand its cultural or political significance. New York papers expected the rigid, grand operatic structures of Europe. Confronted with a hybrid of Western operetta melodramas and traditional Native melodies, critics panned it as a failure of authenticity on both sides.
They viewed the music as primitive or mismatched, failing to see the opera as a deliberate act of indigenous self-determination and political resistance. Rather than viewing it as a historic piece of art, they treated it as an unpolished, outdated regional novelty.
In the New York Times, Howard Taubman (1907-96), a prominent music critic and reporter for the paper at the time (he eventually became the Times’ chief music reviewer [1955-60] and later its chief theater reviewer [1960-66] when Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984] retired), wrote:
The performance did not persuade a listener that Mr. Hanson had succeeded in welding his material and his knowledge into a cohesive work for the stage. In transforming his studies into an opera, Mr. Hanson produced, although he evidently did not intend it, a score that is reminiscent of the European operettas of the nineteenth century and at times of a hokum treatment of the Indian. The music is light and tuneful, but it could be applied with equal success to a story about Graustark [i.e., a highly implausible and melodramatic piece of writing].
Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which was also true in 1935 at BYU. She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.
After 1916, when she and her husband left the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá never returned to public music-making.
While on the reservation, Zitkála-Šá continued to write articles about her life and native legends for English readers. In addition to Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, her essays also appeared in American Indian Magazine (published by the Society of American Indians, Washington, D.C., 1910-19), which she edited from 1918 to 1919.
[The SAI American Indian Magazine should not be confused with the current American Indian, the quarterly magazine published since 2000 by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.]
She joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship. She became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Bureau’s assimilationist policies and practice, reporting abuse of children when they, for example, refused to pray as Christians.
[Prior to 1924, American Indians could only obtain citizenship through specific treaties, military service, or complex naturalization processes. While the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868), which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, excluded indigenous people, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 to grant full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.
[Despite gaining U.S. citizenship, some states actively barred American Indians from voting for decades, a disenfranchisement that wasn't fully resolved until the 1960s. New Mexico was the last state officially to grant Native Americans the right to vote in 1962.
[(Full access to the ballot box was not guaranteed, however. Many states continued to use indirect suppression tactics similar to Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise indigenous communities as they did for other minorities. These pervasive barriers prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal oversight and outlawed discriminatory voting mechanisms nationwide.)]
While Zitkála-Šá’s pieces were often autobiographical, they were still political and social commentary that showed her increased frustration with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which fired the couple in 1916.
In 1916, the couple moved to Washington D.C., where Zitkála-Šá served as the secretary of the Society of the American Indian. In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians, an organization that worked to improve the treatment and lives of Native Americans.
At the same time, Zitkála-Šá also worked with white suffrage groups and was active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) beginning in 1921. She created the Indian Welfare Committee of GFWC in 1924.
That year, when the Indian Citizenship Act passed Congress, she ran a voter registration drive among Native Americans, encouraging those who could to engage in the democratic process and support legislation that would be good for Native Americans.
In 1923, Zitkála-Šá published a report entitled “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery” (Indian Rights Association). This article was instrumental in getting the government to investigate the exploitation and defrauding of Native Americans by outsiders for access to oil-rich lands.
By 1928, she was an advisor to the Meriam Commission, which would lead to several improvements in how the Federal Government treated native peoples.
[The Meriam Commission, led by technical director Lewis Meriam (1883-1972), was a team of researchers who published a landmark 1928 report titled “The Problem of Indian Administration.” Commissioned by the Institute for Government Research (later the Brookings Institution) and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, it investigated the devastating social and economic conditions of Native Americans.
[The Meriam Report documented widespread, extreme poverty, highlighting how assimilation policies stripped Native Americans of millions of acres of land. Federal boarding schools were heavily criticized for providing substandard vocational training, severe overcrowding, malnourishment, and actively destroying indigenous cultures.
[The report identified dismal healthcare, resulting in high rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and trachoma. The commission recommended moving away from harsh, forced assimilation, improving education, granting Native Americans more autonomy, and enhancing the protection of their property rights.
[The report caused a national outcry, ultimately laying the legislative groundwork for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which promoted tribal sovereignty and self-governance.]
Zitkála-Šá lectured across the country, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural and tribal identities while continuing to write. Her books and essays became more political in such works as American Indian Stories (1921) and “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” published in 1923 by the Indian Rights Association.
American Indian Stories was a mix of tales and legends, non-fiction essays about her culture, and other indigenous peoples’ customs and beliefs, but it also included several autobiographical articles and so, serves as her memoir.
Zitkála-Šá continued to work for improvements in education, health care, and legal recognition of Native Americans as well as the preservation of Native American culture. She died at 61 on 26 January 1938. She’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942 at 62.
[Zitkála-Šá had only a brief encounter with theater. Among her other talents—and she had many, as we’ve seen—she was a consummate professional musician on both the violin and piano. She had a special gift for composition, and she was a devoted music conservationist. But she had other drives in her life. Marisa Mathias of the National Women’s History Museum characterized her thus:
Zitkála-Šá was one of the most important reformers of the 20th century. She helped empower Indigenous people by writing about their culture, history, personal experience, and concerns. Her writings forced the audience to face the complexities and beauty of Indigenous culture and the tragedy of the Native experience in America. And her activism influenced change that advocated for citizenship rights, better educational opportunities, improved health care and cultural recognition and preservation for Native Americans.
[Many of Zitkála-Šá’s works
are accessible online. Here are a few
links: Old
Indian Legends (Standard
Ebooks), Old Indian Legends (Project
Gutenberg), Old
Indian Legends (Electronic Text Center), American
Indian Stories (University of Wisconsin – Madison), American
Indian Stories (Standard
Ebooks).]
