Zitkála-Šá

 

[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).]

More Odds & Ends

 

[I enjoyed putting together “Theater Odds & Ends,” posted on Rick On Theater on 23 January, so much that I decided to do another compilation of short pieces from various sources.  This time, I’ve avoided theater articles and gone with a gallimaufry of “vintage” articles of curiosity value.] 

“THE RECYCLERS: FROM TRASH COMES TRIUMPH”

Reported by Bob Simon 

[The transcript below is from “The Recyclers” which aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 17 November 2013 (and re-broadcast on 18 May 2014). The producer was Michael Gavshon.]

Ever heard of a town built on a garbage dump? We hadn’t until earlier this year when we visited a community on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of the tiny, impoverished South American country of Paraguay. It’s called Cateura and there is trash everywhere – in its streets, its rivers, in people’s backyards – but we decided to take you to Cateura tonight, not because of the poverty or the filth, but because of the incredible imagination and ingenuity of the people who live there. Our story is also a reminder that, ultimately, music will triumph everywhere and anywhere.

Garbage is the only crop in Cateura and the harvest lasts 12 months a year. It is Cateura’s curse, its livelihood and the only reason people live here, providing hundreds of jobs to peasant farmers who were kicked off their plots by large land owners. They are the Trash Pickers. It is their profession. They sift through the stench 24 hours a day, scrounging for anything they can sell – 10 cents for a pound of plastic, five cents for a pound of cardboard [equivalent to 14¢ and 7¢ in 2025].

You’ll be amazed at what else people here are doing with this trash . . . just look and listen.

This is the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura [Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura]. The violins are fashioned from oven trays, the cellos from oil barrels. Even the strings are recycled.

The saxophones and trumpets are made from old drain pipes, the keys were once coins and bottle caps. This drum skin used to be an X-ray plate, the guitar from dessert tins.

The idea came from environmental technician Favio Chavez. When he came to Cateura and saw the kids working and playing on this miserable hill, he came up with the idea of starting a music school to lift the kids’ lives out of the trash.

From the start, Favio realized that even if he could raise the money, new instruments were out of the question. A factory-made violin would cost more than a house here and would almost certainly get stolen. But these fiddles aren’t worth a dime.

They are the handiwork of trash worker and carpenter Don Colá Gomez – three days a week he goes to the dump to find the raw materials.

Then, in his tiny workshop at the edge of the dump, he goes to work. Favio first asked him to make a violin. But this Stradivarius of South America had never seen one or heard one. [Italian craftsman of string instruments Antonio Stradivari (c. 1644-1737) made superb and highly prized instruments that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million.]

BOB SIMON: But do you realize how unusual it is?

DON COLÁ GOMEZ: Yes, that’s the way it is. When you need something, you need to do whatever it takes to survive.

He was soon making three violins a week, then cellos and finally guitars, drums and double basses . . . out of trash.

Take a look and listen to what Colá has created. Fifteen-year-old Ada Rios has been playing for three years now. Today, she is the orchestra’s first violinist.

BOB SIMON: The first time you went and saw the orchestra you saw all these instruments with all these different colors. Were you surprised when you learned that they were made from trash?

ADA RIOS: Yes. I was very surprised because I had thought that trash was useless. But thanks to the orchestra I now realize that there are so many different things that can be done with the stuff.

Cateura didn’t exist before Paraguay’s capital Asuncion started dumping its trash here [1984]. The town grew up around the garbage and became one of the poorest places in South America.

Twenty-five hundred families live here now. There is hardly any electricity or plumbing. The drinking water is contaminated. Many of the children move from broken homes to crime and drugs.

But Ada and her younger sister Noelia, who plays the cello, say that music has become their salvation, the centerpiece of their lives. And who do they have to thank for that? Their grandmother, Mirian.

She is a garbage worker, collects bottles in the streets of Asuncion, carries them back to Cateura to sell. Ten cents a pound. Three years ago, Mirian saw a notice advertising free music lessons for children. That’s how it all began.

BOB SIMON: Why did you want them to learn music?

MIRIAN RIOS: Because I always wanted to be a musician-- or play an instrument. Actually I wanted to be a singer. Sometimes our dreams do come true. Maybe not in our lives, but through people that we love very much.

ADA RIOS: When I play the violin I feel like I am somewhere else. I imagine that I’m alone in my own world and forget about everything else around me and I feel transported to a beautiful place.

BOB SIMON: Can you describe that beautiful place?

ADA RIOS: Yes. I’m transported to a place that is completely different to where I am now. It has clear skies, open fields and I see lots of green. It’s clean with no trash. There is no contamination where we live. It’s just me alone playing my violin.

Every Saturday, this drab school yard is transformed into a multi-colored oasis of music. The kids flock here to learn and to play.

Cateura is a long way from Juilliard, but these music students are just as dedicated as those prodigies in New York . . .  and they don’t get rained on like the kids here. Paraguay is in the tropics and you are reminded of that all the time. But the band plays on.

The veterans –15-year-olds – are teaching the novices. Many are barely big enough to hold a violin. The music can’t compete with the downpour but there is refuge in a classroom.

Favio Chavez says that music teaches the kids respect and responsibility, not common commodities in the gang-ridden streets of Cateura.

FAVIO CHAVEZ: These values are completely different to those of gangs. If these kids love being part of the orchestra – they are absolutely going to hate being part of a gang.

For the first time, the children are getting out of Cateura, performing around the country and to Chavez, the Pied Piper of Paraguay, that’s the most important thing. They are being seen. They are being heard.

FAVIO CHAVEZ: These are children that were hidden, nobody even knew they existed. We have put them on a stage and now everybody looks at them and everybody knows they exist.

That’s mainly because of a documentary that’s being made about the orchestra called “Landfill Harmonic.” Last November, the producers put their trailer up on YouTube [Landfill Harmonic - the "Recycled Orchestra"]. It went viral . . .  the orchestra began getting bookings world-wide. It is such stuff as dreams are made on.

The film which follows their remarkable journey through concert halls in Europe and America will only be released next year but already instruments are being donated and that’s not all – the kids are getting help.

Paraguay’s most famous musician, Berta Rojas [classical guitarist; b. 1966 in Asuncion; with over a dozen albums, she has performed all over the world alone and with renowned international musicians and had received many awards and honors from many countries], flies down regularly from her home in Maryland to offer master classes.

Remember Noelia, Ada’s sister, the cellist? Berta is teaching her how to play the guitar.

BERTA ROJAS: This is – an – a story that is filling my heart and my soul with so much inspiration.

BOB SIMON: When you first heard them play, what went through your mind?

BERTA ROJAS: I couldn’t believe that you could make music with trash. I couldn’t believe it. And I thought, “Oh my God, this is the best thing that had happened in Paraguay in so many years.”

And when you talk to the parents, you hear what you hear from poor people everywhere. They want their kids to have a better life than they’ve had.

Jorge Rios is Ada and Noelia’s father . . .

BOB SIMON: If Ada becomes a professional musician, she’d probably be leaving town. How would you react to that?

JORGE RIOS: Yes, the truth is if you asked that question to every parent here they would say they would leave this place if they could. I, of course, would like her to have a better life than the one I’ve had. And if she leaves I hope she takes me with her!

What’s hard to believe is that most of the parents and the people of Cateura had never heard the children play. That was about to change. A concert was finally scheduled. There were banners in the streets, the local radio station was ready to broadcast. The church was transformed into a concert hall.

The children wore their finest. This was, after all, opening night. It could have been New York.

All the students were on stage for the finale. Some of the musicians were performing after just one rehearsal.

The parents were proud, of course. But just listen to the girls’ grandma Mirian.

MIRIAN RIOS: I would say it’s a blessing from God. People used to humiliate us and call us “trash pickers.” Today they are more civilized, they call us the “recyclers.” So I feel that this is a reward from God. That our children who come from this place . . . can play beautiful music in this way.

And here’s a final note from the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. Go on, send us your garbage, we’ll send it back to you . . . as music.

[Since this segment was aired, the orchestra has toured South Africa with the heavy metal band Metallica.  They’ve since performed internationally with Stevie Wonder and the American heavy-metal bands Metallica and Megadeth.

[They were hoping to raise enough money to build a music school for their community on the edge of the dump.  In 2015, construction of the building was begun and the school opened in 2016, just before Landfill Harmonic was released.

[The documentary Landfill Harmonic (2013) was produced by Juliana Penaranda-Loftus and directed by Graham Townsley; executive producers were Alejandra Amarilla and Rodolfo Madero. 

[Bob Simon (1941-2015) covered most major overseas conflicts and news stories from the late ’60s to his death in a car accident.  He contributed to 60 Minutes since 1996.]

*  *  *  *

“AN EXPLANATION FOR HICCUPS? DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH”

by Meeri Kim 

[This article was originally published in the “Health & Science” section of the Washington Post on 3 June 2014.]

It happens in the blink of an eye: Your breathing muscles contract, your vocal cords clamp shut, and out comes that unmistakable sound.

“Hic.”

We all get hiccups from time to time. So do cats, rats and human fetuses. Perhaps you ate too quickly, got too excited or drank something carbonated. Or you are coming out of anesthesia after an operation. But often there’s no clear trigger. Doctors don’t know what purpose they serve, nor do they know how to make them go away.

In other words, the humble hiccup remains largely a mystery. And just as theories abound on causes and cures, so do home remedies.

“People have very interesting interventions: Scare me, hurt me, tickle me, drink for 90 seconds, drink upside down for 90 seconds,” said internist Tyler Cymet. “But these aren’t based in science.”

Cymet, head of medical education at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, performed a five-year study involving 54 hospital patients with hiccups. Beginning in 1995, he tried a wide range of treatments, including breath holding and strong medications, but he ended up with a null result: None of the techniques proved effective in ridding patients of their hiccup spells.

[Osteopathic medicine in the United States is a form of scientific medicine which today scientifically and legally overlaps with non-osteopathic (allopathic) medical science and practice. Before the 20th century, osteopathic medicine emphasized the patient’s health and treatment by manipulation of the musculoskeletal system and on the diagnostic significance of patient lifestyle and environment.  Some osteopathic physicians (OD’s) still include such treatments alongside allopathic medical treatment for a few of their patients, but their training and practices today are indistinguishable from those of allopathic physicians (MD’s).]

“I think the jury is in that nothing works: It starts and stops on its own, and that’s about it,” he said.

But why do we do it in the first place? Some researchers propose it is a fetal digestive reflex that guards against breathing in amniotic fluid while in the womb. Or an early way to train respiratory muscles for breathing after birth.

Another theory posits that hiccups date all the way back to our amphibian ancestors. The classic pattern of breathing in followed by an abrupt closing of the glottis is seen particularly in tadpoles when they use their gills rather than their lungs to breathe. The tadpole’s brainstem tells a flap to close the glottis upon inspiration to prevent water from entering the lungs. This allows the water to pass through the gills. The hiccup reflex may have persisted up the tree of life even though it no longer serves any purpose.

What is agreed upon and well known, however, is the mechanism of a hiccup. Referred to in medicine as singultus, it is defined by a sudden contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles — located within the spacing between the ribs — followed by snapping shut of the glottis, the space between the vocal folds within the larynx. The quick spasm of inhalation colliding with the closed larynx causes the characteristic sound and bodily jerk.

The peanut butter fix

Most experts also agree that hiccups involve a neuronal circuit starting with the phrenic and vagus nerves. The vagus nerve extends from the brainstem to the abdomen, while the phrenic nerves send signals from the brain to the diaphragm.

While hiccups are little more than a temporary annoyance for most of us, they can become all-consuming. Coleen O’Lear, a home page editor at The Washington Post, hiccups nearly every day — sometimes just occasionally, other times in fits.

“When I get them rapid-fire, they are pretty high-pitched and sound ridiculous,” O’Lear said. “It is physically uncomfortable.”

The 29-year-old has had hiccup spells for as long as she can remember; doctors say they may be linked to acid reflux disease, which she has had since she was a baby. She has tried every home remedy she has heard of: spoonfuls of sugar, holding her breath, deep breaths, drinking upside down, sucking on lemons. Some may work temporarily; most fail completely.

But one thing does work: eating a spoonful of creamy peanut butter very slowly. O’Lear thinks it has something to do with coating her esophagus, but Cymet believes it has more of a mental calming effect.

“The peanut butter is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, where you’re controlling your breathing and thinking about what you’re doing instead of getting anxious,” he said.

Although her newsroom colleagues are entirely accustomed to them, O’Lear still finds the hiccups frustrating.

“People don’t know how to react to it,” she said. “Most of the time, they bless me.”

The chronic hiccuper who stepped into psychologist Duane Hurst’s office two years ago got so fed up with her five-year-run of daily hiccup spells that she initially requested an invasive procedure to crush the phrenic nerve, effectively paralyzing her diaphragm. Hurst, of the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., thought such a procedure was far too extreme and instead offered to try a technique called heart rate variability biofeedback.

Flipping back and forth

Our nervous system controls involuntary bodily functions, such as heartbeat and blood vessel contraction, via two complementary branches. One branch stimulates responses related to our fight-or-flight instinct — increased heart rate, dilated pupils, sweat secretion — while the other initiates the rest-and-restore mode.

Some people are oversensitive to stress stimuli and flip too easily back and forth between the two — perhaps a beneficial trait when man was a target of predators, but not as helpful in today’s world, where it can lead to unwanted anxiety. A quick fight-or-flight response that once saved man from cave bears and saber-toothed cats can kick in at inopportune moments, such as at a meeting with the boss or while merging on the highway.

By measuring the interval between heartbeats, doctors can track the interplay between the two branches and the extent to which they are battling each other: One ups the heart rate, while the other slows it down.

For the woman who had considered having her phrenic nerve crushed, Hurst used an electrocardiogram to detect variability in her heart rate and instructed her to take carefully measured breaths. The idea was to help her find a respiration rate that would activate her rest-and-restore mode, rebalance the nervous system and ease stress.

“Not many people are aware that they can use their breathing in a systematic way,” Hurst said. “Each one of us individuals has a breathing sweet spot.”

Once she started paced respiration, she began to calm down — and then, suddenly, no more hiccups. One biofeedback session was all she needed.

“Her hiccups literally stopped when she was in the chair,” Hurst said. “She is going on two years of being symptom-free.”

This was the first hiccups case for Hurst, who typically uses heart rate variability biofeedback to treat migraines, tension headaches, fibromyalgia [a condition characterized by chronic pain, stiffness, and tenderness of the muscles, tendons, and joints], anxiety disorders and irritable bowel syndrome. Similarly, Cymet has used breathing exercises, cognitive behavioral therapy and even yoga or Pilates for the hundreds of hiccupers he has seen over the years. Overall, he estimates a 20 to 25 percent success rate.

But he says most people don’t need to worry unless the hiccups interfere with respiration or eating.

“Everybody gets them, but we don’t know why — we don’t know if [in terms of evolution] it’s adaptive or maladaptive,” Cymet said. “We’re still in the dark ages of understanding hiccups.”

[In evolution, an adaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more helpful than harmful, in contrast with a maladaptation, which is more harmful than helpful.]

[This article caught my eye because, when I was a schoolboy—I remember it mostly in middle school—I had a . . . well, a hiccup problem.  I didn’t get them as frequently as Coleen O’Lear, but when I got the hiccups in class, it was disturbing to the teacher and my classmates, and embarrassing to me.  Once they started, they wouldn’t stop, and I’d sit there hiccupping while doing my work. 

[The teacher would sneak up on me from behind and smack my desk with a ruler to try to scare the hiccups out of me.  It never worked.  I tried holding my breath and at home, Mom would get me to drink water slowly or upside down, but none of that worked.

[To make matters worse, if I got the hiccups once, I’d invariably get them again, sometimes twice more sometime during the day.  It was a given.

[One day, I had a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon and while I was in the doctor’s office, I started hiccupping.  When the usual folk remedies failed, as usual, the doc said he had something that would help.  He gave me a large, white pill that I was to chew up and swallow—it was slightly chalky but didn’t taste too bad—and I did as he instructed.  Seconds later, the hiccups stopped and stayed “off” the rest of the appointment—and never returned that day.

[Whenever I was in his office and the hiccups started, he gave me one of the pills, and they’d stop.  I never asked him what the pills were, and to this day, I don’t know.  I suspect now that it was a placebo and that the relief came from the placebo effect because he was the doctor and he told me the pill would help—so I believed him and it worked.

[Years later, I discovered that the pills looked and tasted almost exactly like antacid tablets.  I imagine that’s what they were—and maybe there was some actual medical application to the relief from the hiccups from a dose of antacid.

[For whatever reason, the hiccup attacks stopped a few years later.  I didn’t get them in high school or college, and certainly not in the army.  I still get hiccups occasionally, like anybody else, but not often, and they go away on their own.  And they don’t come back again a few hours later like they did when I was a ’tween.

[But what I’d like to hear is why some people spell it hiccough?  Never mind why we do it—someone explain that to me!

[Meeri Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.  She has a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and has contributed to the Washington Post since 2013.] 

*  *  *  *

“MATTER: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WRITING”

by Carl Zimmer 

[This article was originally published in the “Science Times” section of the New York Times on 24 June 2014.]

A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.

That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used f.M.R.I. [functional magnetic resonance imaging] scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down—or, in this case, lay down—to turn out a piece of fiction.

The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.

The research is drawing strong reactions. Some experts praise it as an important advance in understanding writing and creativity, while others criticize the research as too crude to reveal anything meaningful about the mysteries of literature or inspiration.

Dr. Lotze has long been intrigued by artistic expression. In previous studies, he has observed the brains of piano players and opera singers, using f.M.R.I. scanners to pinpoint regions that become unusually active in the brain.

Needless to say, that can be challenging when a subject is singing an aria. Scanners are a lot like 19th-century cameras: They can take very sharp pictures, if their subject remains still. To get accurate data, Dr. Lotze has developed software that can take into account fluctuations caused by breathing or head movements. For creative writing, he faced a similar challenge. In previous studies, scientists had observed people doing only small tasks like thinking up a plot in their heads.

Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room.

So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.

To begin, Dr. Lotze asked 28 volunteers to simply copy some text, giving him a baseline reading of their brain activity during writing.

Next, he showed his volunteers a few lines from a short story and asked them to continue it in their own words. The volunteers could brainstorm for a minute, and then write creatively for a little over two minutes.

Some regions of the brain became active only during the creative process, but not while copying, the researchers found. During the brainstorming sessions, some vision-processing regions of volunteers became active. It’s possible that they were, in effect, seeing the scenes they wanted to write.

Other regions became active when the volunteers started jotting down their stories. Dr. Lotze suspects that one of them, the hippocampus, was retrieving factual information that the volunteers could use.

One region near the front of the brain, known to be crucial for holding several pieces of information in mind at once, became active as well. Juggling several characters and plot lines may put special demands on it.

But Dr. Lotze also recognized a big limit of the study: His subjects had no previous experience in creative writing. Would the brains of full-time writers respond differently?

To find out, he and his colleagues went to another German university, the University of Hildesheim, which runs a highly competitive creative writing program. The scientists recruited 20 writers there (their average age was 25). Dr. Lotze and his colleagues had them take the same tests and then compared their performance with the novices’.

As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech.

“I think both groups are using different strategies,” Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice.

When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet.

The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.

When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.

“I was really happy to see this,” said Ronald T. Kellogg, a psychologist who studies writing at Saint Louis University. “You don’t want to see this as an analog to what James Joyce was doing in Dublin. But to see that they were able to get clean results with this, I think that’s a major step right there.”

But Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, was skeptical that the experiments could provide a clear picture of creativity. “It’s a messy comparison,” he said.

Dr. Pinker pointed out that the activity that Dr. Lotze saw during creative writing could be common to writing in general—or perhaps to any kind of thinking that requires more focus than copying. A better comparison would have been between writing a fictional story and writing an essay about some factual information.

Even the best-designed scanning experiments might miss signs of creativity, Dr. Pinker warned. The very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next, and so it can be hard to see what different writers have in common. Dr. Pinker speculated that Marcel Proust might have activated the taste-perceiving regions of his brain when he recalled the flavor of a cookie. But another writer might rely more on sounds to evoke a time and place.

“Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study,” he said.

[One paragraph here really struck me.  Dr. Martin Lotze remarked after one examination of the brain activity, specifically in the caudate nucleus, of the two groups of writers:

When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.

[When I was working on my acting MFA, I had the good fortune to have as my acting teacher an actress, Carol Rosenfeld, with whom I’d already been studying for a couple of years before I followed her to Rutgers for the MFA program.  She knew me and my work very well by this time. 

[Carol, of course, came to see all of her students’ performances in the many university productions---and we grad students were is great demand, so we acted a lot over those two years.  (I had an additional attribute that made me a utility player at Rutgers: I was older than most of my classmates, so when an “old” man was needed, I was at the top of every director’s mind.)

[Carol was always careful not to instruct us or coach us or direct us while we were in production, but she would give us a critique after the show closed if we wished.  After one role, I went to her and explained a new feeling I had while working on that part—something I thought was a small break-through.  Something that used to cause me great angst wasn’t bothering me anymore.

[What Carol explained to me was this: I’d reached a point in my artistic development where I no longer needed to make conscious decisions regarding my “technique”—the external decisions and adjustments I made to particularize a role.  My personal working method now included technique as an integral aspect.  I’d become more relaxed and comfortable with my work, making choices, whether physical or emotional, organically and naturally.

[What used to be affectation was now habitual behavior.  There’s no doubt that this new-found ease had come directly from a conscientious study of acting technique and several years of conscious practice in performance; but it was now part of me and operated automatically as I prepared a role.

[I think that, in acting terms, is what Lotze was talking about with the writers he was examining.  When I read that section of Zimmer’s article, I said, “Hey, that’s me.  That’s what happened to me in The Wood Demon and what Carol told me was the result of my work.”  Good ol’ caudate nucleus!

[Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.  The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as the New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic.  He’s a fellow at Yale University’s Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University.  Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio’s Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.]