The Places of Zitkála-Šá: Five Sites in Her Work for Native American Rights

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was a Yankton Sioux lecturer, educator and writer who also wrote and worked as Zitkála-Šá, "Red Bird". Her activism pressed for Native American citizenship, voting rights, self-determination and recognition of Native cultures.

She was secretary-treasurer of the Society of American Indians. In the 1920s she worked with the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), urged it to set up an Indian Welfare Committee, and spoke throughout the decade at national, regional and local meetings of the GFWC, the Penwomen's League and other groups. She co-wrote a report exposing how county governments and corporations exploited Indian tribes, and testified about it — and about peyote use in Native communities — before the congressional Committee on Indian Affairs. The report influenced the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. In 1926 she founded the National Council of American Indians to push for education, reform legislation and voting rights, and led it until her death in 1938.

Five places follow her work.

1. Hotel Utah, Salt Lake City

Now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

In June 1921 the GFWC held its Mid-Biennial Council meeting at the Hotel Utah. Stella Atwood, who chaired the Division of Indian Welfare for California's women's clubs, invited Zitkála-Šá to speak. She argued for Native American citizenship and urged the GFWC to create a national Indian Welfare Committee — for which she later worked as a research agent in Oklahoma. She also toured the country lecturing for the GFWC, calling for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be abolished.

2. Minneapolis City Hall–Hennepin County Courthouse

In October 1919 the Society of American Indians held its eighth annual convention in Minneapolis, with one session in this building, where the superintendent of the Minnesota Historical Society spoke in the Assembly Hall. Zitkála-Šá encouraged pride in Native heritage and traditions. Because Indigenous women play a central part in raising the next generation, she said, more of them should attend future conventions.

3. Lafayette Square Historic District, Washington, D.C.

In February 1921 Zitkála-Šá spoke at the "First Convention of Women Voters Since Suffrage Passed", hosted by the National Woman's Party at its third headquarters, the party's base from 1916 to 1921. The building's facade is now 722 Jackson Place. She welcomed the party's plan to remake itself to fight legal discrimination against women and to advance equal opportunity, and she pressed for reform legislation on Native American citizenship and voting rights.

4. Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania

Zitkála-Šá taught at Carlisle for two years. From 1879 to 1918 the school enrolled about 10,000 students from more than 141 Indian nations and forced them to assimilate to Anglo-American culture, stripping them of their names, languages, religions and dress. She resented this, saw her own lost identity in her students, and criticised the school in autobiographical essays and short stories. To quiet her, the superintendent sent her west to recruit students. She kept speaking out and was fired in 1901.

5. Osage County Courthouse, Oklahoma

In late 1923 Zitkála-Šá spent five weeks in Oklahoma as a research agent for the GFWC's Indian Welfare Committee, investigating land mismanagement and probate claims with people from other Indian advocacy groups. At the Osage County Courthouse she attended a hearing in which two county governments had conspired to evict an Indian woman from her estate.

In 1924 the investigators published Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians, showing how county governments and corporations cheated tribes out of the leasing fees their members earned from oil-rich land. The investigation helped bring about the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which returned some land to tribes as communal property and supported their self-government and management of their lands.

Sources

• National Park Service, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, "The Places of Zitkála-Šá," researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an NPS intern; part of the series Curiosity Kit: Zitkála-Šá. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-places-of-zitkala-sa.htm
• The article's sources: Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkála-Šá), "Address by Mrs. Gertrude Bonnin," The American Indian Magazine 7, no. 3 (Fall 1919); Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Cornell University Press, 2005); Zitkála-Šá, "America's First Indian Problem," American Indian Stories (1921); Library of Congress, "Historical Overview of the National Woman's Party"; General Federation Clubwoman, June 1921.
• Pictures: portrait, public domain (Wikimedia Commons); Hotel Utah, Johnson of Salt Lake, ca. 1911, and the National Woman's Party headquarters, Harris & Ewing, 1919, both Library of Congress; Carlisle postcard, public domain (Wikimedia Commons). The article's photos of the Minneapolis courthouse and the Osage County Courthouse are under Creative Commons licences and its map sits on a commercial basemap; all three are left out.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.