Zitkala-Ša: a citizen of the United States and of the Yankton Sioux Nation

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, known as Zitkala-Ša, died in Virginia in 1938. She and her husband, Raymond Bonnin, both of the Yankton Sioux (or Dakota) Nation, chose Arlington National Cemetery as their resting place. She was eligible as the spouse of a veteran, because Raymond had served in the U.S. Army in the Great War, and he later joined her. Her tombstone reads "Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 'Zitkala-Ša of the Sioux' 1876-1938," with a plains-style tepee carved on the reverse.

Historian Cathleen D. Cahill, an associate professor of history at Penn State University, reads that stone as a statement of what Zitkala-Ša spent much of her life explaining to non-Native Americans: she could be a citizen of the United States and a citizen of the Yankton Sioux Nation, and did not have to choose. Her suffrage work, Cahill argues, has to be understood that way.

Born into a fight over sovereignty

Zitkala-Ša was born in South Dakota in 1876, the year the Sioux defeated Custer, a fact she liked to remind people of. Cahill stresses that this was one battle among many the federal government fought to conquer Native nations after the Civil War, and that in 1876 the Sioux were also forced to cede the Black Hills. Treaties recognized some sovereignty and land rights, but in the following decades the government tried to dismantle them. Cahill lists the policies of her childhood: outlawing Native governments and making Native people legal wards of the federal government, dividing communally held land into private plots, sending Native children to white-run boarding schools and outlawing cultural and religious traditions. They left Native people in poverty and crisis, and without a political voice: their nations were unrecognized and they were not U.S. citizens.

She was raised by her mother and aunts after her father, a man of French descent, left the family. At eight she was sent to a Quaker-run boarding school in Indiana. She later wrote of the terror of Native children taken from their families to live among strangers. She went on to graduate from Earlham College, another Quaker institution. Cahill says her ideas about women's equality came from her mother and the Dakota women who raised her, and from the Quakers' belief in the spiritual equality of the sexes.

A modern woman in a "vanishing" people

As a college graduate Zitkala-Ša was a modern "New Woman" who also celebrated her Dakota heritage, two things many white Americans thought could not go together. Many believed Native communities were disappearing, and that assimilation could save individuals only if they dropped their traditions. Out of that belief in "the vanishing Indian," many white Americans, suffragists included, romanticized Native cultures. White suffragists praised the matriarchal traditions of Native societies, especially the Haudenosaunee, and held them up as examples of powerful women. Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Mott learned about them directly from Native women in upstate New York; Mott had been visiting the Haudenosaunee community at Cattaraugus just before the 1848 women's rights convention at Seneca Falls.

For Zitkala-Ša the problems of Native communities were devastating, not romantic. She studied violin in Boston, became known for short stories about Native experiences, and taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal boarding school in Pennsylvania, before moving to Utah with Raymond, superintendent of the Uintah and Ouray reservation agency. In the Indian Service she met white employees prejudiced against the people they served and saw how the bureaucracy separated Native people from their resources. She later described the system as a sham protection that left Native people with no voice in their own affairs or money.

The Society of American Indians

Others saw the same failure. In 1911 she joined the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization founded by and for Native people. Its highly educated members gathered to address wardship and the lack of citizenship, to counter stereotypes and to show that Native people were modern and could contribute to the nation's future. Several SAI women backed the vote, including Laura Cornelius Kellogg, a poet and citizen of the Wisconsin Oneida nation, and Marie Bottineau Baldwin, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and, the source says, one of the first Native women to graduate from law school in the United States.

Laura Cornelius Kellogg, 1925. Image from Wikimedia Commons, via the National Park Service's page.

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin. Image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service's page.

Zitkala-Ša's suffrage work became most visible after she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1917 to be the SAI's secretary. Her writing and her testimony to Congress on Indian appropriation bills had made her known to women's groups there. She spoke at the National Woman's Party headquarters in June 1918 and lived three blocks from Lafayette Park, so she would have seen the party's White House pickets that summer. Other women's groups also invited her, often wanting talks about traditional Indian life, and she deliberately wore a buckskin dress with Indigenous accessories, which she called her "drawing card," and used the talks to raise "the Indian woman of today." She told audiences that reservation superintendents held tyrannical power over a voiceless people, that government schools gave Native children a poor education, and that without citizenship Native people could not fix any of it. She pointed out that thousands of Native men, her husband among them, were fighting in the Great War while still legally wards, not citizens. Her answer was citizenship and the vote for Native women and men.

Not everyone agreed

Indian Country was and is diverse, Cahill notes, and not every Native person backed citizenship and suffrage. Leaders of Zuni Pueblo, among others, believed, and had been told by U.S. officials, that accepting citizenship and voting meant giving up their rights as sovereign nations, especially to land and resources. Many Haudenosaunee rejected U.S. citizenship and stressed that their nations predated the United States; in 1923 members of the Mohawk Nation traveled to Europe to ask the League of Nations to recognize them as sovereign, and failed. Many Native women worked within their communities instead.

Dual citizenship, and the 1920 amendment

Zitkala-Ša, Kellogg and Baldwin proposed something like dual citizenship: membership in a self-governing Native nation and citizenship of the United States. Each argued that economic self-support rested on communally held property and political self-determination on self-governance, and that the government should honor its treaties. Zitkala-Ša pointed to Dakota communities and called for tribal self-government that worked with the federal government, communal tribal property, especially cattle herds, and schools with competent teachers and a curriculum that included law, comparative government and treaties.

In August 1920 Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, but it did not cover many Native women: at least a third of Native adults were not citizens. A few months later Zitkala-Ša asked the National Woman's Party conference to support an Indian citizenship bill, hoping Native people would be enfranchised with the help of the women of America. The party stayed focused on sex equality and the Equal Rights Amendment. She found more help from the General Federation of Women's Clubs, with almost three million members, which at her urging created a Department of Indian Welfare that year and hired her as a speaker and investigator. For three years she traveled the country urging white women to use their new votes to enfranchise Native people, and she investigated guardianship cases in Oklahoma.

After 1924

In 1924 Congress passed the Snyder Act, or Indian Citizenship Act, giving full U.S. citizenship to all Native people born in the country, though the law kept government oversight of Native lands. Cahill credits advocacy by people like Zitkala-Ša and the SAI, along with gratitude for Native veterans and rising nativism. Zitkala-Ša hoped Native people would vote as a bloc and change federal policy, and in 1926 she and Raymond formed the National Council of American Indians. For three summers they visited Native communities, discussed legislation and registered voters. Many Native people began to vote and some Native men won office, including Senator Charles Curtis, a citizen of the Kaw Nation, who served as Herbert Hoover's vice president (1928-1932).

But in states with large Native populations, such as Arizona, Montana and New Mexico, many non-Natives used strategies that Cahill compares to Southern Jim Crow laws: literacy tests, at-large elections and poll taxes. Arizona and New Mexico argued that anyone living on land still held in trust, in wardship status, could not vote, using the tie between Native people and the federal government to suppress the vote. Zitkala-Ša was outraged and kept up her advocacy, especially for the self-governance of the Yankton Sioux, until her death in 1938.

Sources

• Cathleen D. Cahill, associate professor of history at Penn State University, "Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša): Advocate for the 'Indian Vote'," National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/gertrude-simmons-bonnin-zitkala-sa-advocate-for-the-indian-vote.htm), part of the series On Their Shoulders. The essay was first published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission on July 30, 2020, on its blog The Suff Buffs. The author's words are paraphrased; the source's footnotes and bibliography, a portrait from Wikimedia Commons and the commission's logo are left out. The Kellogg portrait is credited to Wikimedia Commons and the Baldwin portrait to the Library of Congress.
• National Park Service's page; rewritten in hubnx's own words.