Gertrude Simmons is one of the most outspoken voices raised on behalf of Native Americans during the early twentieth century. As a writer, she produced a number of essays and short stories. Her enduring legacy, however, is that of a reformer and activist devoted to improving the lives of Native Americans.
Background
Ethnicity:
Mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Sioux name was Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind), was a full-blood Dakota Sioux, her father was a European-American man named Felker.
Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Gertrude's parents were Ellen Tate Iyohinwin, and a white man, named Felker. Felker deserted his Indian family. His wife remarried John Haysting Simmons, who gave his name to the girl.
Education
Until Gertrude was 12, she went to a Quaker missionary school for Indians. Though her mother was reluctant to let her go to the boarding school she herself had attended when young, she wanted to ensure her daughter's ability to fend for herself later in life among an increasing number of palefaces.
As with many uprooted children, Zitkala-Sa returned after three years to a heightened tension with her mother and ambivalence regarding her heritage. The assimilationist schooling left her "neither a wild Indian, nor a tame one," as she later described herself in "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (1900). After four unhappy years, she returned to her school, graduated. In 1895 she was awarded her first diploma and gave a speech on women's inequality, a subject often lectured on by the Quakers at White's, that received high praise from the local paper.
The decision to enter a college was an unusual one, as higher education for women was yet a very new phenomenon at the time. Though initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her predominantly white peers, she soon proved her oratorical talents once more with a speech entitled "Side by Side" in 1896. During this time she began gathering Native American legends, translating them first to Latin and then to English for children to read. In 1897, however, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health. She later taught at Carlisle Indian School. Having become an accomplished violinist, she also studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music. a student at the Boston Conservatory she went to Paris in 1900 with Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) as violin soloist for the Paris Exposition.
Career
After her studies at the Boston Conservatory, Bonnin accepted a teaching position at the Carlisle Indian School. Bonnin's stay at Carlisle Indian School lasted two years.
Returning to South Dakota around 1902, she met and married a fellow Yankton Sioux, Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, who worked for the Indian Service. They soon moved to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where Gertrude Simmons Bonnin worked as a clerk and a teacher. During this same period, she also became involved with the Society of American Indians, a Native American reform organization founded in 1911 at Ohio State University. The Society focused its efforts on government reforms, on activities such as increasing Native American employment in the Indian Service (the federal agency charged with managing Indian affairs), codifying laws pertaining to Native Americans, achieving Native American citizenship, opening the courts to all just claims regarding land settlements between Native Americans and the government, and preserving Native American history.
In 1916, Bonnin was elected secretary of the Society of American Indians, and not long after, she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C. From her new base in the nation's capital, which she would call home for the rest of her life, she continued to serve as secretary of the Society (until 1919) and editor of its major publication, American Indian Magazine. She also joined forces with a number of other organizations spearheading Native American rights and reform, including the American Indian Defense Association and the Indian Rights Association. In addition, she began lecturing extensively from coast to coast, speaking to women's clubs and other groups on Indian affairs and lobbying for Indian citizenship. Her work on behalf of the latter met with success in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Bill.
Both Bonnin and her husband devoted a great deal of their time to meeting with officials of the federal government on behalf of individual Native Americans and tribes. They also testified before various congressional committees on a wide variety of issues. Many of their findings were the result of their own investigations and travels throughout the country visiting reservations and noting the need for improvements in areas such as health care, education, conservation of natural resources, and preserving Native American cultural traditions.
In 1926, following the disbanding of the Society of American Indians, the Bonnins formed the National Council of American Indians (NCAI). Like the Society, the NCAI was made up exclusively of Native Americans; Gertrude Bonnin served as its president. Its focus was also on reform, and to that end, Bonnin directed her energies toward lobbying for Native American legislation in Congress and calling attention to the deficiencies of the Indian Service.
The spirit that motivated these efforts finally prompted some government officials to take a closer look at the Indian Service. In 1928, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work commissioned a group of scholars to study living conditions among Native Americans, focusing in particular on economic activity, education, health, and the federal government's administrative policies and practices. Under the direction of Dr. Lewis Meriam, the Institute for Government Research conducted an exhaustive survey and published the results in a landmark report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration, more commonly known as the Meriam Report. Its description of the "deplorable" state of life on the reservations-the high death rate among all age groups, the failure of the educational system, the widespread poverty and malnutrition-focused national attention on the plight of Native Americans and increased pressure on the government to take immediate action.
In mid-December of 1928, Bonnin voiced her thoughts on the findings of the Meriam Report at a meeting of the Indian Rights Association in Atlantic City, New Jersey. According to the text of the speech, as furnished by the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, which houses the Gertrude Simmons Bonnin Collection, Bonnin declared: "As an Indian, speaking earnestly for the very life of my race, I must say that this report by the Institute for Government Research, The Problem of Indian Administration, is all too true, although I do not always concur in their conclusions, which tend to minimize the responsibility of the Bureau [of Indian Affairs]." Bonnin described the conditions on most reservations as below poverty level, with food being scarce and very few educational and employment opportunities. In the speech, Bonnin detailed provisions available in reservation schools: "The subcommittee of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is holding hearings right now, and sworn testimony reveals horrible conditions-rotten meat, full of maggots, and spoiled flour which mice and cats had defiled, are fed to children in government schools. Sworn statements amply show that the report of the Institute for Government Research could all be transformed into the superlative degree and not begin to tell the whole story of Indian exploitation."
Bonnin also commented on the quality of education available to young Native Americans in her address: "The Indian race is starving-not only physically, but mentally and morally. It is a dire tragedy. The government Indian schools are not on a par with the American schools of today. The so-called 'Indian Graduates from Government Schools' cannot show any credentials that would be accepted by any business house. They are unable to pass the Civil Service examinations. The proviso in Indian treaties that educated Indians, wherever qualified, be given preference in Indian Service employment is rendered meaningless. Indians are kept ignorant and 'incompetent' to cope with the world's trained workers, because they are not sufficiently educated in the government schools."
While it did not bring about major improvements, the Meriam Report did exert some influence on government policies regarding Native Americans during the administrations of Herbert Hoover (1928-33) and his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45). Hoover, for example, appointed two leading members of the Indian Rights Association as commissioner and assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As part of his Depression-era reforms, Roosevelt pushed for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and its promised "Indian New Deal," which granted Indians more self-government and the right to keep observing their own cultural ceremonies and other events.
As for Bonnin, she remained active in the reform movement throughout the 1930s. She continued lobbying Congress, particularly on behalf of the Sioux and the Utes, and frequently lectured across the United States, often appearing in native dress to dramatize her message. While she devoted less time to her writing, she renewed her interest in music and even composed an Indian opera entitled Sun Dance.
Religion
Zitkala-Sa's insistence on the dignity of Indian religion and exposure of Christian hypocrisy manifests itself in her activist life, as well. While she and her husband denounced the Peyote religion due to their first-hand observation of peyote's destructive-often deadly-effects, they asserted the superiority of Indian spirituality over the disregard for nature, disrespect of other cultures, and depredation of people which accompanied alleged Christian practices such as stripping children from their language, culture, religion, family, and environment.
Politics
Zitkala-Ša was highly politically active throughout most of her adult life. During her time on the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah she joined the Society of American Indians, a progressive group formed in 1911 and dedicated to preserving the Native American way of life while lobbying for their right to full American citizenship. Zitkala-Ša served as the SAI's secretary beginning in 1916 and edited its journal American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919.
Part of her duty as the secretary for the SAI was to correspond with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Increasingly, however, Zitkala-Ša began to criticize the corrupt practices of the BIA, such as their prohibition of the use of native languages and practices within the school systems set up for Native American children and reported incidences of abuse resulting from children's refusal to pray in the Christian manner. Her sharp criticism of the BIA resulted in the dismissal of her husband from it in 1916, following which the couple relocated with their son to Washington D.C.
From Washington Zitkala-Ša began lecturing nation-wide on behalf of the SAI to promote the cultural and tribal identity of Native Americans. During the 1920s she devoted a great amount of effort to promoting a pan-Indian movement that would unite all of America's tribes in the cause of lobbying for citizenship rights and in 1924 saw the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act which granted citizenship rights to many though not all indigenous peoples. In 1926 she and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians, dedicated to the cause of uniting the tribes throughout the U.S. in the cause of gaining full citizenship rights through suffrage. From 1926 until her death in 1938 Zitkala-Ša would serve as president, major fundraiser, and speaker for the NCAI, running the organization almost single-handedly, though her efforts were largely disregarded when the organization was revived in 1944 under male leadership.
Zitkala-Ša was also active in the 1920s in the movement for women's rights, joining the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1921, a grassroots organization dedicated to diversity in its membership and to maintaining a public voice for women's concerns. Through the GFWC she created the Indian Welfare Committee in 1924, launching a government investigation into the exploitation of Native Americans in Oklahoma and the attempts being made to defraud them of drilling rights to their oil-rich lands. This investigation led to the publication of an article that Zitkala-Ša co-authored, entitled "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribe-Legalized Robbery". The article exposed several corporations that had robbed and even murdered Native Americans in Oklahoma to gain access to their lands and was pivotal in moving the government in 1934 to adopt the Indian Reorganization Act, which returned the management of their lands to Native Americans.
In her work for the NCAI in 1924 Zitkala-Ša ran a voter-registration drive among Native Americans in order to raise their support for the Curtis Bill, which was subsequently passed by Congress. Though the bill granted Native Americans citizenship it did not grant them the right to vote and Zitkala-Ša continued to work for civil rights and better access to health care and education for Native Americans up until her death in 1938.