Zitkala-Ša

Zitkala-Ša (meaning "Red Bird" in Lakota), born Gertrude Simmons on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1876, was a Yankton Dakota writer, educator, musician, and political activist who became one of the most influential Native American voices of the early twentieth century.

Raised by her mother on the reservation until age eight, she was recruited by Quaker missionaries and educated at White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, and later at Earlham College. She went on to study violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. These experiences — the painful uprooting from her Dakota culture and the alienating world of white institutions — became the central subject of her most powerful autobiographical writings.

Her literary career began with a series of autobiographical essays published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900, followed by her collection Old Indian Legends (1901) and stories in Everybody's Magazine and Harper's Monthly. In 1921, she published American Indian Stories, gathering her autobiographical narratives, short fiction, and political essays into a single volume. Her writing combined personal narrative with sharp political critique of the federal Indian boarding school system and the erosion of Native sovereignty.

Beyond literature, Zitkala-Ša was a tireless political organizer. She co-wrote the opera The Sun Dance Opera (1913) with William F. Hanson, worked for the Society of American Indians, edited the American Indian Magazine, and co-founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, serving as its president until her death in 1938. She advocated for citizenship rights, land claims, and the preservation of Native culture at a time when federal policy aimed at assimilation and erasure.

In 2020, the United States Mint honored Zitkala-Ša on the Native American one-dollar coin, recognizing her lasting contributions to American Indian rights and culture.