It would stand to reason, given the deep-rooted bias against her race and her sex, that a Sioux Indian girl born into late-Victorian, predominantly white America might have little to no chance for growth and fame. Nonetheless, against all odds, the woman who called herself Zitkala-Ša grew to become a teacher, a widely read author, a concert violinist and classical composer, co-founder and president of the National Council of American Indians, and a world-recognized advocate and lobbyist for the rights of both women and Native Americans.
The year of Zitkala-Ša’s birth, 1876, was significant, representing as it did the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the United States. It also marked the Native Americans’ last great victory over the nation’s military, when the troops of Lt. Col. and presidential hopeful George Armstrong Custer were soundly defeated by a combined force of Sioux, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors.
For the American Indians, it was the victory that heralded their imminent subjugation. Isolated instances aside, their resistance that had impeded Anglo-America’s expansive drive to the Pacific Ocean had been neutralized. It now became a time of forced assimilation, in which, under the mantle of “civilizing the savage,” tribal cultures were being systematically demolished. One way in which this was achieved was through the “reeducation” of Native American children in government-sponsored, Christian-run boarding schools.
This was the world that the child named Gertrude Simmons inherited. She was born on South Dakota’s Yankton Agency, to a Sioux mother and a white father. The Yanktonai had signed a treaty with the federal government in 1858, and although they had avoided the bloody resistance that had resulted in the subjection of other regional tribes, life on the reservation was harsh.
Gertrude’s father had earlier abandoned the family, leaving her traditional upbringing in the hands of her mother and the tribe. She learned beadwork at her mother’s knee and was weaned on the folktales and origin stories that would later appear in her books. “I was as free as the
