Gertrude Simmons Bonnin 'Red bird'

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception 

 

Our subject this week is Zitkala-Ša (1876–1938) which means 'Red bird' also known by the missionary-given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.

was the third child of Ellen Tate 'I yohiwin Simmons, a full-blood Yankton Sioux. Born in 1876 on a Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised in a tipi on the Missouri River until she was 12 when she went to a Quaker missionary school for Indians--White's Manual Institute--in Wabash, Indiana. 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.
Four years later, Zitkala-Sa re-entered school, graduated on to Earlham College to become a teacher, remaining socially reclusive even after congratulatory gestures by schoolmates when she won oratory contests. As 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. Increasingly, she devoted herself to her people's cause and to overcoming her own cultural alienation through her fiction, as expressed in her 1901 collection Old Indian Legends: "I have tried to transplant the native spirit of these tales--root and all--into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a new tongue." She realized the need to ground political rights in a recovered cultural identity by revitalizing oral traditions, evident in the publication of several stories for which CIIS art teacher and Winnabago, Angel DeCora, drew illustrations.
She died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, DC at the age of sixty-one. She is buried under the name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin in Arlington National Cemetery. Since her death the University of Nebraska has reissued many of her writings on Native American culture.
She has been recognized by the naming of a Venusian crater "Bonnin" in her honor. In 1997 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.