Women's quarters -Zitkala-Ša

 Zitkala-Ša, also Zitkála-Šá (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird February 22, 1876 – January 26, 1938), was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist. She was also known by her Anglicized and married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. 

She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity, and the pull between the majority culture in which she was educated, and the Dakota culture into which she was born and raised. Her later books were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white English-speaking readership.

She was co-founder of the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which was established to lobby for Native people's right to United States citizenship and other civil rights they had long been denied. Zitkala-Ša served as the council's president until her death in 1938.

 Zitkala-Ša has been noted as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century. Working with American musician William F. Hanson, Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), the first American Indian opera. It was composed in romantic musical style, and based on Sioux and Ute cultural themes.

Source: Wikipedia

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From Britanica:

Zitkala-Sa (born February 22, 1876, Yankton Sioux Agency, South Dakota, U.S.—died January 26, 1938, Washington, D.C.) was a writer and reformer who strove to expand opportunities for Native Americans and to safeguard their cultures.

Gertrude Simmons was the daughter of a Yankton Sioux mother and a Euro-American father. She adopted the name Zitkala-Sa in her teens. When she was eight, she was sent to White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary school in Wabash, Indiana. At age 19, against her family’s wishes, she enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, also a Quaker school, and graduated in 1897. For two years she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but she was uncomfortable with the school’s harsh discipline and its curriculum, which was devised to teach Euro-American ways and history, thus eradicating students’ Native American cultural identities.

While at Carlisle, she published several short stories and autobiographical essays in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly under her name Zitkala-Sa. The pieces’ themes derived from her struggle to retain her cultural identity amid pressure to adapt to the dominant American culture. In 1901 she published Old Indian Legends, an anthology of retold Dakota stories.

She married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin (who was half Euro-American and half Sioux) in 1902, and they moved to a reservation in Utah. She became a correspondent for the Society of the American Indians, the first reform organization to be administered entirely by Native Americans.

In 1916 she became the secretary of the Society of the American Indian, and she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., where she served as a liaison between the society and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She also edited the society’s American Indian Magazine (1918–19). Under the name Gertrude Bonnin, she coauthored (with Charles H. Fabens and Matthew K. Sniffen) the book Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians, an Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery (1924), which exposed the mistreatment of Native Americans in Oklahoma.

Zitkala-sa At Nat'l Womens Party  - Photo by Bettmann