Zitkála-Šá — "The School Days of an Indian Girl" with Jessi Haley and Erin Marie Lynch

At the age of eight, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (later known by her pen name Zitkála-Šá) left her Yankton Dakota reservation to attend a missionary boarding school for Native Americans, a harsh and abusive experience about which she eventually wrote a series of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly. Jessi Haley, editorial director of Cita Press (which just published a free anthology of the author’s work) joins Yankton Dakota poet Erin Marie Lynch to discuss how Zitkála-Šá’s sense of cultural displacement impacted her life and literary output.

Mentioned in this episode:

Free edition of Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings of Zitkála-Šá by Cita Press

Cita Press’s Substack newsletter on Zitkála-Šá

Removal Acts by Erin Marie Lynch

Zitkála-Šá

Ella Cara Deloria

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Yankton Dakota people

Sugarcane 2024 documentary

Air/Light magazine

Joe Biden’s October 2024 federal apology to Indigenous Americans

Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Richard Henry Pratt

Earlham College

The Sun Dance Opera

PBS’s “Unladylike” documentary episode on Zitkála-Šá

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 

“Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery” by Zitkála-Šá

P. Jane Hafen’s full PBS interview on  Zitkála-Šá

Oral History Proj

Transcript

Episode 221: Zitkála-Šá with Jessi Haley and Erin Marie Lynch

AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host, Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone! Listeners, you can read the work of today’s “lost lady,” as soon as you finish listening to this episode. That’s thanks to our friends over at Cita Press who publish — (for free!) — the public-domain works of forgotten women writers. 

AMY: We repeat: They’re free. Just open up your laptop and start reading. It can actually be a little bit of a problem, Kim, because as I was working on this episode, I got totally side-tracked reading the Cita Press edition of Tender Buttons. (No, today’s “lost lady” isn’t Gertrude Stein.)

KIM: (It’s so easy to get distracted when there are so many “lost ladies,” Amy.) That said, today we are discussing another Gertrude who lived and wrote in the same era as Gertrude Stein. But the writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin couldn’t be more different.

AMY: Better known by her pen name Zitkála-Šá (which in the Lakota language means Red Bird) she was born on Yankton Dakota Indian Reservation in 1876. Her autobiographical writing helped English-speaking readers understand how Native Americans struggled to maintain their lands, culture and dignity even as she herself felt culturally unmoored straddling two disparate worlds.

KIM: Her story is fascinating and we can’t wait to share it with two special guests, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: So we mentioned Cita Press in our introduction, and our first guest today, Jessi Haley, is editorial director there. She previously managed the creative writing program at the University of Chicago and has served on the editorial staff of Chicago Review and Colloquium Magazine. Jessi helped curate Cita Press’s new collection, Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings of Zitkála-Šá. Hi, Jessi, it’s great to officially meet!

JESSI HALEY: [responds]

AMY: Also joining us today is artist Erin Marie Lynch, whose work includes the 2023 poetry collection Removal Acts, which reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. The title takes its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands. Like Zitkála-Šá, Erin is a member of the Ihanktonwan (or Yankton) Dakota and is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell and Indigenous Nations Poets. She’s also a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California where she serves as associate editor at Air/Light Magazine. She wrote the forward to Cita Press’s new collection of Zitkála-Šá’s writings. Erin, welcome, and thank you for joining us!

ERIN MARIE LYNCH: Yeah, thank you both so much. I'm really excited for the conversation. 

KIM: We are, too. Erin, as we mentioned, you are from the same tribe as Zitkála-Šá…. Tell us about how you first learned about her?

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely.  I first found her writings when I was trying to sort of piece together some literary genealogy, or sort of cohort of literary ancestors, for myself from my tribe. Obviously, much of our storytelling and cultural memory is not preserved in literary works, right, or in writing, but because I'm a writer, I wanted to sort of see the other figures from my tribe who had come before me. And so she was one of those. (Also, the author Ella Cara Deloria, who's a really well-known writer from my tribe.) And that's where I first encountered her work. 

AMY: In late October, President Joe Biden delivered a formal apology for the federal government’s role (starting in the mid-19th century) in separating Indigenous children from their families and placing them in boarding schools — harsh and often abusive institutions whose aim was forced assimilation at any cost. I mention it because this awful facet of American history is central to Zitkála-Šá’s story. Can you give us a little more background?

ERIN:  Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say first off, you know, kind of about that apology…   not to speak for a monolith of Native people, but a lot of Native people were pretty, you know, hurt or sort of like, “Whatever,” about this apology that doesn't really come with any material action, reparation, or, land back, or even, you know, specific efforts to deal with, the trauma that boarding schools still have within Native families. So, you know, “whatever” about the apologies from the U. S. government. 

KIM: It’s easy to just say something, but yeah, to do something is different. 

ERIN: Mm hmm. You know, it's great that there is at least some acknowledgement on a national scale. Part of that sort of, I think, is coming from pressure to follow in the lead of the Canadian government, you know, which has its own sorts of issues with Indigenous people. That's the first thing I'll say. But yeah, in terms of this assimilation project, what the United States wanted was to have our land, right? So first it was like, “Okay, if we kill every native person, then we can take their land.” And then that sort of shifted, in the late 19th century, to this more assimilationist project of just, “Okay, if Indians become white people, then, you know, we don't have to worry about what it is that we're taking from them.” And so there were a number of different assimilationist projects, but yeah, the boarding schools still have the greatest trace or afterlife today, with Carlisle Indian Industrial School kind of being  the model of that within the kind of the cultural consciousness today. Richard Pratt, who sort of helmed this school, had worked with Native people, and he ended up having a very complicated relationship with Zitkála-Šá  over time as well, where they're working to train Native youth within Western educational traditions, but also to be laborers, right? So, for example, in my family, those who went to the boarding school were all trained to be mechanics. So ultimately, a form of cultural loss, separation from culture, separation from family and, you know, intergenerational community, which is so important  to our cultures. And then using that, you know, to ultimately [fulfill] that motto of “kill the Indian, save the man.” So for Zitkála-Šá, even for her to write about what was going on in the boarding schools on sort of like a national scale (not just talking about it within Native communities, but laying bare what was going on there for this broader audience as well) was actually a very important and kind of radical act.

AMY: Yeah, because the rest of the country would have seen this as maybe like, “Oh, this is so altruistic. Look at us helping these Native Americans.” And so she's exposing what's really going on there. And they have to see it.

ERIN: And it's so tied, you know, I didn't say, but it's also like so tied to religion, of course, this Christianization, which is not only a loss of our, spirituality, but, a spirituality that's connected also to like cultural retention and to cultural knowledge, um, and to preserving those things. 

KIM: Okay, let’s back up to talk about Zitkála-Šá’s early years. Jessi, what do we know?  

JESSI: So she was born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation. Her father was actually a French fur trader, but she never knew him. They had no relationship. So she was raised by her mother, Ellen Simmons, and Ellen Simmons’s life, you know, she lived through periods of huge change and displacement, and lots of loss. But she was, you know, this strong matriarch, and as Zitkála-Šá writes about sort of growing up raised by women and like this community of multi generations.  And so she had sort of what she describes as this idyllic childhood on the reservation, with also the shadow of what people had gone through already and what they were continuing to go through.

But you know, she describes it in this way, where like the sense of custom and kinship and identity is really kind of ever present in her early years. I can read a little bit from one of the vignettes from her story about her. early childhood (there's so many great ones) where she kind of mixes together things she was learning about her culture, but one of my favorites is called “The Coffee Pot,” and to set it up, an elder, a warrior, comes by to see her mother and she's not there, so she tries to sort of copy the host duties that she'd seen her mother perform, but she doesn't really know what she's doing; she's very little. So she tries to make him coffee and set up a snack like she's seen her mother do, and he's sort of politely humoring her, drinking this, like, gross sludge she made with coffee grounds over no fire, and then I’ll start to read where her mother comes in.

Before the old warrior had finished eating, my mother entered. Immediately, she wondered where I had found coffee, for she knew I had never made any, and that she had left the coffee pot empty. Answering the question in my mother's eyes, the warrior remarked, “My granddaughter made coffee on a heap of dead ashes and served me the moment I came.” They both laughed and mother said, “Wait a little longer and I shall build a fire.” She meant to make some real coffee, but neither she nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect. 

KIM: I love that.

AMY: Yeah, it's like you can see these lessons she's learning in  this first triptych, I guess (the first of three articles that she's going to write) she's learning in such a gentle way than what we are going to see happening at the school, right? It's such a nice contrast to be able to see how things start for her. And then you're like, “Oh, whoa,” because this early part, it's really a sweet childhood, right? 

JESSI: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think she's really kind of artfully setting up that contrast in a way that's very organic. I think it belongs to the genre of, you know, the great works of literature like Jane Eyre and others where there are these young girls kind of figuring out the world and what's kind and what's not about it. But in this first one, she's really setting it up like there's this community of people. She's being taught values that are very entrenched in being part of a community, but also she's treated with respect. Um, she emphasizes that corporal punishment is not part of the custom at all, and like, just all this stuff that really contrasts with what she experiences later,

ERIN: Yeah, definitely.  One of the things that really strikes me the most about her writing that's more kind of story based versus polemic, is that she really has a very, very particular eye, which we see in her attention to the natural world around her, but also to these particularities of social interaction and relation and emotional interaction, just picking up on this like very simple kind of gentle thing that happened, in this particular vignette where it's really like a sort of a throwaway moment, but  takes on this really important place in her writing. And I think that that's one thing that she's really good at doing is, alongside some of the more kind of dramatic, traumatic, serious moments that take their place in the writing, this is equally as important as those moments for her. Um, and the emotional kind of registers that we see here. I talked a little bit earlier about some of kind of the oral traditions of our tribe and our tribal culture and I'm thinking about, a storytelling practice as something that's very kind of, codified and passed down in particular, you know, she's not writing as that,  but seeing, the sort of the vividness and the pacing so many of the techniques that she uses in her writing coming from that.

But then this other piece of it too, where, you know, she talked a lot about how going to the boarding schools and going to these Christian schools is what taught her also how to write and how to wield English in this way. So there's sort of those dual pieces of the two cultures that she felt caught between, but she's able to use language and use English in this very particular way, very, very finely wrought, um, sort of coming out of these two pieces of her identity. 

KIM: Right. And “Impression of an Indian Childhood” ends with a section called “Big Red Apples.” This is a turning point moment for Zitkála-Šá, and it’s quite a poignant moment. Jessi, can you explain for our listeners?

JESSI: Yes. So, she talks about these missionaries coming to the reservation and they're kind of tantalizing the children with these ideas of like a land of unlimited apples. You can just go pick apples off the tree and like you can ride an “iron horse” (a train) and you know, all the things like when you're a kid and you want braces because it seems exciting and then you get like I mean … that's a that's a trite comparison, but she's just so good at capturing that youthful curiosity, um, that I think it's like instantly relatable. But yeah, so she's really excited and then she hears this conversation with her mother and, again, her mother kind of sees the future and doesn't like it, but also doesn't see a way around it, so she talks about, well, maybe getting an education is “tardy justice” for what has been done. That's a phrase she uses. So she ultimately decides to let her go, and this is framed with this real foreboding, and Zitkála-Šá calls it, “the first turning away from the easy natural flow of my life.” 

KIM: Yeah. She's really caught between the two worlds, and she's obviously smart and adventurous and wants opportunity on one level, but you could just see it coming like she has this beautiful, you know, nature-filled childhood. And now what's going to happen?

AMY: Yeah. And when you were talking, Erin, earlier about like the gentle storytelling that she's doing in that first part, it reminded me of almost like if this was a film like Jane Campion or somebody, honing in on the bumblebee in a field of heather… it would be that shot, right? Like the quiet, the dripping of dew off a leaf… that's almost how the vignettes feel to me are like quiet little moments of beauty. And then here we move into the second installment for The Atlantic Monthly called “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” So she's heading off to the school and she's on the iron horse. She's on the locomotive and we instantly see her imagined fantasies about what life in the East is going to be like. That all comes crashing down  in a harsh and scary reality. Because everything's bewildering to her, from the strangers on the train who are staring at her to arriving at the school and seeing a staircase for the first time ever, which she describes as “an incline of wooden boxes,” which I guess I never really even thought of somebody seeing a stairway for the first time and what that would be like. It would be odd, you know? She doesn't speak English. She cries herself to sleep on that first night in this starkly institutional setting. And then what happens the next day is, to me, one of the most memorable parts of this second story. Erin, why don't you read for us what happens to her? 

ERIN: [reads from “The Cutting of My Long Hair”]

KIM: Oh my gosh. So painful, yeah.

ERIN: Mm-hmm, especially that last paragraph, she, you know, uses this. very violent language with the scissors gnawing off the braids, and also just thinking about the contrast between  the kinship that really guided her early life where, you know, she was treated with this dignity versus what's happening here, the opposite of that, and with that really dehumanizing language: the wooden puppet, like a little animal… All of a sudden  she's able to see herself the way that these people are seeing her, which is not as a person,  but  as sort of less than human. It's just really devastating. But also, you know, I love in this moment as well that she's still defiant and still sort of keeps her spirit, which I think is so important to how she was able to navigate this really dark time in her life and to who she became as well. 

AMY: There's a line that she even says later that, um, she was quote “actively testing the chains that bound her individuality like a mummy for burial” which is such a great image. You know, she's trying to not be stifled by all of this.

KIM: Yes. And you're cheering for her to keep her strong personality,  to continue standing up, basically. And she paints this really bleak picture of her time at the school, which we now, of course, understand to be, you know, very harmful and abusive. The lingering trauma is also apparent here, too.

AMY: There are still people alive who were in these schools, you know who are still Suffering trauma from what they went through. 

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely. 

AMY: I think I had sent you guys (I couldn't figure out how to watch it) but there's a new documentary out that I think hopefully  Disney+ is going to distribute it. Um, what's it called? Sugarcane?

JESSI: Yes. Yeah. I haven't been able to watch it yet either. It screened near me for like one day. 

AMY: Yeah, same. It just has theatrical screenings that were across the country. Maybe I'll reach out to them and find out if there's a distribution plan for how we can watch it, because I would love to.  

ERIN: I'll just say really quickly also about Sugarcane, which I've also been wanting to watch, is that it's also focused on the Canadian project and the Canadian residential program. Canada had an investigation, this great reckoning with this system, and things are very different (not necessarily better) in Canada, but there's sort of a different level of attention put on, um, the effects of the boarding school system, not only for the people that experienced it, but also for their descendants as well. And that reckoning hasn't really come to the US yet in the same way.  

AMY: So getting back to Zitkála-Šá’s biography, we learn in this second article that she ends up at college (Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana) and wins a big state oratorical contest despite overt racism against her… (someone strung up a racist banner directed at her.] Nevertheless, Zitkala-Za manages to get the better of the haters. She writes: 

There were two prizes given that night, and one of them was mine!

The evil spirit laughed within me when the white flag dropped out of sight, and the hands which hurled it hung limp in defeat.

Leaving the crowd as quickly as possible, I was soon in my room. The rest of the night I sat in an armchair and gazed into the crackling fire. I laughed no more in triumph when thus alone. The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.

Erin, her mother is a looming important figure throughout this autobiographical writing, right?

ERIN: Yes, definitely. Not only in this writing, but throughout her whole life, her mother is this sort of…  oh man, really fraught figure.  When she comes back  from the boarding school to see her mother's grief at having lost her daughter, you know, her mother goes out into the hills and cries alone because she realizes that her daughter is lost to her in this way. And we can sort of read onto that then as standing in for these former ways that she's not able to fully return to, especially once she converts to Catholicism and is sort of caught in this interesting place where she is, you know, pro-Indian in very overtly political ways, but also really wants like Catholic missionaries to come to the reservation.  Zitkála-Šá’s this very complex figure in that way. And I think her mother, who she's never able to really reconcile with, represents a lot of different things for her in the writing.

KIM: So in her third installment for The Atlantic Monthly, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” she recounts her experience after college working at another Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. And during her time there, she was actually sent by the superintendent to go back west  to recruit more pupils, just as she had once been recruited.

AMY: That was surprising to me that she would go on to work and teach in the school that was kind of so horrible. I know it was a different school, but…

JESSI: Yeah, I mean, as Erin has touched on, Carlisle is a symbol to us now (and it was then too) of this assimilationist project. I think it's important to (thinking of the oratorical contest and stuff) it's important to see what a “success story” quote-unquote she was for the assimilationist system you know. She was this really talented musician. She had this incredible facility with language. So she was kind of like a poster child in a lot of ways.  She toured with the Carlisle Indian School Band.  So she describes the pain and suffering of being a student in these schools, but she was also being, you know, groomed to represent them and what they claim to accomplish. And she was  representing them quite successfully up until the point where she, you know, rejects them.  And so this, uh, final story in the triptych, she's talking about how she sort of got there.  I'll read a little bit of that. But I also want to say  she published these stories  right when she was still entwined with the school. So it kind of adds to the story, the boldness of what she was doing. She had left already, and there's some (and y'all probably encounter this a lot in your work on “lost ladies,”) there's always like misinformation or misinterpreted stories about a lot of these figures because, their legacies have not been tended to as, you know, much as some of their contemporaries. And  I've seen accounts where people say she got fired from Carlisle for publishing these stories, but she had already left, but she was still entwined. Um, she was still touring with the band, and it was very bold and brave of her to publish this really powerful denouncement in the midst of still being kind of used and celebrated by these institutions. So she writes:  At this stage of my own evolution,  I was ready to curse men of small capacity for being the dwarfs their god had made them. In the process of my education, I had lost all consciousness of the nature world around me. Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small, white-walled prison which I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation.  Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me. I wished my heart's burdens would turn me to unfeeling stone, but alive in my tomb, I was destitute. For the white man's papers, I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers, I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother's simple view of life and my lack of any, I gave her up also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversensitive nature was scraped off to the very quick.  Now a cold, bare pole I seemed to be, planted in a strange earth. Still, I seemed to hope that a day would come when my mute, aching head, reared upward to the sky, would flash a zig zag lightning across the heavens. With this dream for a long pent consciousness, I walked again amid the crowds. 

AMY: Love that, and that “planted in a strange earth” is exactly where you landed on, for the title of this Cita Press edition, right?

JESSI: Yes, there was a lot to choose from in this and it is such a devastating image,  and I I don't know I think that really encapsulates her radical honesty and refusal to kind of  simplify what she's experienced But also her kind of drive to keep going, which she really, I mean, her whole life,  she always was relentless in fighting for Native rights as she saw them, she was not gonna let other people tell her how the world was, uh, from this point. 

KIM: So listeners, if you are intrigued by this (and we know you are) we should mention that Cita’s new collection also features five more pieces by Zitkála-Šá that are really wonderful short reads.

AMY: Oh yeah, shout-out for “Why I am a Pagan.” I thought that was such an amazing meditation on the moments of awe you can discover just being attuned to Nature. It comes really close to the way I kind of feel. And I think a lot of people feel,

JESSI: Yeah, and I'll just note that that essay was published in The Atlantic as “Why I am a Pagan.” And then it was collected later in her 1921 collection, American Indian Stories as “The Great Spirit,” and Erin mentioned earlier her conversion to Catholicism, so she sort of toned down some of the rejection of Christianity a little later in her life, when she republished it,  but we decided to put the first edition of the essay in, just because I think it pairs so intensely with the triptych and then, um, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” which is another story that caused a ton of waves at Carlisle and other places. Just her boldness of rejecting this institutional outlook.

ERIN: Yeah, yeah, one thousand percent. Like, coming from the Carlisle boarding school system and then publishing in a national publication “Why I am a Pagan” as the title is just so provocative. The essay itself is not particularly provocative. It's very, again, this sort of gentleness, um, particularly with how she's writing about the natural world, but the natural world, you know, is so integral to Dakota spirituality and Dakota ways of seeing the world that even, you know, a natural description has this kind of greater freight as well that her detractors would have been well aware of. So that, you know, what feels maybe to us like really beautiful and meaningful was also incredibly political. Yeah. 

AMY: When did she officially fully embrace Catholicism? Was it  like, oh, she learned it  at the boarding school and it slowly took hold? Or did she have a moment much later? Do either of you know?

ERIN: Ooh, that's a great question. It was later in her life, but I don't have the exact year.  

AMY: Because it's just interesting that she rejected school finally, and yet felt so strongly about the religion side of it. 

ERIN: Yeah, I think so much of her, from how I see her for me, is this person who, again, is extremely committed to rights for Native people, sovereignty for Native people, like, our ways. And the question then for her is, “Where do I do that work? Do I do that work within white institutions and collaboration with white institutions?

Do I work with  the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Do I go fully to just, you know, organizations that focus on, Native issues run by, native people?” Which again, I think, you know, seeing her as this person always moving between two worlds, trying to make sense of that in different ways throughout her life. But I think also this question for her of  how best to affect change, whether that be in collaboration and with these institutions or by rejecting them and working outside of them. And I think, again, that shifted for her over the course of her life.  It also reveals the complexities and difficulties of her position of just being like, “Okay, what do I do and how do I do this?” Because what she was up against was just so difficult. She was an activist for her entire life, and that's sort of how she fell in love with her husband, um, and, you know, she really influenced the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in the Twenties, which is interesting because, you know, a lot of Native people would say, “Why do we want to even vote in the United States elections? We should be focusing on sovereignty, strengthening our nations and intertribal work rather than, you know, collaborating even with the United States government.”  So a lot of her causes were really controversial within her communities, but she was always trying to do what she could in these different ways. And I think, you know, you can't fault her for the limits that she had as one particular person in a time when so much was being pulled and stripped away from Native people, that you can just see her trying really hard to make things better over the course of her life.  

AMY: Yeah, and I think the four of us actually, we're recording this in early December, but we were commiserating a few weeks ago after the election. And Jessi, I think you brought up that she's kind of a good role model in terms of looking at somebody that was always fighting an uphill battle and not always necessarily seeing  the fruits of her labor. You know what I mean? Like, even by the end of her life, she probably felt like, “Gosh, we still haven't made very much headway,” you know, but it didn't deter her from doing the work. 

ERIN: She says her “aim to render service to the Red Race remained unchanged.”  And then she said, “It is even a most strenuous effort to stand still and hold fast the small grounds that have been gained, but I do not regret the try I made.” 

JESSI: Yeah.  And I think as Erin was saying that she was so fluid in her strategies and attempts to make things work. I mean, she would go and dress up in native dress and speak at these like women's federations. And even after women did get the right to vote, in 1920 she spoke at a party and she said, please remember that, you know, the first women of America still can't vote. So she was pretty good at keeping people on task, but also using these different strategies with her physical presence and her relationships and her words to sort of  try and weave through these, um, you know, opaque and not always welcoming systems to try and accomplish what she could.

AMY: And we didn't have a lot of time in this episode to talk about her musical talent, but I just really quickly want to point out that she was a talented violinist who performed at the White House for President McKinley and his wife. She also co-wrote an opera called “The Sundance Opera,” the first American Indian opera.

So if you want to look into the music side of Gertrude Bonnin more, you can on your own. We just didn't get around to it. Uh, she died in 1938 at the age of 61, and she is buried  under the name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin next to her husband at Arlington Cemetery in Washington. (I think that's because he was a World War I veteran, which is why she's there.) Erin, what do we make of her legacy today? Is there a growing awareness about her? Do you think she's still, you know,  too forgotten?

ERIN:  I'm sure  every episode you do, the answer is like, “”Yes, of course! It's a damn shame!” Um, but yeah, for native artists, native writers, she's like an icon, right? It's more, I think, maybe broader literary circles where you're not going to see that as much, and probably never will, because the canons will never shift in that direction. I have heard in the last few years, like more non-native writers bring her work up, which I think is really cool, so I don't know if there is sort of some shifting awareness? And I think Cita’s collection, hopefully that shifts a little bit more as well, because it's free, it's available to everyone, it looks really beautiful, so hopefully that has some movement or some traction as well. She's always been famous to us, and then it's like, “Okay, people are catching on a little bit,” and that's cool, too.  

JESSI: I also want to note that she's on a quarter now. So there's a program called the American Women Quarters Program through the U. S. Mint, and so she's one of the 2024 quarters. So check your change — when you get quarters, you might see her! We celebrated the quarter in Salt Lake City in October, and a student from BYU who shares Dakota ancestry performed from the opera. Her great, great grandson read the same passage, “The Cutting of My Long Hair” that we talked about earlier. So she is starting to get a bit of non-academic, non-Native attention.

KIM: Did we talk about the exposé that she wrote that helped trigger the federal investigation that's chronicled in the movie Killers of the Flower Moon? Is there anything you know about that?

JESSI: Yeah, I mean, she has such  an insanely fascinating life and career across all these different fields, and one thing that I think doesn't get a lot of attention is this project she did where she was working for the General Federation of Women's clubs as like an Indian welfare agent, and she traveled around and documented in a federal report,with two other co-authors… It's got a great title. It's called “Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: an Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes. Legalized Robbery: A Report.

KIM: Whoa. 

AMY: There she is again with her provocative titles!

JESSI: Oh, yes, she's, I mean, she has a way with words in her personal writing and everything she's, um,  but she, uh, yeah, so she wrote about the atrocities and crimes happening that are the same ones that are chronicled in Killers of the Flower Moon and her formal report helped eventually slowly trigger federal investigation, like the federal investigation that's chronicled  in the book and in the movie. You can read the report at Digital Public Library of America. And there's also a good article in People's World about it. I also just want to quickly shout out P. Jane Hafen, who's a scholar who's been working on Zitkála-Šá for decades. Um, she's an emeritus professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and she has two collections of writing by Zitkála-Šá, one from about 28 years ago called Dreams and Thunder, and that contains the text of the opera in addition to some unpublished stories and other things and her own kind of commentary on it. And then recently, a couple of years ago, she published Help Indians Help Themselves: The Later Writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Zitkála-Šá. Um, and these are amazing collections, academic collections, so they're not as accessible as, you know, trade paperback, but they really capture a lot of the lesser-known stuff she did, including all of her speeches and congressional testimony and things like that. 

AMY: I also want to, um, say to our listeners that I'll link in our show notes, but I found a PBS documentary… I don't know if it's from American Experience or…

JESSI: The “Unladylike” series.

AMY: Okay, “Unladylike.” It's a really great focus on her and her work, and you can see all sorts of photographs of her and they read selections of her writing. It's really good. And it's actually not even I think it's only like 20 minutes or something. 

JESSI: Yeah, it's short and it's pretty comprehensive, and Jane is interviewed in it.

AMY: Oh, I was wondering if that might have been her. 

JESSI: Yeah. And you can watch her full unedited interview on the website for PBS which is like, just, I mean, she's just an incredible scholar and she's been fighting this uphill battle for a long time in terms of, getting Zitkála-Šá recognized, and telling the full story as much in Zitkála-Šá's own words as possible. 

AMY: Okay. Um, so Erin, I know that in your own poetry collection, Removal Acts, you reference Zitkála-Šá.  

ERIN: Yeah, so my book is sort of about…. the title Removal Acts comes from the Dakota Removal Act of 1863 and, you know, of course there was a number of these different removal acts in that era, another one of the government strategies of disenfranchisement. So for me, I was sort of looking at these broader cultural forms of removal and then tying those together with sort of intimate forms of removal that we encounter in our day to day life, and trying to think of “removal” as this process that kind of guides a lot of what happens in life. And a lot of this from this book for me was about lineages and thinking about tracing the histories of my own ancestors, the locating of ancestors, and she's one of these figures that I locate within the book as the sort of artistic ancestor, as well as I mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation.

AMY: Also, just to tie back what we were discussing in the introduction when I was looking at your poetry collection, I see a little nod also to Tender Buttons, and I was like, what? This is all coming weirdly together.

ERIN: Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's true. I forgot that was in there!

KIM: Thank you so much for talking with us more about your work, and thank you for joining us today for this really fantastic discussion. We love getting to talk with you and Jessi both. 

ERIN: Yes, thank you so much. It was my pleasure! It’s always so fun to talk about her work and to talk with Jessi, too. So thank you all.

JESSI: Yes. Thank you so much for having me and for highlighting the collection. It was great talking to you!

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Listeners, this marks our last full episode for the calendar year. We'll be back with new free episodes beginning in early February.

KIM: Until then, Amy will be serving up bonus episodes to our subscribers. So if you can't bear to take a break from us, consider becoming a patron to help support our production costs.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.