Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation

Zitkala-Ša, photograph by Joseph Turner Keiley, 1898. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic violence against Native Americans and repeated violations of Native treaties and basic human rights. Yet in 1900, as she began publishing autobiographical essays in some of the nation’s leading literary magazines, she described her childhood self as a free-spirited girl empowered by her single mother: “I was a wild little girl of seven. . . . I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride,—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits.”[1]

In the spring of the following year, however, Protestant missionaries arrived on her reservation persuading young children to travel nearly 800 miles east to an Indian boarding school in Indiana where they would receive an American education. What these Native children did not know is that such an education was actually an attempt to force them to abandon all aspects of their cultural identity and conform to the linguistic, religious, and social standards of so-called American civilization. As Bonnin remembers as she was leaving for boarding school: “When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me. I felt suddenly weak, as if I might fall limp to the ground. I was in the hands of strangers whom my mother did not fully trust. I no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings.”[2] Rather than experiencing an enhanced freedom through education, Bonnin—alongside tens of thousands of other Native American children throughout the United States—endured rigid, militarized methods of enforcing cultural compliance.

Despite witnessing and experiencing frequent abuse throughout her time in boarding school, Bonnin graduated and decided to continue her education at Earlham College, where she began to reclaim her voice and to use it publicly to advocate for her fellow Native Americans. The culminating event of her college experience was to participate in and ultimately win a statewide speech contest as Earlham’s sole student representative. As she stood and faced the crowd to accept her award, they shouted slurs and, as Bonnin writes, “Some college rowdies threw out a large white flag, with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it. Under this they had printed in bold black letters words that ridiculed the college which was represented by a ‘squaw.’”[3]

Her 1896 speech that garnered such simultaneous praise and prejudice was entitled “Side by Side.” She began by praising the industriousness and innovation that had come together to create the United States, what she describes as “a nation of free men and free institutions.”[4] Yet, just as she celebrated certain aspects of American accomplishment, she also reminded her audience that America was still in the making, needing to atone for its sins of cruelty and hypocrisy in order to finally realize the foundational American ideal that “all men are created equal.” “Let it be remembered,” she wrote, “before condemnation is passed upon the Red Man, that, while he burned and tortured frontiersmen, Puritan Boston burned witches and hanged Quakers, and the Southern aristocrat beat his slaves and set blood hounds on the track of him who dared aspire to freedom.”[5] This winning speech and the overall experience of publicly confronting anti-Native attitudes that permeated the turn of the twentieth century set the stage for Bonnin to later enter the public arena as an author, educator, activist, and nation-wide advocate for Native American communities.

In 1916, Bonnin moved to Washington, DC, to join the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization formed in 1911 as the first all-Native organization run specifically by and for Native Americans. She served as the SAI’s secretary and editor of their quarterly magazine. She also began going on lecture tours throughout the country to speak out against the ongoing injustices against Native Americans. Building upon her first statewide speech, Bonnin continued to advocate for the enfranchisement of Native Americans as equally capable US citizens. In June 1924, thanks largely to the persistent lobbying of Bonnin and her cohort of Native American authors, intellectuals, and activists, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting US citizenship to all Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

While citizenship brought increased legitimacy and inclusion for some, Bonnin and many of her contemporaries recognized that Congress had still severely limited the rights and opportunities of Native Americans. By 1926, after a decade of speaking out on behalf of Native communities and issues throughout the United States, Bonnin met in DC with representatives from twenty-one tribal nations to discuss the possibility of organizing a grassroots movement that might strengthen the presence and representation of Native Americans in Washington. Together, they formed the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) and unanimously elected Bonnin as president, a position she held throughout the remainder of her life. Unlike other contemporaneous Native American organizations that tended to represent the desires and perspectives of only professional and educated Native Americans, those who had already “made it” within American society, the NCAI aimed to bring together all Native American experiences and perspectives.

On April 24, 1926, Bonnin petitioned Congress on behalf of the NCAI, reminding legislators of the longstanding, constitutionally recognized rights of Native Americans. Standing before Congress as a survivor of the brutal boarding school system and attempted acculturation of tens of thousands of Native American children, Bonnin directly blamed Congress for enabling the ongoing theft of Native American lands, resources, and cultural identities. She also condemned Congress for barring Native Americans from seeking legal redress. In many ways, her petition as president of the NCAI was simply the next chapter of the argument she presented years before as a representative of Earlham College; the United States needs to be held accountable for its national sins and allow equal participation of all peoples in order to heal and continue to progress.

Bonnin went on to distribute more than 10,000 copies of her petition throughout the country. In fact, she often delivered the petition in person as she traveled from community to community, crisscrossing more than 15,000 miles within her first two years as NCAI president.[6] Rather than touring to continue speaking to so-called “friends of the Indians,” this time she traveled to learn from and consult directly with Native communities. With each visit, she discerned local issues that she then brought up in Washington to lobby on behalf of underrepresented tribes. She promoted education as a strategy of reclaiming the means of self-representation, not as an argument for assimilation. Despite having lived away from her Yankton community for much of her life, she remained fluent in her traditional language, continued to stay connected to her community elders, and developed relationships with Native American communities throughout the United States according to Sioux principles of kinship and self-governance. Just as she reclaimed her voice after having had it forcefully limited within the Indian boarding school system, Gertrude Bonnin spent her entire adult life creating a self-representative space for future generations of Native Americans to be able to claim their rightful place within the social, cultural, and political fabric of the United States.

Michael P. Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University. His publications include “Co-National Networks: Reconstituting Indigenous Solidarity through the Works of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin” ( Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2021).

 


[1] Zitkala-Ša, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 68.

[2] Zitkala-Ša, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, 86.

[3] Zitkala-Ša, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 102–103.

[4] Zitkala-Ša, “Side by Side,” American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 222.

[6] Zitkala-Ša, “Side by Side,” American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, 224.