Context

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, better known as Zitkala Sa, was born on February 22, 1876 and passed away on January 26, 1938. She was a Native American who grew up in South Dakota on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Her mother, Ellen Tate Iyohinwin was a Yankton Nakota, while her father was a white man, name Felker who eventually left his Indian family. After that, her mother remarried to John Hasting Simmons which whom Zitkala-Sa got the name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. Since she had been a mix of white and Native American ancestry, she felt like the two cultures needed to live together cooperatively within the same body of land. Zitkala Sa became an editor, musician, teacher and political activist, once she grew up, she was probably best known for her books. Zitkala Sa primarlily had 2 publishing spans, the first one from 1900 to 1904. During this time, Zitkala Sa wrote Indian legends and autobiographical narratives. The second span of publishing she had was from 1912 to 1916. During this period Zitkala Sa moved to Washington DC and began to publish political writngs. Also during this span Zitkala Sa wrote some of her most influential writings which includes //American Indian Stories.//

Zitkala Sa lived a pretty normal Native American life untill she reached the age of 8 when she was sent to attend Whites Manual Labor Institute, a school in Wabash, Indiana. Four years later, when she went back home, she went against the wishes of her mother and attended a Quaker missionary school at the age of 12, which had also been in Indiana. From 1895 to 1897, she went to Earlham College. During her college experience, Zitkala-Sa won first place after attending an oratorical contest. Soon she also won second place in a contest and she became a representative for her college in the Indiana State Oratorical Contest. In the contest, Zitkala-Sa placed 2nd statewide regardless of the racial slurs that were being said throughout the auditorium. After graduating from college, Bonin changed her name to Zitkala-Sa which means Red Bird in the Lakota dialect.

The book, "American Indian Stories" tells of Zitkala Sa's life growing up on the plantation and her life at the school in Wabash. When Zitkala Sa got to the school, she had regretted leaving her mother and learned that the East wasn't the great place it was made out to be. American Indian Stories is mainly about the hardships some Native Americans, including herself, suffered when they had been placed in boarding schools and taken from their reservation life. The boarding schools had been used to "civilize" the Indian children. The goals of the schools was to assimilate Indian children into the American culture. Eventually, Zitkala-Sa wanted to overcome the fact she had a cultural alienation, so she decided to write a fiction book in 1901 that was a collection called, "Old Indian Legends."

After Zitkala Sa was finished with school, she became a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and after her years of teaching, she moved to Boston to pursue a career as an author. In 1900, Zitkala-Sa went to Paris with the Charlisle Indian Industrial School where she became a violinist for the Paris Exposition. Also in the year of 1900, Zitkala-Sa started to publish articles that critcized the Carlisle Indian School because an army officer, Richard Henry Pratt had believed, "we must kill the savage to sabe the man." Sometimes if the children spoke in their native language, they would receive quite hard punishments.Through life-long work as a spokes person, she was elected the secretary of the Society for American Indians.

Zitkala Sa has mainly written about how her life has experienced conflicts, from her assimilation into American culture to her tribes tradtions. Her political views also take part in her writings and they portray in most articles she has contributed to. Noted for her lterary and political genus, She won a scholarship to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She also felt like it was more important to fight for the rights among her people throughout literature and politics, rather than having an intense feeling for music.