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Zitkala-Ša (1876–1938) (Dakota: pronounced ''zitkála-ša'', which translates to "Red Bird"), also known by the missionary-given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Sioux writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist. She wrote several works chronicling her youthful struggles with identity and pulls between the majority culture and her Native American heritage. Her later books in English were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white readership. With William F. Hanson, Zitkala-Ša co-composed the first American Indian opera, ''The Sun Dance'' (composed in romantic style based on Ute and Sioux themes), which premiered in 1913.〔("Gertrude Bonnin, Zitkala Sha, Yankton Nakota." ) ''Native Authors.'' (retrieved 12 April 2010)〕 She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926 to lobby for rights to American citizenship and civil rights. She served as its president until her death in 1938. ==Early life and education== Zitkala-Ša was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Dakota name was ''Taté Iyòhiwin'' (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a European-American man named Felker, who abandoned the family while Zitkala-Ša was very young. Until 1884 Zitkala-Ša lived on the reservation. She later described those days as ones of freedom and happiness, safe in the care of her tribe. In 1884, when Zitkala-Ša was eight, missionaries came to the Yankton Reservation. They recruited several of the Yankton children, including Zitkala-Ša, taking them for education to the White's Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. This training school was founded by Quaker Josiah White for the education of "poor children, white, colored, and Indian". She attended the school for three years until 1887. She later wrote about this period in her work, ''The School Days of an Indian Girl''. She described both the deep misery of having her heritage stripped away, when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her traditionally long hair, and the contrasting joy in learning to read and write, and to play the violin. In 1887 Zitkala-Ša returned to the Yankton Reservation to live with her mother. She spent three years there. She was dismayed to realize that, while she still longed for the native Sioux traditions, she no longer fully belonged to them. In addition, she thought that many on the reservation were conforming to the dominant white culture. In 1891, wanting more education, Zitkala-Ša decided at age fifteen to return to White's Manual Labor Institute. She planned to gain more through education than becoming a house-keeper, as the school prescribed for girls. She studied piano and violin, and started to teach music at White's when the teacher resigned. In 1895 Zitkala-Sa was awarded her first diploma. She gave a speech on women's inequality, which received high praise from the local paper. Though her mother wished her to return home after she graduated from White's, Zitkala-Ša decided to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana after receiving a scholarship in 1895. Higher education for women was quite limited at the time. Though initially feeling isolated and uncertain among her predominantly white peers, she soon proved her oratorical talents again with a speech entitled "Side by Side" in 1896. During this time, she began gathering Native American legends, translating them first to Latin and then to English for children to read. In 1897, however, six weeks before graduation, she was forced to leave Earlham College due to ill health. From 1897 to 1899 Zitkala-Ša played violin with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1899 she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she taught music to the children and conducted debates on the treatment of Native Americans. In 1900 she played violin at the Paris Exposition with the school's Carlisle Indian Band. In the same year she began writing articles on Native American life which were published in such popular periodicals as ''Atlantic Monthly'' and ''Harper's Monthly''. Also in 1900 Zitkala-Ša was sent by Carlisle's founder, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, back to the Yankton Reservation for the first time in several years to collect students. She was greatly dismayed to find there that her mother's house was in disrepair, her brother's family had fallen into poverty, and that white settlers were beginning to occupy the land promised to the Yankton Dakota by the Dawes Act of 1877. Upon returning to the Carlisle School she came into conflict with its founder, resenting the rigid program of assimilation into dominant white culture that he advocated and the fact that the curriculum did not encourage Native American children to aspire to anything beyond lives spent in menial labor. In 1901 Zitkala-Ša was dismissed, likely for an article she had published in ''Harper's Monthly'' describing the profound loss of identity felt by a Native American boy after being given an assimilationist education at the school. Concerned with her mother's advanced age and her family's struggles with poverty, she returned to the Yankton Reservation in 1901. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Zitkala-Sa」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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