Gertrude Simmons Bonnin

• Gertrude Simmons Bonnin
• Born: February 22, 1876
• Died: January 26, 1938

Writer, lecturer, and welfare worker, was the third child of Ellen Simmons, a full-blood, born on the Yankton Sioux reservation. Agency records indicate that the father was Caucasian. Her earliest memories were of being taught by her mother to hate the whites. But she was also impressed by missionary tales of the beautiful land to the East, and at the age of eight she defied her mother so she could leave to attend a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana. She was not happy at the school, where she both resented and accepted being forced into the mold of white culture, but after a miserable four-year hiatus she returned to graduate at the age of nineteen. Still resisting her mother’s wish that she return to tribal life, she spent two years at Earlham College, at Richmond, Indiana, where she made few friends but gained the respect of the white students through her prize-winning rhetoric. She later recalled her guilt even at the moment of winning the prize: “In my mind I saw my mother, far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.”

Illness forced her to discontinue her college studies, and from 1897 to 1899 she taught at the Carlisle Indian School. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, and in 1900 she went with the Carlisle Indian Band, as solo violinist, to the Paris Exhibition. At this time, Bon-nin’s writing talent came to nationwide attention through her autobiographical sketches in The Atlantic Monthly, her tales of Indian life in Harper’s Monthly. One book, Old Indian Legends, had art work by Angel de Cora, a native American. Bonnin used her Sioux name, Zit-kala-sha.

Like many educated Indians, Gertrude Simmons found employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She became an issue clerk at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where she married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, a Sioux coworker, on May 10, 1902. They had a son, Raymond O., who was born in 1903. From 1902 to 1916 they worked at the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where Raymond Bonnin became agent.

The Bonnins were among the ten percent of American Indians who had achieved middle-class status in white society but had also lost their place in tribal life and did not feel completely at home with whites. In the early twentieth century they were beginning to develop a wider, Pan-Indian identity and a reform program based on progressive principles. In 1911 these “Red Progressives” came together in the Society of American Indians (SAI), which although founded by a white sociologist, Fayette Mac Kenzie, required that its active members be of Indian blood. The SAI’s objectives were political equality, preservation of native-American culture, and the improvement of Indian life. Under its auspices Gertrude Bonnin operated a community center in Fort Duchesne, Utah, but in 1916, when she became Secretary of the SAI, she and Raymond Bonnin moved to Washington, D.C., which became their permanent home. In 1918-1919 she edited the SAI’s American Indian Magazine.

In 1920 the Society of American Indians expired, a victim of factionalism and frustration, and Gertrude Bonnin began to work with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. She was instrumental in starting an Indian Welfare Committee and lectured widely under their auspices, arousing public opinion against the Harding administration’s assaults on Indian lands and tribal religions. When the Curtis Bill granting citizenship to all Indians was introduced in 1924 she traveled among the suspicious Indians urging them to support the bill and to exercise their voting rights. In the same year she traveled to Oklahoma to investigate charges of widespread defrauding of Indians by state probate courts, and was coauthor of a report, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation, issued by the Indian Rights Association in 1924. In 1926 she helped to found the National Council of American Indians, which cooperated with the General Federation and with John Collier’s National Indian Defense Association to publicize the dreadful conditions on Indian reservations. In the late 1920s these reformers enlisted scores of prominent citizens in their cause, forced the appointment of a blue-ribbon investigatory panel, and skillfully used national magazines and political pressures to persuade the Hoover administration to make some modest reforms.

Gertrude Bonnin worked for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, but as a progressive assimilationist she was sharply critical of the Indian New Deal, which looked to a revitalized tribal life as the path to Indian improvement. As president of the National Council of American Indians she continued lecturing on Indian culture, often wearing native dress in which she resembled an idealized version of an Indian princess. She remained an active member of American Pen Women, and in collaboration with William F. Hanson composed an opera, Sun Dance. Bonnin died of renal failure in Washington at the age of sixty-one. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Correspondence by and about Gertrude Bonnin is located in Record Group 75 (Indian Affairs) of the National Archives. See also the files of the American Indian Magazine, 1915—1920; M. E. Gridley, American Indian Women (1974); and Notable American Women (1971). H. E. Hertzberg, The American Indian’s Search For Identity (1971) is an excellent study of the Pan-Indian movement. See M. W. Wells, Unity in Diversity (1953) for an account of Bonnin and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.