Marriage and the Political Life
In 1902, Zitkála-Šá married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, a Yankton Dakota man who was working as an employee of the Indian Service. The marriage would last until her death, and Raymond was a significant partner in both her personal and political life.
After their marriage, the couple spent approximately fourteen years at the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where Raymond worked for the Indian Service. During this period, Zitkála-Šá began to engage more directly with the political dimensions of Native life — with the specific policies affecting Indigenous communities, with the legal and governmental frameworks within which those communities existed, and with the possibilities for organized political advocacy.
She did not set aside her writing during this period. She continued to publish, and she continued to be engaged with the cultural and literary work that had established her national presence. But the fourteen years in Utah were also years in which she developed the organizational and political instincts that would define the second major phase of her public life.
The Indian Service, which employed Raymond, was the bureaucratic system through which the federal government administered the lives of Native people on reservations. Zitkála-Šá encountered it as the spouse of a government employee, and what she saw — the corruption, the exploitation, the specific ways in which the system that claimed to be administering for Native people’s benefit was often doing the opposite — shaped the direction of her political work.