The Girl Before the School
Before the school, there was a girl named Gertrude Simmons, born February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Dakota Sioux reservation in what is now the state of South Dakota.
She was the daughter of Ellen Tate’iyohiwin Simmons — a full-blood Yankton Dakota woman — and a white man who left before Zitkála-Šá had any memory of him. Her mother raised her within the Yankton Dakota community, and her early years were shaped by the cultural world of the Dakota people: the language, the stories, the practices of a community that was under extraordinary pressure from the United States government but that maintained a living cultural tradition.
The Yankton Dakota — part of the broader Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires of the Sioux — had signed the Yankton Treaty of 1858, ceding approximately eleven million acres to the United States and confining the Yankton people to a reservation along the Missouri River in what would become South Dakota. By the time of Zitkála-Šá’s birth in 1876, the reservation was established, government agents administered the community’s affairs, and the broader assault on Dakota culture and land was well underway.
Her mother, Ellen, was a woman of strong character who would remain a significant figure — and a subject of some of the most evocative writing — in Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical essays. The essays describe a mother who maintained Dakota traditions and who was deeply ambivalent about the forces that were reshaping her world. The relationship between Zitkála-Šá and her mother is one of the most emotionally complex threads in all of her writing: love and tension, connection and distance, a daughter who went away to school and came back changed.
The early years on the reservation are described in her autobiographical writing with a vividness that has made those essays enduring literary documents. She wrote of watching games, of listening to stories, of the specific physical world of the reservation and the specific emotional world of Dakota childhood. The writing is not idealized into fantasy. It is specific and sensory: the taste of certain foods, the sound of language spoken in a particular way, the warmth of the lodge.
This is what she was leaving when the recruiters came.