The Name She Chose
She was born Gertrude Simmons. She married and became Gertrude Bonnin. But the name by which history knows her — the name she chose for herself and used throughout her public career — is Zitkála-Šá: Red Bird.
The choice of a Lakota name for a woman who was Yankton Dakota is a specific linguistic decision that has drawn some scholarly attention. The Lakota and Dakota languages are related — they are dialects of the same language family — but they are distinct, and a Dakota woman choosing a Lakota name was making a specific choice.
The most straightforward explanation is that “Red Bird” in Lakota was the name she chose to give herself when she began her public career, and that the choice of a name in an Indigenous language — whichever specific dialect — was the primary statement she was making. She was naming herself in a language that connected her to her people rather than in the English that the boarding school system had imposed.
The specific meaning — Red Bird — is also worth sitting with. Red is the color she associated, in her writing, with strong emotion and with the intensity of experience. A red bird is vivid, conspicuous, impossible to ignore. It is a creature that moves through its world visibly and doesn’t apologize for being seen.
She spent her career being seen — in the Atlantic Monthly, in Congress, in the editorial offices of national magazines, in the organizational meetings of pan-tribal advocacy groups. She was, persistently, conspicuously there, saying what she saw and demanding that it be engaged with.
Red Bird.
The name was apt.