She was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Dakota Sioux reservation in what is now South Dakota. She was taken to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in 1884, at eight years old. She published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, at twenty-four. She helped create The Sun Dance Opera in 1913. She co-authored the Oklahoma investigation report in 1924. She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926. She died on January 26, 1938, in Washington, D.C., and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. She was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022, eighty-four years after her death, one hundred and twenty-two years after she published the essay describing the haircut in the Atlantic Monthly. The boarding school system that cut her hair, banned her language, and tried to replace her identity produced one of the most accomplished and consequential Native American public figures of the early twentieth century. It did not succeed in making her less than she was. It gave her tools she used against it. She wrote in the English the school taught her. She published in the magazine the Anglo-American literary establishment read. She lobbied in the halls of Congress the country she was born in had built. And she did all of it as Zitkála-Šá — Red Bird — in the name she chose for herself in her own language. She is still being discovered. She always deserved to be known.
The political work she did through the National Council of American Indians, the literary work she published in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, the musical work she composed in collaboration with William Hanson, the investigative work she and her collaborators did in Oklahoma, the organizational work she did through the Society of American Indians — all of it was the work of a person who had been subjected to a system designed to silence her and who chose, continuously and consistently, not to be silenced. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report of 2022, which documented the graves of children who died in the system she critiqued, and which used language that described the system’s practices in terms that confirmed her own account from 1900, is the most recent official acknowledgment of what she was saying throughout her career. She was right. She was always right. And she was saying so in public, in the most public venues she could access, from 1900 until her death in 1938. Zitkála-Šá. Born Yankton Dakota in 1876. Died in Washington, D.C., in 1938. Buried at Arlington. Awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022. Author of essays that changed how some Americans understood the boarding school system. Composer and collaborator on the first American opera by a Native person. Founder of an organization that became the model for the National Congress of American Indians. Investigator of corruption. Political advocate. Editor. Speaker. Red Bird. She was all of this. Know her name.
The photograph Joseph T. Keiley took of her in 1898 shows a young woman who looks directly into the camera with an expression of complete self-possession. She is not performing deference or apology. She is not presenting herself in the diminished way the boarding school system was designed to produce. She is exactly who she is, looking at whoever is looking at her, without blinking. The photograph was taken two years before the Atlantic Monthly essays were published. She was twenty-two years old. She had already experienced the boarding school, already developed the literary voice that would publish in the country’s most prestigious literary magazine, already begun to understand what she was going to do with her life. The photograph captures the beginning of a public career that would last forty years and touch every register of public life available to a Native woman in the early twentieth century. She was Zitkála-Šá. The country she lived in tried to make her invisible. She refused. She spent her life being visible, in the most visible venues she could access, saying what she saw and demanding that it be heard. She was heard. She is heard. She is still being heard. Red Bird. She flew. She is flying still.
She hid under a bed at eight years old and was found. She spent the next fifty-four years making sure the country that found her and cut her hair and tried to erase her would have to reckon with what it had done. She succeeded in making that reckoning happen more than it would have happened without her. She did not succeed in making it happen fully, in her lifetime or in the eighty years since her death. The work continues. Her name should be part of it.
Zitkála-Šá. Red Bird. 1876–1938. Born on the Yankton Dakota reservation. Died in Washington, D.C. Buried at Arlington. Know her name.