Zitkála-Šá

Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Yankton Dakota writer, musician and political activist. Born on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota, she was taken at eight to a Quaker boarding school in Indiana, later studied at Earlham College and the New England Conservatory, and taught at the Carlisle Indian School. Her autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 and her Old Indian Legends (1901) were among the first works by a Native American woman to reach a national audience, and she co-wrote the opera The Sun Dance in 1913. American Indian Stories appeared in 1921.