Zitkála-Sá (pronounced Zitkála Shá), also known as Gertrude Evaline Simmons, was born in 1876, year of the Battle of Little Bighorn, on South Dakota’s Yankton Sioux Reservation. Her mother was a full-blooded Dakota Sioux named Ellen Tatiyahewin (“She Reaches for the Wind”) Simmons, her father a white man about whom little is known. We do know he abandoned the family, leaving her mother to raise their children in traditional Sioux ways.
Continue reading “Zitkála-Sá: A 20th-Century Champion of Native American Activism”Zitkála-Sá: A 20th-Century Champion of Native American Activism
Her Opera “The Sun Dance” Made Stage History