Paratextual Reception of Bonnin's Work
Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)
Zitkala-Ša as a historical figure inhabits a complexity which cannot be but scratched at here. Born the year of the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, she tied herself in kinship to Sitting Bull--a fact that media took literally as they characterized her as a descendant despite the difference in tribal contexts (Davidson and Norriss xiv). She balanced cultural political ties as a Yankton Dakota woman who until age 8 grew up on the reservation before missionaries recruited her to White's Indiana Manual Labor institute. From there, she went on to Earlham College and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston as well as advocated around the US for Indigenous rights, eventually becoming the co-founder of the National Council of American Indians in 1926. She is characterized as a writer, musician, educator, and activist among other things.
Bonnin's own history as an activist and writer are largely misunderstood on the basis of how complicated she is of a figure. Nor was she unaware of this, as someone who thought critically about the ways in which non-Natives lumped Indigenous peoples together, the constraints and benefits of citizenship, the failed promises of assimilation, the contradictions of the Women's movement, and the tricky terrains of Washington (Davidson and Norris xi-xv).
Bonnin's major works, Old Indian Legends (1901) and American Indian Stories (1921) as well as her scholarship, speeches, and other works were published in both popular and prestigious venues (Davidson and Norris xii). Old Indian Legends was originally intended for school children and was first published in textbooks for (white) children in mostly Eastern states, while American Indian Stories was published story-by-story in the Atlantic Monthly. The production of her first work underlines how Indigenous stories were packaged and marketed for consumption as their histories were conceptualized as disappearing. Notable in this is how white children are imagined to be the inheritors of these "Old Indian Legends" even as the work and Zitkala-Ša herself refused such easy consumption (a fact that we will look at in depth in American Indian Stories). The continued resonances of widespread availability are evident in American Indian Stories as well, since archival collections at the Newberry Library feature an early page dedicated to the success of Old Indian Legends while also calling for the integration of these texts into "every home"