Zitkala-Ša
The Sun Dance Opera
1913 | Classical
— Act I, Duet: “Love is for Valor”
Zitkala-Ša: A wigwam of weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills. A footpath wound its way gently down the sloping land till it reached the broad river bottom; creeping through the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side, it came out on the edge of the Missouri.
Here, morning, noon, and evening, my mother came to draw water from the muddy stream for our household use. Always, when my mother started for the river, I stopped my play to run along with her. She was only of medium height. Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.
"Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears"; and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, "Now let me see how fast you can run today." Whereupon I tore away at my highest possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.
Dr. P. Jane Hafen: I am from the Taos Pueblo [in New Mexico]. I was a music student at BYU [Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah] and that’s when I first saw the score to the opera. That’s called being in the right place at the right time. This is the first Native opera.
[Hafen is now an Emerita Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has edited numerous collections of Zitkala-Ša’s works including Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera.]
I’ve tried to do it by letting [Zitkala-Ša] speak for herself. I’ve tried to have a mild editorial hand. Because after having worked on this stuff — like I said, I’m old as dirt, I started working on this stuff almost thirty years ago — I’ve looked at the way people have shaped her for their own agendas. My answer to that is: read what she wrote. Read what she wrote, and you don’t have to make her into a suffragette, and you don’t have to — The opera is such a challenge, it’s such a tickly thing.
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Hafen: Zitkala-Ša was born Gertrude Simmons [in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in the Dakota Territory]. I don’t think anything is known about her father except that he was a non-Indian. But her mother raised her up as an Indian girl and she saw herself as an Indian.
Zitkala-Ša: The first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life occurred in an early spring. It was in my eighth year; in the month of March. From some of my playmates I heard that two paleface missionaries were in our village. Running direct to my mother, I began to question her why these two strangers were among us. She told me, after I had teased much, that they had come to take away Indian boys and girls to the East. My mother did not seem to want me to talk about them.
"Mother, my friend Judéwin is going home with the missionaries. She is going to a more beautiful country than ours; the palefaces told her so!" I said wistfully, wishing in my heart that I too might go.
Mother sat in a chair, and I was hanging on her knee. "Yes, my child, several others besides Judéwin are going away with the palefaces. Your brother said the missionaries had inquired about his little sister," she said, watching my face very closely. My heart thumped so hard against my breast, I wondered if she could hear it. "Did he tell them to take me, mother?" I asked. With a sad, slow smile, she answered: "There! I knew you were wishing to go, because Judéwin has filled your ears with the white men's lies. Don't believe a word they say! Their words are sweet, but, my child, their deeds are bitter. You will cry for me, but they will not even soothe you. Stay with me, my little one! Your brother Dawée says that going East, away from your mother, is too hard an experience for his baby sister." Thus my mother discouraged my curiosity about the lands beyond our eastern horizon.
But on the following day the missionaries did come to our very house.
Hafen: As soon as [Zitkala-Ša] goes to boarding school — she goes to White’s Manual Institute, which is a Quaker boarding school in Indiana — immediately they’re put into the boarding school structure. The boarding school system was an institutional way of trying to erase tribal identity. You had children from all these different tribes thrown in together, and of course once they get to the boarding school they can’t speak their language, they’re made to wear uniforms, lose their individual identities, they have to convert to Christianity. They might do basics: arithmetic, and reading, and those kinds of things, but then in the afternoon they’re responsible for sustaining the school. So they cook, they clean, the young boys work in the fields, shoe the horses, those kinds of things. Interestingly one of the metaphors she uses is the humming of the telegraph wires on the train ride to school, so I think she’s sensitive to sound.
Later studies have shown that the abstract, the non-linguistic things, native students did very well at [in the boarding schools]. Math, for example, until you get into story problems, then you have language which complicates it. But abstract concepts, Native students did well. They also did very well at music, so she’s trained to play the violin at a fairly early age. By the time she arrived at Earlham College in 1896, she was sufficiently trained in music to perform publicly: a vocal duet, a vocal solo, and a piano solo.
She went to teach at a boarding school [the Carlisle Industrial Training School] and she ran into conflict pretty quickly with the director of the school, Colonel Richard H. Pratt. It was his idea to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.” [While employed at Carlisle she writes “The School Days of an Indian Girl”] She’s the first person to write [about the boarding school experience] without a translator or as-told-to person.
Zitkala-Ša: I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.
Hafen: The stories are published [in the Atlantic Monthly] and the criticisms are that she bites the hands that fed her, that she is criticizing the boarding school education that educated her to write the stories. The Red Man’s Helper, which was the newspaper for Carlisle, smacked back pretty quickly and said, “Look how ungrateful she is.” She left [teaching at Carlisle] pretty quickly after that.
In 1899, she left to study piano and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. One of her most prestigious performances was a violin solo at the White House in 1900 for President William McKinley.
Zitkala-Ša: I do not care about a doctor’s profession more than those of the others. In truth music, art, and literature are more in line with my own.
Hafen: Somewhere in that adolescence she gives herself the name Zitkala-Ša. That speaks to the legacy of the boarding school. Young girls and young men are deprived of their rites of passage, and so they don’t get a new name from their tiospaye, from their family, from their extended families, and she chose to give herself that name which means “Red Bird.”
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Hafen: When she was in college she won an oratory contest. That’s where she found her gift, especially with political speaking. And so she went that direction: with politics, with organizations regarding American Indian rights and so forth. Gertrude and her husband Raymond [Bonnin] were working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in Vernal, Utah, and quite frankly I think they were bored. I mean, think about it: 1910s, no radio, no television, reading, a lot of subsistence farming, subsistence working, and those kinds of things. But for entertainment, they would perform for each other. And it was probably a pretty small cadre of local musicians and Gertrude. [William F. Hanson] was the music teacher out in Vernal.
Hanson and [Zitkala-Ša] decided to collaborate on the composition of an opera with a local topic. They settled on the topic of the Sun Dance set against an appropriately romantic love triangle between Sioux maid Winona, Sioux hero Ohiya, and the evil Shoshone Sweet Singer. It was a collaboration [between Hanson and Zitkala-Ša], and I don’t know to what degree, but there are some things that are very obvious: One is the character of the Heyoka, who was the contrary. He was a structural character in many plains societies including the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota. And the main character, Ohiya, means hero, and that is the name of [Zitkala-Ša’s] son. The evil character is the Shoshone because they were in competition with both the Utes and the La/Da/Nakotas. So I’m sure there are a lot of ways that she was intensely involved in the shaping of the lyrics and clearly in the shaping of the structure of the opera.
According to Hanson, Bonnin would play Sioux melodies on the violin and he would transcribe them, then they would add harmonies and lyrics. It makes it very interesting that it’s the violin where she figures out the melodies, not the piano, because with indigenous music there’s a lack of precision about pitch. And so she could cheat with those pitches on the violin, whereas playing them on the piano they don’t sound quite the same, to put it mildly.
Indigenous music is monophony. You have rhythm with the drums, but you really don’t have harmony in the sense that you have in Western music. And so if you’re dealing with a monophonic melody, what happens to it when you start to add harmonies? When you add a chorus behind it? Or when you add an orchestra behind it? Or when you add a piano accompaniment behind it? You know, it radically alters what is going on there, to make it sound like something it’s not.
Have you ever been to a powwow? You know what a powwow is like. You know that the dancers know the rhythms, and they know that there’s a certain structure to a certain type of song, and that there are certain phrasings, but those structures and those phrasings don’t fit in common time, or in a time signature that you would see as you look at a staff of music. But the powwow dancers know that because they have to stop right on the beat, and if they go over the beat then they’re deducted on their performance. So it’s a familiarity within the culture, but it’s not a culture that meshed well with western standards of music that Hanson was working with.
If you think about light opera at the turn of the century, not even as sophisticated as Gilbert and Sullivan, I mean really, really light stuff, that’s kind of the style of a lot of it. And I know that the producers [of the UNLADYLIKE2020 web series] didn’t appreciate me saying it, but musically it’s very challenging. It’s not written to be easily performed. You couldn’t stand to listen to it all the time. It just, it sounds like cartoon music that we know because we live 120 years later, you know? The “THUMP-thump-thump-thump-THUMP-thump-thump-thump.” It’s got a lot of that in it. At the time, that’s fine, but we have a musical memory and a musical history that we have associations with, that make it very challenging. But that’s not where it starts. It starts with these traditional songs.
I did study the score when I was working on [transcribing] the libretto [for Dreams and Thunder], and it was the actual score, now they have it on microfiche because so many people have gone to look at it at the BYU library. So there’s the libretto and the score, but there are also grand pauses where it would say “Indians perform.” And so at that point, the Utes who were involved in the production would perform their traditional dances. And it’s important to remember at that time that type of dancing and performance was outlawed. But if you framed it in grand art and grand opera you can get away with it. So in that way I think it’s marvelously subversive.
They performed it 14 times in Utah and received quite a bit of acclaim.
Hanson goes on to teach at BYU, and then in 1938 [The Sun Dance Opera] goes to New York. As I understand it, one of the singers from the 1912-1914 productions eventually ends up at the City Light Opera in New York, and he arranges to stage it in New York. And so it’s kind of flipped: They don’t have the tribes there to perform the big numbers. There’s a lot of publicity about it, and one tiny, little paragraph mentions Gertrude. William Hanson has pretty much colonized it. [Zitkala-Ša] dies in January, it was performed in March. She didn't have anything to do with the preparation. It was performed to disappointing reviews.
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Hafen: Zitkala-Ša hated living in Utah, and worked very hard to get out of there, and she did get out [in 1914] and moved to Washington, D.C. She gave speeches before Federated Women’s Clubs. She gave speeches before Congress. She and Raymond filed a bunch of claims before Congress. At that time, if you had a case in your tribe, Congress had to resolve it, so somebody had to represent you before the congressional committees. So that’s what the latest book [Help Indians Help Themselves] that I have is, it’s a collection of those kinds of speeches and the work that she did politically for the remainder of her life. It seems that she did not continue to make music. There is virtually no mention of music in the surviving documentation from later in her life.
It’s pretty interesting, you know, 2020 was the centennial of women getting the vote, and when she was editor of the American Indian Magazine, one of her campaigns was for citizenship for American Indians. But she was advocating citizenship, which is different than suffrage. She wrote some very strong editorials about how there were 12,000 Native Americans who served in World War I who were not citizens of the United States, and so she worked very hard on that, to not only get them citizenship in reward for their military service, but also Indians in general. So the suffragettes have picked her up and she’s been having a lot of popularity and I think that that’s why she was on the Google Doodle. I’m all for people learning more about her and learning more about her story, and learning more of her words, and what a strong woman she was. I mean, have you ever met a Sioux woman who was not a strong woman? She was very determined in the things that she did. But in my opinion you need to look at the whole picture. You knew this much about the boarding school narratives and the stuff that she published in 1901, and then my work has to show her voice for her whole life, and the whole impact of what she did. That includes the opera, that was one part of it. But the speeches that she gave, the essays that she wrote, the campaigning that she did for rights and for justice — I think she was truly an amazing woman.
SOURCES
Hafen, P. Jane. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 15 Apr. 2021.
Zitkala-Ša. “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” A Celebration of Women Writers, University of Pennsylvania, digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/impressions.html.
Zitkala-Ša. “School Days of an Indian Girl.” A Celebration of Women Writers, University of Pennsylvania, digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/school.html.
“Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird / Gertrude Simmons Bonnin).” UNLADYLIKE2020, Unladylike Productions, LLC, 2020. https://unladylike2020.com/profile/zitkala-sa/. 15 Apr. 2021.
Zitkala-Ša, and P. Jane Hafen. Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
