At the end of the 19th century, a series of narrative essays published in The Atlantic Monthly by Dakota composer and activist Gertrude Bonnin, better known by her self-chosen name Zitkala Ša, focused on the violence of compulsory U.S. boarding schools. Existing research on her activism, however, has overlooked the subversive role of music, dance, and sound in her literary and musical projects, which reveal Zitkala Ša’s sophisticated sonic politics.
The historical tension between the prohibition and appropriation of Indigenous sounds highlights how the boarding school press functioned as a powerful engine for assimilation projects. A close reading of Zitkala Ša’s essay, The Indian dance: A protest against its abolition, along with an examination of its reception, reveals her reverse-gaze strategy and demonstrates her effectiveness in challenging aggressive assimilationists. Similarly, her collaboration on The sun dance opera resulted in a project that defied neat categorization and withheld complete disclosure of the ceremony, establishing its own sonic politics of self-determination. Zitkala Ša wrote the libretto and the songs for the opera, while William F. Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University, composed the score. The songs were inspired by a sacred ritual that was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978. The opera was groundbreaking, allowing Zitkala Ša to bridge her worlds through music. It premiered in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah, featuring performances by members of the Ute Nation residing on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation.
Zitkala Ša’s years on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, often mischaracterized as a period of domesticity in her literary career, were marked by significant creative sonic productivity, representing an important phase in her evolving activism that bridged her earlier years of serial publication with the sophisticated vocal activism of her later work.
This according to “Tiny taps and noisy hacks: Listening to Zitkala Ša’s sonic politics” by Kristen Brown (Resonance: The journal of sound and culture 2/1 [spring 2021] 348–362; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-7615).
Watch a short documentary on Zitkala Ša’s life in music and activism below.
https://www.pbs.org/video/zitkala-sa-american-indian-composer-author-activist-qqjsyq/
Related Bibliolore posts:
https://bibliolore.org/2022/11/03/national-native-american-heritage-month-an-annotated-bibliography/
