Happy Leap Day!

            Happy Leap Day!  When I realized that it was a leap year, and that leap day was on a Monday, I realized I had to do something about leap day, even if there wasn’t much.  How could I resist?  (Boy did I find some funny, but kinda awful at the same time, vintage leap day cards.)  This probably won’t be terribly long, but like I said, how could I resist?

            Leap years occur because each year isn’t actually 365 days.  A year is closer to 365.25 days, and so every four years (more or less) we have to add a day to the calendar in order to keep everything in check.  Without the day added, eventually holidays and seasons would be all out of whack.  When we add a day to the calendar, this causes the date to jump a day the following year.  For example, yesterday, February 28, was a Sunday.  Next year, February 28 is a Tuesday.  It “leapt over” Monday.  This seems to be the agreed upon reason for why the day is called “leap day”.

            Until the time of Julius Caesar, the year was 355 days.  Every two years a whole 22 day month was added.  Caesar had the astronomer Sosigenes develop a new calendar.  This new calendar was adjusted by Pope Gregory XIII to be even more accurate.

            In some calendars they still add a whole month; Hindu and Hebrew calendars add a month every three years on average.  Other calendars have had extra, extra days; in 1700 Sweden also had a February 30.  Sweden had been on their own calendar and was slowly moving over to the Gregorian calendar.  When Sweden went to war at this time, though, they didn’t keep up with the slow move, and so had to add another extra day in 1700.

            Since February 29 only occurs every four years (generally), people with leap day birthdays have to celebrate their birthday some other day.  Most of the United States, the U.K., and Hong Kong use March 1 as the birthday in non-leap years.  In China, Taiwan, and New Zealand they use February 28.  People who have a leap day birthday are generally called leaplings.  Personally, they can choose to celebrate their birthday every year, and pick a date, or have a birthday every four years (they’re recognized to have a birthday every year though, hence why different countries have different official dates for them).  Back in 2012, Parks and Recreation did an episode for Jerry’s “Sweet 16” since he had a leap day birthday.

            Most traditions involving leap day involve women proposing to men on the day.  In Ireland the tradition is supposed to have been started by St. Patrick and/or Brigid of Kildare.  Since they most likely never met, or if they did Brigid was about five, and that records of the tradition weren’t documented until the nineteenth century…  That’s probably not where the tradition started.  In Denmark, women were supposed to propose to men on February 24 of the leap year, not actually on leap day.

            In England it was believed that anything that happened on leap day was acceptable since the day wasn’t officially recognized by English law.  The day is also seen to be lucky, and it’s believed that anything started on a leap day will be successful.  In Scotland it was unlucky to be born on a leap day.  (It’s also called St. Oswald’s Day since he died on the day in 992.)  Also in Scotland women were supposed to wear red petticoats, so men could see them, when they would propose to men.

            In much of upper-class Europe there were traditions that men had to buy the woman something if they turned down the woman’s proposal.  In some places the man had to buy her twelve pairs of gloves (possibly to cover up that she doesn’t have a ring on).  In Finland the man had to buy the woman fabric for a skirt.  In Greece it was viewed as unlucky to marry either on leap day or during the whole leap year.

            More modern observations of leap day include: since 1980, the French satirical paper, La Bougie du Sapeur, which is only published on leap day; in 1988, Anthony, Texas declared itself the “leap year capital of the world”, even having a leapling birthday club; in some of the U.S. it has been seen as sort of a Sadie Hawkins Day, where gender roles could be reversed.  Leap day has shown up on tv shows at least twice (I can think of two and I’m sure I don’t know of others).  As mentioned earlier, Parks and Rec threw Jerry a sweet 16 back in 2012, and on 30 Rock we were introduced to Leap Day William.

            That’s about it for leap day.  There wasn’t a whole lot of varying information, and most of the traditional aspects are pretty much all just variations on the same theme.  I don’t even have any links to add today since it’s basically all common knowledge.  It’s a fun little day though.  Make sure you wear your yellow and blue! 

Victorian Fabric Dyes

            Despite my main interest being the period between World Wars One and Two, I’ve been getting increasingly interested in the Victorian Era.  There’s always been a bit: I love watching adaptations of Dickens, Gaskell, Burnett; The Forsyte Sage is one of my favorite miniseries and books (not written in the period, but the first two parts take place during it); I loved The Young Victoria.  After Christmas I picked up three or four books on Victoria and the Era, and I’m working through one of them currently.  In the book, the author takes you through a day in the life of a Victorian, covering different classes and different years in the period.  There is a lengthy discussion of changes in fashion and the new colors that were created at this time due to the discovery of chemical dyes.

            Dyeing clothes has been around for millennia.  Dyes were made from plants and animals.  The first popular fabric dye was a purple made from crushed mollusk shells; it was the most expensive dye ever, literally costing its weight in gold.  By about the year 300, instead of things that actually made purple, people were using blue and red to make purple; this was more affordable, and, well, the mollusk had gone extinct.  Late in the fourth century, the Emperor of Byzantium issued a decree that only the imperial family could wear purple.  You could be killed if you went against the decree.

            The next popular dye was red.  In Europe, madder root was used to make red.  In South America, Brazilwood was used for a brighter red.  In Central America, cochineal, an insect, was used.  In the fifteenth century, “Cardinal’s Purple” was used for the clergy, but was actually a crimson red made from a different insect related to cochineal; cochineal was brought back to Europe around 1519.  In the seventeenth century, it was found that adding tin to this made for a deeper, more intense red; this was used for the British Army’s coats and for those bright red hunting jackets you see.

            Now we’re finally caught up to where dyes were at coming into the Victorian Era.

            In the 1850s, William Henry Perkins was trying to cure malaria by creating artificial quinine.  In the process, Perkins discovered aniline dyes.  Aniline dyes were “a byproduct created from distilling tar left from coal that was ‘cooked’ to produce gas for commercial use” (1).  Perkins created the “first mass produced chemical dye” (2) – mauveine.  At first Perkins called it Tyrian Purple after the Roman purple, but since this was a real thing, that name was dropped.  Next the color was called mauve, after a flower, but personally Perkins called it mauveine.  (This mauveine is a different shade than modern mauves, so that’s why that name is still used. (3))

            Mauveine wasn’t the first aniline dye - the first dyes from coal tar were blues and reds - but Perkins was the first to really pursue aniline dyes.  There were issues at the beginning: the earliest mauveine dyes weren’t very colorfast, fading in the sun; they couldn’t dye cotton - the most popular fabric at the time - only wool and silk; creating aniline dyes was incredibly expensive.  Perkins experimented though and found that tannins (the same things found in wines and whatnot) helped the dye work on cotton.  He also found a way to produce the dyes much more cheaply; he found his own dyer and built his own factory. (4)

            Around this same time, the Empress Eugenie decided she really loved wearing purple.  In 1858, Queen Victoria wore a pale purple to her daughter’s wedding.  Purples, of all shades, were on the rise.  In 1859, Punch magazine was joking about the “mauve measles”.  After mauve went out of fashion, there were reds, browns, other purples, yellows, blues, and greens.  Perkins kept up with the changing fashions, coming up with new colors: dahlia, Britania violet (a deep blue), Perkin’s green, aniline black, and others (5).

            Aniline dyes were very popular.  Many of the colors were bright (though not all were; aniline blacks were incredibly popular) and the new dyes didn’t fade in the sun or rinse out in the wash.  Natural dyes were more pale, and would fade or wash out over time; the market for natural dyes just collapsed.

Aniline dyes also were safer than some of the older dyes.  As mentioned with purples, greens could only be made by mixing blues and yellows until the late 1700s.  In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele created a bright, colorfast green by mixing copper and arsenic.  Scheele’s Green was used for everything from wallpaper and paintings to clothing.  It looked good in natural light and the new gas lighting.  It was used for the fake flowers that were so popular.  It was everywhere.  It could also be dangerous; it did have arsenic in it after all.  Aniline greens took over from the arsenic dyed greens in the 1870s.

(Honestly though, these arsenic dyes weren’t as dangerous as they’ve been made out to be - especially not the greens.  The most dangerous arsenic dyes were red and black, and possibly blue.  Green got the bad rap probably mostly from the fake flowers it was used on.  Unless you had very sensitive skin, or allergies to the metals in them, fabric dyes probably wouldn’t really hurt you.  The people that suffered the most from arsenic dyes were the people that created the dyes and the dyed items.  The worries about arsenic dyes were more likely about “Victorian morality and condemnation of fashion and female vanity” than anything else (6).)

By the late nineteenth century nearly all colors could be created with aniline dyes.  Not everyone approved of chemical dyes though.  By 1900, the Shah of Persia had even banned the dyes from being used in making rugs.  If someone did make a rug with chemical dyes, the carpets were taken and the guilty party was fined at double the value and possibly even burned in public.  Aniline dyes helped pave the way for modern dyes.

            So that’s a brief telling of the evolution of fabric dyes, and Victorian chemical dyes.  I didn’t find quite as much as I would have liked (I do have a whole book about the creation of mauve, but I haven’t read it yet, and that’s still limited in scope), but I found it pretty interesting.  Besides, those pretty, crazy colors!

1 - Fabric Dye: Dyeing to be Fashionable

2, 3, 4, 5 - Terminology: What are aniline dyes? (or, thehistory of mauve and mauveine)

6 - Drop Dead Gorgeous: A TL;DR Tale of Arsenic in VictorianLife

Happy Presidents Day!

I'll be back with a regular post next week!

Happy birthday, Galileo!

Edmonia Lewis

            This is another person I found on Pinterest.  Edmonia Lewis’s caption reads “Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. July 4, 1845 - ca. 1911) was the first African American and Native American woman to gain fame and recognition as a sculptor in the international fine arts world.  She was of African American, Haitian, and Ojibwe descent” (1).  If that doesn’t sound interesting, I don’t know what does.  When I started reading about her, she’s even more interesting, but with some said parts to her story as well.

            It’s not entirely clear where or when Mary Edmonia Lewis was born.  She claimed July 4, 1844 for her birthdate.  She could have been born any time between 1840 and 1845 though.  She was probably born around Greenbush, New York (now in either Rensselaer or East Greenbush).  It’s also possible she was born in Albany, New York or Newark, New Jersey.  In one interview she said she was born in Greenhigh, Ohio.  July 4, 1844 in Greenbush, New York seems to be the agreed upon date and place.

            Edmonia was the daughter of an African-American gentleman’s servant and a Mississauga Ojibwe/African-American weaver and craftswoman.  Both of her parents died when she was young.  Her mother’s two sisters took in Edmonia and her brother Samuel (who was about twelve years older than Edmonia).  At this point Edmonia was known as Wildfire, and Samuel went by Sunshine.  Edmonia lived with her aunts for about four years in the area near Niagara Falls.  She helped sell Ojibwe baskets and other souvenirs to the tourists that came to Niagara Falls.

            In 1852, Samuel went to California to look for gold.  He must have been fairly successful because he was able to send money back to Edmonia for a number of years.  Samuel helped pay for Edmonia’s education at the New York Central College in McGrawville.  This school was a Baptist, abolitionist school.  Edmonia started at NYCC in 1856 but left after just three years “when she was ‘declared to be wild’” (2).

            In 1859 Edmonia started at Oberlin College with help from her brother and some abolitionists.  Oberlin was one of the first schools to admit women and minority students.  At Oberlin, Edmonia began studying art, excelling at drawing.  It was around this time that Wildfire chose to be called Mary Edmonia Lewis; a few years later she would drop Mary and just be Edmonia Lewis.

            At Oberlin, Edmonia boarded with the Reverend John Keep and his wife.  Keep was an abolitionist and an advocate for coeducation.  Keep was also a member of Oberlin’s Board of Trustees.  At the Keep residence also lived two white students, Christine Ennes and Maria Miles.

            In the winter of 1862, Edmonia, Christine, and Maria were going out for a sleigh ride and had some spiced wine.  Edmonia didn’t have as much as the other girls and the other girls got very sick.  It was discovered that they had been poisoned with Spanish Fly.  They were very sick for a while, but recovered.  It was believed that Edmonia had poisoned them, but since they recovered, no charges were filed.  People in town were very upset by this though, and Edmonia was dragged off to a field and beaten.  Due to public pressure, she was charged with poisoning Christine and Maria.

            Oberlin defended Edmonia.  Her lawyer, John Mercer Langston, was shot by one of the sick girls’ fathers.  In court, Langston argued that “the contents of the girls’ stomachs had never been analyzed, and thus the charges against Lewis could not be proved” (3).  Witnesses testified against Edmonia, and she didn’t take the stand.  She was either acquitted or the case was dismissed, and so she was free to go.  (Langston “would go on to become the first African-American elected to public office in the United States and a founding dean of Howard Law School” (4).)

            The following year Edmonia was accused of stealing art supplies from Oberlin, but was acquitted of this charge as well.  The women’s principal would not allow Edmonia to register for classes for her last term, though, and so she never graduated.

            After leaving Oberlin, Edmonia debated returning to the Niagara Falls area and her mother’s tribe, but instead went to Boston.  The Keeps’ wrote to friends in Boston, introducing her to William Lloyd Garrison.  Garrison introduced Edmonia to area sculptors and writers.  She tried at least three people before she found a teacher willing to take her on in Edward A Brackett.  Brackett specialized in marble busts and had abolitionists for clients.  He lent Edmonia fragments of his pieces for her to copy and be critiqued.  It’s not clear what happened, but Brackett and Edmonia split and it was unamicable.

            In 1864, after a solo exhibition, Edmonia opened her own studio.  Her pieces at this time were mostly of abolitionists.  Her 1863 and 1864 subjects included John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw.  Shaw’s family purchased her bust of him, and the success of that allowed her to make plaster copies and sell them for $115 each.  She also made medallion portraits of Brown and Garrison.

            Between 1864 and 1871, Edmonia was written about by a number of prominent Boston and New York abolitionists.  While she wasn’t opposed to the coverage she was getting, Edmonia didn’t want false praise.  “She knew that some did not really appreciate her art, but saw her as an opportunity to express and show their support for human rights” (5).

            Due to the success of her bust of Shaw, and the medallions of abolitionists, Edmonia was able to save up enough to travel to Rome in 1866.  In Rome, the sculptor Hiram Powers gave her some room in his studio.  She also was supported by Charlotte Cushman, a Boston actress, and Maria Weston Chapman, an anti-slavery advocate.

            In Rome, Edmonia first began sculpting in marble.  She also started pieces about Emancipation, the first of which was Freedwoman and her Child.  She used the neoclassical forms and mediums to create pieces related to blacks and Native Americans.  Edmonia was profiled in London in Atheneum and Art-Journal.  In 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited her in Rome and she sculpted his bust; his family praised the piece.  She had previously created pieces based on Longfellow’s poem, Song of Hiawatha, and it’s possible he saw these pieces when he visited her.

            Edmonia was rare in Rome at the time because she did all of her own work.  Most sculptors would create the model and then hire Italian workers to carve the marble.  Edmonia did all the carving herself, possibly “to forestall expected suggestions that a black woman could not possibly have created works of such skill and accomplishment” (6).  Because of this though, “fewer examples and duplicates of Lewis’s work survive than other sculptors of the period” (7).

In 1870 Edmonia had an exhibition in Chicago, and in 1871 in Rome.  In 1873, Edmonia received two $50,000 commissions.  Her studio became a tourist spot in Rome, being featured in guide books as a destination.  A big boost to her profile was having a piece in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  For this Edmonia created a 3,015 lb., full length sculpture of The Death of Cleopatra.  People weren’t sure about the subject matter dealing with death, but thousands still came to view it.

After Philadelphia, Cleopatra was exhibited in Chicago in 1878.  It was eventually purchased by a gambler and was used to mark the grave of a racehorse named Cleopatra.  After this it was put in storage and damaged by some Boy Scouts who painted the sculpture.  Eventually the piece was rediscovered by the Forest Park Historical Society and was donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1994.  Cleopatra was cleaned and restored to near-original condition.

As neoclassical art decreased in popularity, so did Edmonia.  She had become a Catholic in 1868 and continued to do work for Catholic patrons, but her profile was on the decline.  She travelled to the US for exhibits of her works.  In 1883 she created an altarpiece for a church in Baltimore.  Two of her pieces, Hiawatha and Phyllis Wheatley, were exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1901, Edmonia moved to London, but after that little is known of her life.  She never married and never had children.  It was speculated that she died in 1911 in Rome, or in Marin County, California (she had travelled to San Francisco at some point).  But recent digging has discovered that she died on September 17, 1907 in Hammersmith Borough Infirmary in London from chronic kidney problems. 

Edmonia’s pieces had faded from memory, but many have been recently rediscovered.  As mentioned, Cleopatra is now at the Smithsonian.  Other pieces are at Howard University’s Gallery of Art.  In the early 2000s, a play about Edmonia, Wildfire: Black Hands, White Marble, was written by Linda Beatrice Brown.

1- Pinterest caption

2, 5 - Edmonia Lewis

3, 6 - Edmonia Lewis

4, 7 - The Life and Death of Edmonia Lewis

Zitkala-Ša

            Sorry for the delay in this.  I was sick, again, last weekend and spent most of the weekend asleep.  By Monday I was a bit better, but since I’d lost a few days, I didn’t have this ready then.   I like winter, but I’m over it this year.  I haven’t been sick this much in a while.

            I found today’s topic somewhere on Pinterest.  I have a board for historical women, and Zitkala-Ša is on it.  The pin came from a “this day in history” thing and it’s for her birthday (February 22).  The caption just says “On this date in 1876, Zitkala Sa was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She would go on to write several books, including American Indian Stories, co-write the first Native American opera, and found the National Council of American Indians” (1).  Not a whole lot of information, but just enough to get me interested and wanting to know more.

            Zitkala-Ša was born Gertrude Simmons on February 22, 1876 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Yankton Sioux Agency, or Yankton Indian Reservation - depending on the source - in South Dakota.  She was the third child of Ellen Simmons, also called Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind), a Yankton Nakota Sioux.  Zitkala-Ša’s father was a European-American by the name of Felker, but he abandoned the family when Zitkala-Ša was young.

            Zitkala-Ša lived on the reservation until she was eight in “freedom and happiness” (2).  In 1884, missionaries arrived at the reservation and Zitkala-Ša was taken to White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana.  White’s was a Quaker school set up to educate the poor and unfortunate so they could do better in life. 

            While Zitkala-Ša was only at White’s for three years, it was hugely important in her life.  In The School Days of an Indian Girl, published in 1921, Zitkala-Ša wrote of the “deep misery of having her heritage stripped away, when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her traditionally long hair, and the contrasting joy of learning to read and write, and to play the violin” (3).

            In 1887, when Zitkala-Ša returned to the reservation, she didn’t feel like she belonged anymore, and so, in 1891, she returned to White’s, wanting more education.  White’s taught girls enough to become house-keepers, but Zitkala-Ša wanted more than that.  She learned piano and violin, and became the music teacher when the previous teacher resigned.  It was around this time that Gertrude Simmons adopted the name Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird) as a way of “asserting both her independence from and her ties to Sioux culture” (4).  Zitkala-Ša is a Lakota name, though she grew up speaking Nakota.  One source posits that choosing a Lakota name “might indicate a profound dislocation from her family origins, as well as a conscious choice” (5).

            In 1895, Zitkala-Ša received her diploma and her mother wanted her to come back home, but Zitkala-Ša went on to Earlham College in Indiana on a scholarship.  At Earlham, though, Zitkala-Ša felt isolated from her white fellow students.  The students only paid attention to her after she gave a speech, “Side by Side”, and won the Indiana State Oratorical Contest in 1896.  Zitkala-Ša did well at Earlham, but unfortunately had to leave just over a month before graduation due to illness.

            Around this same time Zitkala-Ša began compiling Native American legends.  She would translate them into Latin and then English, in the hopes of getting children to read them.  Compiling legends would become one of the focuses of Zitkala-Ša’s life.

            For her violin playing, Zitkala-Ša received a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she attended from 1897 to 1899.  In 1899, she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.  Zitkala-Ša taught music to the children, and “conducted debates on the treatment of Native Americans” (6).

            While employed by Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša played at the 1900 Paris Exposition with the school’s Indian Band.  At this time she also began writing about Native American life, getting published in Harper’s Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, and others.  These articles upset the higher-ups at Carlisle and so she was sent out West, ostensibly to recruit students, but more likely to remove her from the publishing centers in the United States.

            When Zitkala-Ša arrived back out West, she found her mother’s home in an awful state and her brother’s family living in poverty.  Additionally, there were white settlers on the lands that the Yankton Dakota had been given in 1877 through the Dawes Act (7).

            Zitkala-Ša returned to Carlisle after a while, but upon her return her conflicts with the founder of the school intensified.  She didn’t like that the school focused on assimilating Native students into white culture, and only trained its students for low-level jobs; the school assumed its students would return to where they had come from and that they wouldn’t need more than a basic education.  Carlisle also didn’t like her stories, calling them “worse than pagan” and “trash” (8).

            Due to her continued conflicts with Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša was dismissed from her position in 1901.  She had had an article published in Harper’s Monthly that year that told of a boy at the school who felt a loss of identity after his education.  After being dismissed, Zitkala-Ša returned home to Yankton, worried for her family.  Also at this time, the Native American stories and legends she had been compiling were collected and published in Old Indian Legends, commissioned by a Boston company.  Old Indian Legends was published to high acclaim; in 1919 she received a letter of praise for the book from Helen Keller.

            Upon returning to Yankton, Zitkala-Ša took a position as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Standing Rock Indian Reservation.  In 1902, Zitkala-Ša met Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin; they married later that year.  Bonnin was raised Yankton Dakota as well, but was only one quarter to one half Dakota.  Shortly after marrying, Bonnin was transferred to Utah; they moved to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation where they lived for fourteen years, and where their only child, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin, was born.

            While in Utah, Zitkala-Ša met William F. Hanson, a professor at Brigham Young University.  Hanson was also a composer, and the two began a musical collaboration in 1910.  Based on a sacred Sioux ritual that the U.S. government had prohibited from being done on the Utah reservations, The Sun Dance Opera premiered in Vernal, Utah in 1913.  Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and the songs for the opera, the first opera co-written by a Native American.  In performances, Ute performers danced and played some parts, but all of the lead singing was done by white people.  The opera received much praise upon its premiere.  It was performed periodically by rural troupes over the years before premiering in New York in 1938.  The advertisements in New York only mentioned Hanson.

            While in Utah, Zitkala-Ša joined the Society of American Indians, which was formed in 1911.  She served as its secretary until 1916, and edited its journal, American Indian Magazine, from 1918 to 1919.  SAI members had to have Indian blood.  They were assimilationist, but also promoted Native American self-determination.  A main goal was to get full American citizenship for Native Americans.  (Towards the end of the twentieth century, SAI was criticized “as misguided in their strong advocacy of citizenship and employment rights for Native Americans.  Such critics believe that Native Americans have lost cultural identity as they have become more part of mainstream American society.” [9])

            Zitkala-Ša criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs for prohibiting Native American children’s use of their native languages and cultural practices.  In the 1920s, Zitkala-Ša helped promote a pan-Indian movement to help get citizenship rights.  In 1924 the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, but it did not secure citizenship for all Native Americans.

            In 1926, Zitkala-Ša and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians.  This group, too, worked to unite all Native Americans in a hopes to get full citizenship rights through suffrage.  Zitkala-Ša served as NCAI’s president, speaker, and major fundraiser from its founding until her death.  When the group was revived in 1944, Zitkala-Ša’s work was dismissed.

            Zitkala-Ša died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, D.C.  She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery due to her husband’s service in World War One.  She is buried as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.  There is a crater on Venus named Bonnin in her honor (all craters on Venus are named for women or have women’s names).

            It’s agreed that Zitkala-Ša had two major periods of work.  The first is from 1900 to 1904.  This period includes the Native American legends and her autobiographical pieces, showing the conflicts between her cultural traditions and assimilation into white culture.  Many of these pieces were published in Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly.  The second period is from 1916 to 1924.  These are her political works.  Zitkala-Ša and her family had moved to Washington, D.C., and Zitkala-Ša became increasingly political on behalf of Native Americans and women.

            Some of Zitkala-Ša’s most influential works are from this second period.  American Indian Stories was published in 1921.  She was also co-author of 1923’s Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery.  Her co-authors were Charles H. Fabens, from the American Indian Defense Association, and Matthew K. Sniffen of the Indian Rights Association.  Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians exposed “the corrupt land allocation policies in place at the time in Oklahoma” (10).  This work “resulted in her appointment as an advisor to the U.S. government’s Meriam Commission of 1928, the findings of which eventually led to several important reforms” (11) and influenced Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

            Zitkala-Ša’s writings were “the first major literary pieces written by a Native American in English that deal with Native American culture and the process of assimilation from an Indian’s point of view” (12).  She’s so interesting.  I’m going to have to read some of her writings now, many of which are available online.      

1 - Pinterest caption

2, 3, 6, 7, 9 - Zitkala-Sa

4, 5, 8 - Zitkala-sa, Sioux Indian

10, 12 - Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

11 - Zitkala-Sa, Encyclopædia Brittanica