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