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Actual records from Carlisle - not thrilling but interesting to glance at and picture might be useful.

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Standing Bear, Luther | Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center

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Luther Standing Bear (Kills Plenty) Student File

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Zitkála-Šá ("Red Bird"), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, w as a Native American musician, writer and activist who fought for women's suffrage and Indigenous voting rights in the early 20th century. Her writings and activism led to citizenship and voting rights for not only women, but all Indigenous people.

Zitkála-Šá was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876, the same year that the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples defeated the U.S. Army under the command of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. She was a member of the Yankton Sioux (or Dakota) Nation. Her mother, "Reaches for the Wind" or Ellen Simmons, was of Sioux Dakota heritage and her father was of French descent. After her father abandoned the family, Zitkála-Šá was raised by her mother and aunts. At the age of eight, missionaries from the White's Manual Labor Institute came to the reservation to recruit children for their boarding school. Zitkála-Šá's mother was hesitant to send her, but Zitkála-Šá was eager to attend and convinced her mother. Zitkála-Šá attended the Quaker-run boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. Zitkála-Šá's time at the school was traumatic. These boarding schools were part of a larger attempt to assimilate Indigenous people into the United States while erasing Native traditions and culture. One of these methods was forcibly sending Native children to white run boarding schools and outlawing the practice of Indigenous cultural and religious traditions. While the missionary school taught her English literacy, Zitkála-Šá was beaten and punished for speaking her tribal language or practicing her Sioux culture.

Zitkála-Šá graduated from White's Manual Labor Institute and enrolled in a teacher training program at Earlham College, where she was one of the few Indigenous students, before transferring to The New England Conservatory of Music to study violin. At the Paris Exposition in 1900, she performed a violin solo with the Carlisle Indian Band. Later in 1913, she worked with a composer to write the opera, She wrote autobiographical essays and short stories under her Sioux name "Zitkála-Šá" meaning "Red Bird" in the Yankton language. Her works were printed in publications such as Sundance, that utilized traditional Yankton rituals, dance, and melodies. It premiered in Utah and was performed by rural troupes before being performed in 1938 by the New York Light Opera Guild. While studying music in Boston, she began to work on her writings. Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Weekly. Her first book, Old Indian Legends, was significant because it translated many Sioux myths to English to preserve for future generations.

By 1900, Zitkála-Šá was teaching music and speech at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She believed the administration at the school patronized Native students by offering a limited vocational instruction instead of more academic subjects. She left the position within two years, unable to work for an institution which reminded her of her own traumatic experience as a child. She continued to write about her experiences and frustrations. Her writings, such as American Indian Stories (1921) and Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians (1927), focused on Dakota history and culture, corruption of the United States government at the expense of Native people, and the trauma and terror experienced by Indigenous children who were separated from their families and culture in these boarding schools. Other of her essays and short stories appeared in national magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly.

After leaving Carlisle, Zitkála-Šá returned to home on the reservation and began to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a clerk while continuing to write. In 1902, she published an article in Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic) called "Why I am a Pagan,"in which she wrote about her traditional beliefs to counter the trend of Native converting and assimilating to Christianity. As she wrote and worked for the BIA, she met and in 1902 married Captain Raymond Talephause Bonnin, who was also of Yankton Sioux ancestry. When Bonin was assigned to be superintendent of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation Agency, the couple moved to Utah. The couple lived and worked on the reservation for 14 years and had a son, Raymond Ohiya Bonin. While on the reservation, Zitkála-Šá witnessed white employees of the Reservation Agency treating Uintah and Ouray peoples with extreme prejudice. Her observations influenced her critique of the federal policy involving Native Americans. She believed the reservation system was corrupt, offered limited employment opportunities, and was ultimately under the control of white Americans, meaning Native Americans were left without the power to make their own choices.

In 1911, she joined the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization founded for and by Native Americans to challenge the wardship status of Native Americans and their lack of U.S. citizenship. Zitkála-Šá was one of many women in the SAI who advocated for women's suffrage and in 1917 she became the secretary of the SAI and moved to Washington, D.C. Here, she became a visible part of the Women's Suffrage Movement and spoke at the National Women's Party headquarters in 1918. Zitkála-Šá's beliefs about women's equality were influenced by the strong women in her family, her culture, and her experience in Quakers schools.

She educated her audiences about the injustices being carried out against Indigenous peoples and nations in the United States. She pointed out to her readers that the federal government had power over a people left without a say in how their land or money was managed. She pointed to the irony that the "First Americans" lacked a political voice and urged the public to enfranchise Native Americans - both women and men.

In August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, taking away sex as a barrier to voting for citizens. However, at least one third of Native adults lacked U.S. citizenship and therefore still could not vote. Zitkála-Šá continued her fight for Native American citizenship and suffrage, urging American women who now had the vote to help support an Indian citizenship bill. She traveled around the U.S., calling on white women to use their newly won suffrage rights to enfranchise Native peoples. In 1924, in part due to Zitkála-Šá's advocacy, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act that endowed full citizenship rights to all native-born people in the country.

In 1926, Zitkála-Šá and her husband formed the National Council of American Indians to connect the political activism of Natives across the country. They traveled, heard concerns, discussed policy and legislation, and registered voters. As some states began to adopt strategies similar to Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Native people, Zitkála-Šá kept advocating for Native rights, suffrage, and self-governance until her death on January 26, 1938. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to and sharing a headstone with her husband.

Zitkála-Šá was one of the most important reformers of the 20 th century. She helped empower Indigenous people by writing about their culture, history, personal experience, and concerns. Her writings forced the audience to face the complexities and beauty of Indigenous culture and the tragedy of the Native experience in America. And her activism influenced change that advocated for citizenship rights, better educational opportunities, improved health care and cultural recognition and preservation for Native Americans.

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Zitkála-Šá ("Red Bird"/Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

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Zitkála-Šá ("Red Bird"), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, w as a Native American musician, writer and activist who fought for women's suffrage and Indigenous voting rights in the early 20th century. Her writings and activism led to citizenship and voting rights for not only women, but all Indigenous people.

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Life Story: Zitkala-Sa - Women & the American Story

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Zitkala-Sa was an activist and composer who fought tirelessly for Native American rights and citizenship in the early 20th century.

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Zitkala-Ša, having grown her hair back out after her stay at the missionary school, and her violin.
Photo by Gertrude Kasebier, 1898. Smithsonian Institution.

Zitkála-Šá ("Red Bird") was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876. A member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux, she was raised by her mother after her father abandoned the family. When she was eight years old, Quaker missionaries visited the reservation. They took several of the children (including Zitkála-Šá) to Wabash, Indiana to attend White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. Zitkála-Šá left despite her mother's disapproval. At this residential school, Zitkála-Šá was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. She attended the Institute until 1887. She was conflicted about the experience, and wrote both of her great joy in learning to read and write and to play the violin, as well as her deep grief and pain of losing her heritage by being forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her hair.

She returned to live with her mother on the Yankton Reservation in 1887, but left only three years later. She felt that she did not fit in after her experiences at the Institute. At fifteen years old, she returned to the Institute to further her education. Her study of piano and violin led the Institute to hire her as a music teacher. She graduated in 1895. When she received her diploma, Zitkála-Šá gave a speech advocating for women's rights.

Instead of returning home, Zitkála-Šá accepted a scholarship she was offered at Earlham College in Richmond Indiana. It was while at Earlham that she began to collect stories from Native tribes. She translated the stories into Latin and English. In 1897, just six weeks before she was to graduate, Zitkála-Šá had to leave Earlham because of financial and health issues. Again, she chose not to return to the reservation. Instead, she moved to Boston, where she studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music.[1]

In 1899, she took a job as music teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.[2] From 1879 until 1918, it was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States, and used as a model for many others. In 1900, the school sent Zitkála-Šá back to the Yankton Reservation to gather more students. She was shocked to find her family home in disrepair. Many people on the reservation lived in deep poverty, and white settlers were occupying land given to the Yankton Dakota people by the federal government. Zitkála-Šá returned to Carlisle and began writing about Native American life. Her autobiographical and Lakota stories presented her people as generous and loving instead of the common racist stereotypes that portrayed Native Americans as ignorant savages. These stereotypes were being used as arguments why Native Americans needed to be assimilated into white American society. Her writing, which was deeply critical of the boarding school system, was published in the national English-language magazines including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly. In 1901, she wrote a piece for Harper's that described the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School. She was fired from Carlisle.

Afterwards, Zitkála-Šá spent some time back at home on the reservation taking care of her mother and collecting stories for her book, Old Indian Legends. She also took work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a clerk. She married Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin in 1902. They were assigned to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah, where they lived and worked for the next fourteen years. While there, they had a son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.

In 1910, Zitkála-Šá met William F. Hanson, a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah. They collaborated on an opera. Sun Dance was completed in 1913. Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and songs for the story, based on a sacred Sioux ritual that the federal government had prohibited. Sun Dance was the first American Indian opera written. It is a symbol of how Zitkála-Šá lived in and bridged both her traditional Native American world and the world of white America that she was raised in.

While on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship. Beginning in 1916, Zitkála-Šá was the Society's secretary. In this position, she corresponded with the BIA. She became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Bureau's assimilationist policies and practice, reporting abuse of children when they, for example, refused to pray as Christians. Her husband Raymond was fired from the BIA office in 1916.

The family moved to Washington, DC. Zitkála-Šá continued her work with the Society of American Indians, where she was colleagues with Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin. From 1918 to 1919 Zitkála-Šá edited their journal, American Indian Magazine. She lectured across the country, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural and tribal identities (though she was adamantly against the traditional use of peyote, likening it to the destructive effects of alcohol in Native communities). While being sharply critical of assimilation, she was firm in her conviction that Indigenous people in America should be American citizens, and that as citizens, they should have the vote: "In the land that was once his own - America... there was never a time more opportune than now for American to enfranchise the Red man!"[3] As original occupants of the land, she argued, Native Americans needed to be represented in the current system of government.

The federal Indian Citizenship Act passed in 1924. It granted US citizenship rights to all Native Americans. However, this did not guarantee the vote. States retained the authority to decide who could and could not vote. In 1926, Zitkála-Šá and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians. Until her death in 1938, she served as president, fundraiser, and speaker. The Council worked to unite the tribes across the United States to gain suffrage for all Indians. Zitkála-Šá also worked with white suffrage groups and was active in the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) beginning in 1921. Zitkála-Šá created the Indian Welfare Committee of GFWC in 1924. That year, she ran a voter registration drive among Native Americans, encouraging those who could to engage in the democratic process and support legislation that would be good for Native Americans.[4]

The same year, Zitkála-Šá also published a report entitled "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes - Legalized Robbery." This article was instrumental in getting the government to investigate the exploitation and defrauding of Native Americans by outsiders for access to oil-rich lands.

Until her death on January 26, 1928, Zitkála-Šá continued to work for improvements in education, health care, and legal recognition of Native Americans as well as the preservation of Native American culture. She died in Washington, DC. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with her husband. Sharing a headstone, she is memorialized as: "His Wife / Gertrude Simmons Bonnin / Zitkala-Ša of the Sioux Indians / 1876-1936."[5]

Discover the Places of Zitkála-Šá.

Notes:

[1] The New England Conservatory of Music at 290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 14, 1980.

[2] The Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on July 4, 1961. Explore the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School with our Teaching with Historic Places Lesson Plan, " The Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Assimilation with Education after the Indian Wars."

[3] Zitkala-Ša (as Gertrude Bonin), "Editorial Comment," American Indian Magazine 6 (1919): 162.

[4] It was not until 1962, when New Mexico enfranchised Native Americans that all American Indians could vote.

[5] The Arlington National Cemetery Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 2014. She was eligible for burial in Arlington National Cemetery because her husband had been an Army Captain.

Sources:
Barker, Joanne. 2015. Indigenous Feminisms. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous People's Politics, edited by Jose Antonio Lucero, Dale Turner, and Donna Lee VanCott. Oxford University Press.

Conley, Paige Allison. 2013. Stories, Traces of Discourse, and the Tease of Presence: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin as Orator and Indigenous Activist. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Find A Grave. " Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938)."

Johnson, David L. and Raymond Wilson. 1988. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876-1938: "Americanize the First American." American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 27-40.

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Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird / Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) (U.S. National Park Service)

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Zitkála-Šá ("Red Bird") was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876. A member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux, she was raised by her mother after her father abandoned the family. When she was eight years old, Quaker missionaries visited the reservation.

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By P. Jane Hafen

Gertrude Simmons was born on the Dakota Plains in 1876, the same year as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, also known as the Battle of Little Big Horn. As a Yankton Sioux, she lived her life through the Plains Indian wars, the Boarding School Era, and changing politics to the New Era of Indian Affairs in 1938.

Gertrude is most well known for writing about her young life on the Plains and going to Boarding School. There she was forced to learn English and to change her life into what non-Indians expected of her. Rather than becoming a domestic worker, she took her skills and became a famous writer, musician, and speaker. She gave herself the Lakota name Zitkála-Šá, which means Red Bird. For a while she taught at Carlisle Indian School, the most famous of the Indian Boarding Schools. She turned to writing her own story, collecting her tribal stories, and returned to South Dakota.

While in South Dakota, Gertrude met and married Raymond Bonnin. Together they looked for jobs and eventually moved to Utah where they both worked for the Indian Bureau, the forerunner to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, on the Uintah Ouray reservation. Gertrude felt isolated in Utah, so she worked with the local Ute women, teaching them to sew, to cook, and to budget. In the evenings she and Raymond would have musical gatherings.

Those socials led to her friendship with BYU music professor William Hansen and together they wrote The Sun Dance Opera. Based on Sioux rituals and melodies, the opera combined local trained singers and tribal members who would sing traditional and sacred songs. They traveled around Utah and gave a number of performances.

In 1911 a group of former Boarding School students formed the Society of American Indians. From many different tribes across the United States, they worked together to influence politics and fight for rights for Indians. Gertrude wrote about working in Utah for their magazine. She and Raymond moved to Washington D. C., where she became the magazine's editor and Raymond worked for the Army in World War I.

Among her editorial writings, Gertrude campaigned for citizenship for American Indians, especially the Indian soldiers who fought in the war. After the war she continued her battle for Indian citizenship. She was supported by General Federation of Women's Clubs on the East coast and in California. In 1924 the American Indian Citizenship Act was passed, although some states such as Utah, took a long time to extend the right to vote to Indians.

Gertrude fiercely fought against the use of peyote. Unfortunately, that battle led to sharp divisions among her associates with the Society of American Indians. She and Raymond also fought for land and treaty rights. In 1926 they formed the National Council of American Indians to represent tribal nations before Congress. Gertrude served as NCAI president. She was also involved in investigating crimes against Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s. After the passage of the Indian "New Deal" in 1934, Raymond prepared legal claims under the Indian Claims Act. Those claims were settled for the Consolidated Ute Tribes in Utah and Colorado in 1951, after Gertrude and Raymond's passing.

Gertrude helped raise her four grandchildren in Washington, D.C. while her son Ohiya lived in Roosevelt, Utah. She passed away in 1938 and had a Mormon funeral. She and Raymond are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She left a legacy of telling the Indian Boarding School experience and of standing up for Indian Rights.
P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) is a Professor Emerita from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Read more about American Indian voting rights in Utah here. Many of Zitkála-Šá's records are at BYU's special collections library, highlighted in this blog post. And stay tuned - Zitkála-Šá is being honored on a quarter in Fall 2024!

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Gertrude Simmons was born on the Dakota Plains in 1876, the same year as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, also known as the Battle of Little Big Horn. As a Yankton Sioux, she lived her life through the Plains Indian wars, the Boarding School Era, and changing politics to the New Era of Indian Affairs in 1938.

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Luther Standing Bear : Aktá Lakota Museum & Cultural Center

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Luther Standing Bear was born in 1868 on the Pine Ridge Reservation to an Oglala Lakota family. His family named him Óta Kté – Plenty Kill, but he later took his father’s […]

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Biography. The second son of Omaha chief Joseph La Flesche, Francis La Flesche attended the Presbyterian Mission school and participated in tribal ceremonies associated with approaching manhood. His mission education proved useful in his work as an interpreter and research assistant for James Owen Dorsey, who arrived on the Omaha reservation in 1878 to continue his studies in Dhegiha Siouan languages. In 1879 La Flesche accompanied his sister, Susette, and uncle, Ponca chief Standing Bear, on their grueling Eastern crusade for Indian land reform, and took a job a year later as a copyist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, working at night to complete two law degrees. He formally transferred to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1910, although he had been engaged in research for the Bureau for a number of years. During his tenure at the Bureau of American Ethnology he also began his lifelong friendship and collaboration with Alice Fletcher, who became first his employer, then his tutor and colleague, and who eventually adopted him as her son.

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Basil Johnston, Anishnaabe writer, storyteller, language teacher and scholar, was born on the Parry Island Indian Reserves in Ontario, Canada, in 1929. He attended elementary school at the Cape Croker Indian Reserve school until the age of 10, after which he attended St. Peter Claver's Indian Residential School in Spanish, Ontario. He left school for a time before finishing the ninth grade, but soon learned that it would be difficult to support himself without further education. In the meantime, St. Peter Claver's had gained a new Father Superior who reorganized the school as Garnier Residential School for Indian Boys to deliver a secondary school education, instead of as a trade school. In 1950 Johnston graduated valedictorian from Garnier and then attended Loyola College in Montreal where he graduated with honors, earning a B.A. in 1954. An account of his school years can be read in Indian School Days.

From 1955 through 1961 Basil Johnston was employed by the Toronto Board of Trade. He received his Secondary School Teaching Certificate from the Ontario College of Education in 1962, and took a position teaching history at the Earl Haig Secondary School in North York until 1969. He then joined the Ethnology Department of the Royal Ontario Museum where he worked for the next 25 years with a mandate to record and celebrate Ojibway (Anishinaabe) heritage, especially language and mythology. His writings began appearing in print in 1970. The first essay, "Bread Before Books or Books Before Bread," which appeared in The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians, recounts events contributing to the deterioration of the Native American culture. For the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs Johnston wrote the Ojibway Language Course Outline and the Ojibway Language Lexicon in 1978. Basil is a fluent speaker, scholar, and teacher of the Anishnaabe language who writes in both English and Anishnaabe. He is often sought as a translator, perhaps because his translations display a sensitivity to both the Ojibway and English languages. Since the key to understanding culture is language, to provide this key, Basil Johnston has developed audio programs on cassette and CD.

Back in 1968 a grade 5 student, after studying Indians in-depth for five weeks, asked Basil Johnston, a visitor to the school, "Is that all there is to Indians, Sir?" Since that time Basil has written 15 books in English and 5 in Ojibway to show that there is much more to North American Indian life than social organization, hunting and fishing, food preparation, clothing, dwellings and transportation. In addition he has written numerous articles that have been published in newspapers, anthologies and periodicals. In 1978 he developed the script for the film, "The Man, the Snake and the Fox", still available from the National Film Board of Canada. Basil travels extensively throughout Canada and the U.S. to speak about the Ojibway culture and language. He often visits Canadian and U.S. Ojibway reserves and reservations and schools where he continues to pass down the stories, customs, and history of the Ojibway people in the Ojibway oral tradition.

Writing available online

Excerpt from the Introduction to Honour Earth Mother

Awards

For his work in preserving Ojibway language and culture, he has received the Order of Ontario and Honourary Doctorates from the University of Toronto and Laurentian University. Basil has also received the2004 Aboriginal Achievement Award for Heritage and Spirituality

A short biography from the Internet Public Library's Native American Author's Project is available.

This website has become an Amazon.com Associate site. When a book is available through Amazon.com, we will provide a direct link to their listing for the book, allowing you to place an order at that time. You may move back and forth between the Amazon.com site and this site, maintaining the integrity of your order.

Books by Basil Johnston or containing his work

Language Courses

Ojibway language course outline for beginners, Indian and Inuit Affairs Program.

Ojibway language lexicon for beginners, Indian and Inuit Affairs Program.

Anthologies

Canada: Discovering Our Heritage,

with David Smith, Chris Andreae, Ann MacKenzie, & E. Mitchner, Ginn Pr. [Buy from Amazon Canada]

The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians, Waubageshig (Editor), New Press.

This is an "official" site in that this page was constructed with the assistance and active collaboration of the author, Basil Johnston. The website "author" is Karen M. Strom

© 2004 Basil Johnston and Karen Strom.
Return to the Storytellers Frontdoor

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Basil Johnston, Anishnaabe writer, storyteller, language teacher and scholar, was born on the Parry Island Indian Reserves in Ontario, Canada, in 1929. He attended elementary school at the Cape Croker Indian Reserve school until the age of 10, after which he attended St. Peter Claver's Indian Residential School in Spanish, Ontario.

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Technically about a documentary but has a lot of good info.

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Peter LaFarge LaFarge, Pete born 1931 in Fountain/Colorado died 27. 10. 1965 Record Labels: Columbia, Folkways Pete LaFarge, son of Pulitzer Prize winner and rights campaigner for the Indians Oliver LaFarge, was a talented…

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Rita Joe's book For the Children at a public library

Early Life and Education

Rita Joe was born to Joseph and Annie Bernard of the Mi'kmaq nation. She spent her early childhood on a reserve at Whycocomagh on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Rita's mother died when she was only five; subsequently she was sent to live with foster families. At the age of nine, Rita returned to her reserve to live with her father and siblings, Annabel, Soln, Roddy and Matt. About a year later, Rita's father died, once again forcing her into foster homes. At the age of 12, Rita entered the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School on mainland Nova Scotia ( see Residential Schools). Like many Indigenous children, Rita was forbidden to speak her Mi'kmaq language in the school that she likened to the military. When she had completed school, Rita had to re-learn her native language by talking to Mi'kmaq speakers ( see Indigenous Languages in Canada).

Rita worked various jobs in Nova Scotia before moving to Boston. It was there that she met Frank Joe, her future husband. Frank was originally from Eskasoni, a Mi'kmaq First Nation close to Rita's home reserve. Rita later returned to Cape Breton to live on the Eskasoni reserve, where she and Frank raised 10 children, including two foster sons.

After Rita's literary career took off in the 1970s, she went back to school to complete high school and take a course in business education. Her husband Frank also returned to school and received a bachelor of education as well as a degree in sociology.

Rita Joe's Poetry

Rita Joe's experiences as a Mi'kmaq person in Canada deeply influenced her works. In her writing, Joe sought to challenge the negative messages she encountered about her Indigenous identity at residential school and as an adult in the books her own children were reading. In the prologue to her memoir, Song of Rita Joe (1996), she states: "My greatest wish is that there will be more writing from my people, and that our children will read it. I have said again and again that our history would be different if it had been expressed by us."

Although Joe began writing in the late 1960s, her first collection of poetry, Poems of Rita Joe, was published in 1978. Her second volume, Song of Eskasoni: More Poems of Rita Joe appeared in 1988 and contained one of her most well-known poems, "I Lost My Talk." The poem speaks about how residential school altered her very identity: "I speak like you / I think like you / I create like you." At the end of the poem, Joe speaks about the possibility for reconciliation and reclaiming lost identity: "So gently I offer my hand and ask, / Let me find my talk / So I can teach you about me." Four lines of Joe's famous poem were included in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 's report on residential schools in Canada: "I lost my talk / The talk you took away. / When I was a little girl / At Shubenacadie School."

Her third book, Lnu and Indians We're Called, was released in 1991. Rita Joe's poetry is included in the 1994 anthology Kelusultiek: Original Women's Voices of Atlantic Canada. Kelusultiek, which takes its title from a poem by Rita Joe and translates as "we speak," also includes the lyrics and music to one of her best known songs, "Oka Song," as well as another well-known work, "The Drumbeat Is the Heartbeat of the Nation." The "Oka Song" was written in response to the 1990 land dispute and armed standoff at Oka ( see Oka Crisis). Rita Joe read "The Drumbeat Is the Heartbeat of the Nation" to dignitaries on Treaty Day in October 1992.

Her memoir, Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet, was published in 1996. She relates both the terrible difficulties and the amazing accomplishments of her life in unassuming but compelling prose. Her autobiography also includes poetry, music and photographs.

Rita Joe's now out-of-print first collection can also be found in We are the Dreamers: Recent and Early Poetry (1999). Her poems cover a wide range of subjects, from the domestic to the spiritual. Her language is blunt but lyrical, and she captures both the sorrow and joy of life. Joe co-edited, with Lesley Choyce, and contributed to The Mi'kmaq Anthology (1997) - a collection of stories, poems and essays written by Mi'kmaq people.

Works Inspired by Rita Joe: Film, Music and the Arts

Rita Joe is the subject of a 1993 documentary titled Song of Eskasoni. Directed by Brian Guns and narrated by Rita Joe, the film celebrates Mi'kmaq culture as reflected in her poetry.

In January 2016, the National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa premiered I Lost My Talk, a multimedia performance based on Joe's poem of the same name. The NAC orchestra performed music composed by John Estacio. A film directed by Barbara Willis Sweete accompanied the music. Shown on screens surrounding the stage, the film featured Indigenous dancers interpreting the poem and music in Killbear Provincial Park, near Parry Sound. Actor Monique Mojica of Guna and Rappahannock ancestry played Rita Joe on stage as she recited the poem. Produced and directed by Donna Feore, the performance shone a light on the legacy of residential schools in Canada. Commissioned by the family of former prime minister Joe Clark, who was an honourary witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the performance also sought to encourage discussion about reconciliation.

"I Lost My Talk" also inspired the Rita Joe National Song Project (2016), a program of the NAC that encouraged students to create a song based on what Rita Joe's poem means to them. Young artists from five selected communities across Canada sent in professional audio and visual recordings of their songs to the NAC to be showcased at the same time as the 2016 premiere of the performance based on Rita Joe's poem. The performance also featured live entertainment by youth from Maniwaki's Kitigan Zibi Kikinamadinan School in Maniwaki and ABMHS High School in Eskasoni, Cape Breton.

Publications

Poems of Rita Joe (1978)

Song of Eskasoni (1988)

Lnu and Indians We're Called (1991)

Kelusultiek: Original Women's Voices of Atlantic Canada (1994)

Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet (1996)

The Mi'kmaq Anthology (1997) (co-edited with Lesley Choyce)

We are the Dreamers (1999)

Awards and Honours

In addition to a number of honorary doctorates, Rita Joe has received the following awards and honours:

Significance

Upon her appointment to the Order of Canada, Rita Joe was described as a "true ambassador for her people, promoting [Indigenous] art and culture across Canada and in the United States." More affectionately known by some as the "gentle warrior" or the "warrior poet," Rita Joe is remembered for the way her poems expose truths about residential school and about growing up Indigenous in Canada, while also speaking about peace, reconciliation and healing.

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Rita Joe's book For the Children at a public library Rita Joe was born to Joseph and Annie Bernard of the Mi'kmaq nation. She spent her early childhood on a reserve at Whycocomagh on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Rita's mother died when she was only five; subsequently she was sent to live with foster families.

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Has information about the performance of "I Lost My Talk" performance for Canada's National Reconciliation Day. But also a lot of info about her.

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Rita Joe’s I Lost My Talk: A poem for reconciliation

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As Canada observes the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30, a day dedicated to acknowledging the legacy of residential schools and the ongoing journey toward healing, we invite Canadians to engage with I Lost My Talk, the…

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This has a transcript so you can directly quote it if you want, but there is also a 3 minute recording if you like listening!

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Louise Erdrich on her Native-American background

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Longer but has good information if you are feeling stuck!

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Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and re-visited the North Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, representing Chippewa experience in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to her Native ancestors' mythic and artistic visions while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and mixed heritage Americans. An essayist for Contemporary Novelists observed that "Erdrich's accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions-questions of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself." In addition to her numerous award-winning novels and short story collections, Erdrich has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Jacklight (1984), Baptism of Desire (1989) and Original Fire: New and Selected Poems (2003).

Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich attended Dartmouth College, part of the first class of women admitted to the college; her freshman year also coincided with the establishment of the Native-American studies department. The author's future husband and collaborator, anthropologist Michael Dorris, was hired to chair the department. In his class, Erdrich began the exploration of her own ancestry that would eventually inspire her poems, short stories and novels. Intent on balancing her academic training with a broad range of practical knowledge, Erdrich told Miriam Berkley in an interview with Publishers Weekly, "I ended up taking some really crazy jobs, and I'm glad I did. They turned out to have been very useful experiences, although I never would have believed it at the time." Erdrich also became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. She told Writers Digest interviewer Michael Schumacher: "Settling into that job and becoming comfortable with an urban community-which is very different from the reservation community-gave me another reference point. There were lots of people with mixed blood, lots of people who had their own confusions. I realized that this was part of my life-it wasn't something that I was making up-and that it was something I wanted to write about." In 1978, the author enrolled in an M.A. program at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote poems and stories incorporating her heritage, many of which would later become part of her books.

After receiving her master's degree, Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. Dorris-with whom she had remained in touch-attended a reading of Erdrich's poetry there and was impressed. A writer himself-Dorris would later publish the best-selling novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and receive the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction work The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome-he decided then that he was interested in working with Erdrich. Though Dorris left for New Zealand to do field research while Erdrich moved to Boston, the two began collaborating on short stories, including one titled "The World's Greatest Fisherman." When this story won five thousand dollars in the Nelson Algren fiction competition, Erdrich and Dorris decided to expand it into a novel- Love Medicine (1984), which went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. At the same time, Dorris had returned from New Zealand and their literary relationship led to a romantic one; they were married in 1981.

The publication of Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, also coincided with her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984). The poems in Jacklight center on the conflict between Native and non-Native cultures, but they also celebrate family bonds and the ties of kinship, offer autobiographical meditations, dramatic monologues and love poetry, as well as showing the influence of Ojibwa myths and legends. Erdrich has always claimed that her childhood, spent in a community of story-tellers, influenced her work and its concern with narrative. Much of Erdrich's poetry is narrative poetry, told in direct language that often relies, as in the section of Jacklight entitled "The Butcher's Wife," on dramatic monologue. In Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion, Lorena Laura Stookey noted that "Erdrich began her mature literary career as a poet, and the evidence of her origins can be found in her lyrical prose, in her deft use of imagery and metaphor, and in her employment within her fiction of patterned designs and recurring motifs. She began to move from poetry to fiction in 1980, when she became conscious of the narrative elements at work in her poems." There is some cross-over in between the novels and poetry: the poem "A Love Medicine" explores similar themes to Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, in addition to sharing its name.

Erdrich's next collection of poetry, Baptism of Desire (1989), takes its title from an obscure tenet of the Catholic Church. The book itself concerns spirituality and the hybrid form of religion, with Roman Catholic and Native values mingling but also conflicting, that Erdrich grew up practicing. Written during Erdrich's pregnancy, the volume also includes poems that focus on motherhood and children. The highly-praised poem "Hydra," written while Erdrich was pregnant, evokes her unborn child and a mythical serpent figure, while its speaker compares herself to the Biblical mothers Eve and Mary. In Library Journal, Kathleen Norris noted that throughout the book, Erdrich "appropriates and transforms the Catholic theology learned as a child." Original Fire: New and Selected Poems (2003) includes many poems from Erdrich's first two collections, as well as new poems on familiar subjects. In Booklist, Donna Seaman noted "Erdrich's fecund poems are seedbeds for her acclaimed novels," adding: "Deeply attuned to the sacred as it is manifest in everything from sunlight to stones to water to plants and animals, Erdrich grapples with both Native American and Christian beliefs, and the conflicts ignited by the friction between them, in poems of sweet gratitude, voluptuous ecstasy, cutting satire, seething grief, and fiery resolve." A reviewer for Publisher's Weekly noted Erdrich's influences ( Richard Hugo and Louise Glück), but added "Erdrich's particular landscapes and affiliations, and her way with myths and talismans, ensure that her poems, new and old, retain strengths all their own."

Undoubtedly, though, it is as a novelist that Erdrich is best known. Over the course of a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels, Erdrich has carved out an important place for herself and her work in contemporary American fiction. Erdrich's novels Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1997), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and Four Souls (2004) encompass the stories of three interrelated families living in and around a reservation in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, from 1912 through the present. The novels have been compared to those of William Faulkner, mainly due to the multi-voice narration and non-chronological storytelling which he employed in works such as As I Lay Dying. Erdrich's works, linked by recurring characters who are victims of fate and the patterns set by their elders, are structured like intricate puzzles in which bits of information about individuals and their relations to one another are slowly released in a seemingly random order, until three-dimensional characters-with a future and a past-are revealed. Through her characters' antics, Erdrich explores universal family life cycles while also communicating a sense of the changes and loss involved in the twentieth-century Native-American experience.

Though Erdrich's early works were written in collaboration with Michael Dorris, and the couple published a novel together, The Crown of Columbus (1991), the pair separated in 1995 and all of Erdrich's later work is hers alone. Dorris died by suicide in 1997. The Antelope Wife (1998) was the first book Erdrich released following Dorris's suicide, and although the author disavowed any relationship between herself and her characters, the story does include a self-destructive husband. In a New York Times review Michiko Kakutani described The Antelope Wife as "one of [Erdrich's] most powerful and fully imagined novels yet." Kakutani added: "Erdrich has returned to doing what she does best: using multiple viewpoints and strange, surreal tales within tales to conjure up a family's legacy of love, duty and guilt, and to show us how that family's fortunes have both shifted-and endured-as its members have abandoned ancient Indian traditions for a modern fast-food existence...As for Ms. Erdrich's own storytelling powers, they are on virtuosic display in this novel. She has given us a fiercely imagined tale of love and loss, a story that manages to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival. She has given us a wonderfully sad, funny and affecting novel." Though many of Erdrich's novels involve the same revolving cast of characters, in The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Erdrich focused on the European half of her ancestry, telling the stories of a World War I veteran, his wife and a large cast of characters in a small North Dakota town. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award finalist. Erdrich's 2008 novel A Plague of Doves was also widely praised and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

Winner of the National Book Award, Erdrich's novel, The Round House is set in 1988 in the same North Dakota Ojibwe reservation as that in The Plague of Doves. New York Times Book Review writer Maria Russo noted of The Round House: "Law is meant to put out society's brush fires, but in Native American history it has often acted more like the wind. Louise Erdrich turns this dire reality into a powerful human story in her new novel." Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that this novel "pulses with urgency as [Erdrich] probes the moral and legal ramifications of a terrible act of violence." A contributor to Christian Century found this novel to be a "powerful combination of art and social justice alert."

Erdrich has also written non-fiction, including a chronicle of her pregnancy and the birth of her first child, The Blue Jay's Dance (1995). She has also published a number of novels for children based on the lives of Native-American young people at the time of white encroachment. Her collected short stories were published as Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories in 2009. Her recent novels include LaRose (2016) and Future Home of the Living God (2017), both from HarperCollins.

Elizabeth Blair declared in World and I: "In an astonishing, virtuoso performance sustained over more than two decades, Erdrich has produced...interlinked novels that braid the lives of a series of fallible, lovable, and unpredictable characters of German, Cree, métis, and Ojibwe heritage." Blair continued: "The painful history of Indian-white relations resonates throughout her work. In her hands we laugh and cry while listening to and absorbing home truths that, taken to heart, have the power to change our world. We listen because these truths come sinew-stitched into the very fabric of the tapestry she weaves so artfully."

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Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and...

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Celia Haig-Brown received the Roderick Haig-Brown Prize for Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Tillicum / Pulp Press, 1988). Based on interviews with 13 former students, it’s a study of how Indigenous students were forced to attend and endure the Kamloops Residential School. The book was published...Read moreabout:Haig-Brown, Celia