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Zitkala a, a Yankton Sioux, was among the first Native American authors to tell her own story without the aid of an editor or translator, and she was a significant figure in pan-Indian politics during the first part of the twentieth century. She was born Gertrude Simmons on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. As a little girl, at the enticement of missionaries, she left her mother and homeland to attend boarding school. In compelling narratives published in the
In 1901 Gertrude returned to the Yankton Reservation, where she met and married Raymond Bonnin. They worked for the Indian Bureau on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where Gertrude collaborated with William Hanson on the
In 1921 she published her earlier writings along with several new, more political pieces in