Zitkála-Šá

The base of this stained glass window in the Immaculate Conception Church of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, notes its dedication--"In memory of Sybil Bolton. . ."

Sybil Bolton was murdered, a young Osage woman who learned how to play the harp at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. She died back home, at the age of just 21 years old, mysteriously, I should add, with her baby at her side. She was buried in an ermine coat.

Sybil Bolton was one of many Osage people who came to untimely ends in a string of murders by white men, a few of whom were, in fact, married to the women who were killed, even fathers of their children. Those murders required significant collaboration, even with the law. All told, it's a horrible story, told unflinchingly--and most recently-- by the American journalist David Grann in Killers of the Flower Moon (2017). 

Starting with President Andrew Jackson in the 1830's, the American government simply assumed that the best possible solution to "the Indian problem"--Native Americans were simply in the way of real progress--was to slap them all into "Indian Territory," the region of the country where they could do what Indians do forever and ever. The Osage, who'd been pushed west for more than a hundred years, lived north in what eventually became Kansas. When they were herded south onto their parcel of Oklahoma land, no one had the slightest idea that the place floated on an ocean of liquid gold--oil. When the first gusher sprang from beneath the Osage feet, the Osage got filthy rich. Money somehow, maybe especially in America, draws flies and other vermin and, biblically at least, is the root of all evil.

Once the place was drilled, white men did what had to be done to secure what they could get of all that filthy lucre, including kill.

As we speak, Hollywood notables like Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jesse Plemmons, are hard at work in Pawhuska, creating a movie based on Killers of the Flower Moon.

David Grann's work is staggering, but it might be worth noting that one of the original investigations into what was happening in Osage County was accomplished by a writer named Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a Yankton Sioux, born just west of here on the Yankton Reservation, who wrote "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes--Legalized Robbery," a forty-page pamphlet published in 1924, when all that horror was still happening.

Just thought I'd mention it because today is her birthday, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, whose Yankton name was Zitkala-Sa.

I'd be amazed if ten people in the entire county ever heard of her, even though she is considered one of the most influential Native writers of the early 20th century. Once upon a time, this really was a Sioux county, Yankton country. I'm guessing she was born and reared not all that far from here, 145 years ago today.

Just thought I'd mention it.