A Cultural Duet: Zitkala-sa and The Sun

A Cultural Duet: Zitkala-sa and The Sun Dance Opera

Jane Hafen, an English professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, writes about Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’s (Zitkala Sa) collaboration with fellow musician William F. Hanson in creating a “spectacle that combined the musical style of operetta, a melodramatic love triangle, and traditional Plains Indian ritual” (103). The Sun Dance Opera blends Native American musical stylings with opera, the west’s trademark venue of expression. Bonnin’s creation of the opera was an exercise in selfhood, reasserting her identity as a Native American woman, and used a mainstream tradition (the opera) as a means to convey this cultural sense of self to a wider audience. Hanson’s motives, however, proved to be less benevolent, using his association with Bonnin and other Native Americans for his own gain through, as Hafen puts it, “an artistic colonialism” (103). While Hanson briefly accredits Bonnin as co-writer of the opera in his memoir, “his name alone appears on the title page” and “selected for performance on Broadway in 1938, Hanson claims sole proprietorship of the opera” (106).

Hafen continues by listing Bonnin’s scholastic accomplishments, including writing the novels Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories, and her publications in Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, all of which express her unique experiences throughout the various stages of her life as a Yankton Sioux woman.

Hafen presents one potential reason for Bonnin’s desire to write the opera:

“She may have considered that placing a very Indian ritual in the context of high opera was a cultural dissolution of hierarchy. If Native music were considered as valid as the sublime expression of western civilization, then Indian peoples would have to be subject to racial injustice (105).

In presenting her culture to the masses through a widely-accepted and familiar medium, Bonnin may have thought the presentation of The Sun Dance Opera would encourage acceptance and foster understanding about the Native American culture.

Hafen recognizes that Bonnin’s specific motives in crafting the opera are unclear due to Bonnin’s lack of writing on the subject; however Hafen concludes the article by stating that making the opera “asserts the value of her specific tribal traditions while revealing her own romanticism with love songs and flutes.” Hanson, while under the guise of preserving the Native American culture, dominates the final creative decisions and claims sole authorship through, as Hafen describes it, “a sentimental colonialism” (109).

For Hafen, Bonnin’s disassociation with the opera had everything to do with her political activism, which commanded her time; Bonnin and her husband, Raymond, fought for various tribes’ rights to the land they lived upon for generations. Hafen sums up the article by expressing that Bonnin’s “artistic expression was a luxury that paled against political imperatives and financial and family challenges” (110).

Source:

Hafen, Jane. "A Cultural Duet: Zitkala Ša And The Sun Dance Opera." Great Plains Quarterly (1998): 102-11. DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Web. 1 Dec. 2014. <http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3027&context=greatplainsquarterly>.