Zitkala-Ša: She Wrote the Opera, He Filed the Copyright

Posted by by Female Obscura

She wrote the first American Indian opera. The copyright named one white man, and it was not her.

In 1913, an opera opened in Vernal, Utah, built on the Sun Dance, a Plains ceremony the United States government had outlawed in 1904. Its story, its songs, and its cultural spine came from a Yankton Dakota woman who had trained as a concert violinist and published in the Atlantic Monthly.

When the work was entered into the United States Copyright Office, her name was not on it.

Her name was Zitkala-Ša.

The woman who built it

She was born Gertrude Simmons on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876. In her teens she took the Lakota name Zitkala-Ša, Red Bird. Quaker missionaries took her east at eight years old to a boarding school that cut her hair and forbade her language. She learned to read, to write, and to play the violin there, and she never stopped naming the system for what it was.

She studied violin at the New England Conservatory, performed at the White House for President McKinley, and wrote essays for the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s that attacked the boarding schools built to erase Native identity. By 1910 she was living on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where she met William F. Hanson, a music professor at Brigham Young University.

Together they made The Sun Dance Opera, the first American Indian opera.

The idea to center it on the Sun Dance was hers. She wrote the libretto and the songs. She played traditional Sioux melodies on the violin while Hanson notated them at the piano. She chose the costumes, trained the performers, and named the lead character Ohiya after her own son. The Library of Congress puts the stakes plainly: without her insistence on the Sun Dance as the basis, without her collaboration in gathering the material, without her musical skill, the opera “might not have taken shape at all.”

What the record actually shows

Here is the part that gets flattened when this story circulates online, and the part that matters most.

Zitkala-Ša was not invisible in 1913. A December 1913 article in the El Paso Herald ran under the headline “Indian Girl Writes Opera” and named her as the writer, with Hanson as her collaborator. After the first production, Hanson himself signed over to her an “undivided half interest” in the work and had it notarized in Uintah County, Utah.

He never recorded that assignment with the Copyright Office.

What he did record, and what the federal record therefore shows, is his name alone. The copyright registration for The Sun Dance Opera lists Wm. F. Hanson as the sole claimant. His name alone appears on the title page. The private acknowledgment stayed private. The official register named one author, and it was not the woman who built the thing.

That is the mechanism. Not a theft in a single night. A credit that lived in the newspapers and in a notarized side agreement, and never once entered the record that institutions treat as the truth.

The 1938 erasure

The opera returned in 1938, revised, at the Broadway Theatre in New York. The New York Opera Guild presented it as its opera of the year.

Zitkala-Ša had no part in it. She was not consulted on the revisions. Hanson doubled the length and rewrote the songs, and when the vocal score went out, her name was left off it. She did not live to see the run. She died in Washington, D.C., on January 26, 1938, months before the New York premiere, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The historian P. Jane Hafen has a name for what Hanson did across his life. She calls it “artistic colonialism.” He gave Zitkala-Ša varying amounts of credit depending on the decade and the document. Late in life he handwrote her name after the title on one copy of the score, and in his 1967 memoir he acknowledged her as a coauthor. None of it corrected the public record. The registration was never amended. To the institutions that keep the official story, The Sun Dance Opera had one author for most of a century.

The reversal

Zitkala-Ša did not need the opera to matter. She spent her life on larger things and let the credit fall where it fell.

She co-founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926 and led it until her death. Her 1924 report on the swindling of oil-rich tribes in Oklahoma, “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” forced a federal investigation. She helped win the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

In October 2024, the United States Mint began shipping a quarter bearing her face. The reverse shows her in Yankton Sioux dress, holding a book. A cardinal sits at her shoulder for Red Bird. Behind her, a stylized sun stands for the opera she wrote and did not get to sign.

The coin is in circulation now. The copyright registration still reads the way Hanson left it.

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