Today’s Google Doodle has South Dakota connection

Google is honoring a Native American activist who was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation on what would have been her 145th birthday in today’s Google Doodle.

The logo on Google’s home page changes to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists.

Today, it features artwork of Yankton Dakota writer, musician, teacher, composer and suffragist Zitkala-Sa by artist Chris Pappan, who is of Osage, Kaw, Cheyenne River Sioux and European heritage.

Zitkala-Sa, which is Lakota for Red Bird, also is known by her missionary-given and later married name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.

Zitkala-Sa “wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity and the pull between the majority culture she was educated within and her Dakota culture into which she was born and raised,” according to her Wikipedia entry.

“Her later books were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white English-speaking readership, and she has been noted as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century.”

She also worked with American musician William F. Hanson to write the libretto and songs for “The Sun Dance Opera” in 1913, the first American Indian opera.

Zitkala-Sa also co-founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, “which was established to lobby for native people’s right to United States citizenship and other civil rights they had long been denied,” her Wikipedia entry said. She served as the council’s president until her death in 1938.