Detecting Indianness: Gertrude Bonnin's Investigation of Native American Identity

Be very cautious,—say nothing on this matter for publication. Just quitely [sic] secure information, but do not attempt to see them alone, always have a good friend with you.¹

With these words, American Indian activist and writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) sent Charlotte Jones, a new member of her National Council of American Indians (NCAI), on a kind of racial detective case to investigate "Princess Chinquilla," a New York woman who claimed to have been separated from her Cheyenne parents at birth.² Although Bonnin had written to Chinquilla a year earlier urging her to join the NCAI, she began to question Chinquilla's Indian identity in 1926 when she learned of her affiliation with Red Fox James (aka Skiuhushu), another suspected Indian imposter. Jones, a loyal follower who had introduced herself to Bonnin at an NCAI dinner a few months earlier, struck Bonnin as an ideal private eye. The detective case described in their letters demonstrates the complex racial identities not only of Chinquilla but of Jones and Bonnin as well; in investigating Chinquilla's Indianness, they sought to define and assert their own.

Despite Bonnin's investment in determining Chinquilla's real identity, scholars have said little about her letters on the subject; those who analyze her correspondence tend to focus on her communication with one-time fiancé Carlos Montezuma or her commentary on her literary work.³ One of the few references to Chinquilla appears in Hazel W. Hertzberg's classic study of early pan-Indian movements, which describes her as an earnest woman who was involved in a number of efforts to improve American Indian lives. According to Hertzberg, Chinquilla visited the Tongue River Agency when she was in her sixties in an unsuccessful attempt to learn the details of her parents and her birth.⁴ Hertzberg distinguishes between Chinquilla and the "impecunious" Indians who sought loans from the club (229). She does not comment on the controversy that, according to Bonnin, surrounded Chinquilla. Much remains to be said about how exactly Bonnin came to doubt Chinquilla's Indianness as well as what these doubts indicate about her own—and others'—understanding of the physical, cultural, and political dimensions of Indianness.

This article is not an attempt to pick up the case where Bonnin and Charlotte Jones left off—that is, to determine whether Princess Chinquilla and her associates were or were not Native American—but rather to investigate why these figures sparked such fear and intrigue. In considering what these letters say about Bonnin's own identity, I do not mean to suggest, as a number of critics have, that she was profoundly conflicted about who she was. While a number of studies portray her as a figure who led a "schizophrenic life," who was "caught between two cultures," and who existed in "two diametrically opposed worlds,"⁵ I would argue that her letters demonstrate that her challenge was not to maintain her connection to an American Indian identity but rather to fine-tune the public persona that was most amenable to her activist work. My study is more congruent with the work of critics like Ruth Spack, Dorothea M. Susag, and P. Jane Hafen, who see Gertrude Bonnin as a figure who actively manipulated available (and sometimes conflicting) genres and identities in order to improve conditions for American Indians.⁶ At a time when what it meant to be Indian was being redefined, this often meant making difficult decisions about how to represent herself to a wide—and often non-Indian—audience. Bonnin's correspondence with Charlotte Jones gives us insight, I contend, into the ways that such prominent American Indians were producing and revising their public Indianness in the 1920s.

Such attempts to define "real" Indians were not altogether new, of course; Native American writers and leaders had long tried to balance their conceptions of themselves with the expectations of a non-Native public. Bonnin's letters are particularly insightful, however, for their articulation of Indian identity in the 1920s, a decade marked by contestation over what it meant to be Indian—and American...