American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

Locations
Call Number: 398.208 Zi
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	398.208 Zi	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Old Indian legends -- American Indian stories -- Selections from American Indian magazine -- Poetry, pamphlets, essays, and speeches.
A groundbreaking collection of stories, essays, poems, and speeches by a Sioux writer, teacher, and activist includes legends and tales from oral tradition, childhood stories, and allegorical fiction.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Important classic submitted by redwood on July 26, 2023, 12:37pm Zitkála-Šá (Yankton Dakota) spent her early years on a South Dakota reservation, raised by her mother in a traditional community. Her descriptions of the Western landscape are some of my favorite parts of this book—the grass, the Missouri River, a sense of freedom and belonging in these lands. And she gains a valuable education in Native customs and arts from her mother, including beadwork. The “easy, natural flow of her life” is disrupted when Zitkála-Šá is eight, and “palefaces” come West to recruit Native children to boarding school. Enamored with the idea of riding a train, Zitkála-Šá goes East to Indiana with them. At school, education is assimilationist—she is forced to cut her hair, into routine, and tries to preserve her identity through small rebellions. At the same time, she relishes other kinds of learning, especially reading and writing. She excels as a student and eventually becomes a teacher herself, including at the Carlisle Indian School.

Zitkála-Šá’s simple yet artful prose beautifully elucidates the educational contrasts—Western, Eastern, Native, white—that animate her life. The other pieces in this volume touch on similar themes of assimilation and cultural sovereignty, some with an even more polemic stance towards the federal government. Zitkála-Šá was also a prominent activist, co-founding the National Council of American Indians. This is a short, significant classic that everyone should read.