A thought-provoking collection of searing prose from a Sioux woman that covers race, identity, assimilation, and perceptions of Native American culture Zitkala-Sa wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today. Sioux writer and activist Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938) was born in the year of the infamous Battle of Little Big Horn--her people's last victory over the invasion forces that would soon force them onto reservations, on one of which she grew up under a regime of forced assimilation. Her writing career blossomed early, with stories published in the Atlantic Monthly when she was in her early twenties. She could have been a mere exotic, but she found a way to capture the interest of non-Indian readers, who preferred the romanticized noble savage to the often-sad reality of Indian life, and to give voice to her threatened culture. Her work, surprisingly, seems undated, perhaps because, unfortunately, the situation of Indian people has changed so little. This first comprehensive collection of her work, consisting of a significant sequence of mythic tales as well as memoirs and poetry, reveals Zitkala-Sa as a crusading, spiritually aware woman. Patricia Monaghan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Table of Contents   AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES, LEGENDS, AND OTHER WRITINGS Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements Introduction   I - OLD INDIAN LEGENDS Preface Iktomi and the Ducks Iktomi’s Blanket Iktomi and the Muskrat Iktomi and the Coyote Iktomi and the Fawn The Badger and the Bear The Tree-Bound Shooting of the Red Eagle Iktomi and the Turtle Dance in a Buffalo Skull The Toad and the Boy Iya, the Camp-Eater Mans̈tin, the Rabbit The Warlike Seven   II - AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES Impressions of an Indian Childhood The School Days of an Indian Girl An Indian Teacher Among Indians The Great Spirit The Soft-Hearted Sioux The Trial Path A Warrior’s Daughter A Dream of Her Grandfather The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman America’s Indian Problem   III - SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN INDIAN MAGAZINE The Indian’s Awakening ( January-March 1916) A Year’s Experience in Community Service Work Among the Ute Tribe of Indians ... The Red Man’s America ( January-March 1917) Chipeta, Widow of Chief Ouray with a Word About a Deal in Blankets ( ... A Sioux Woman’s Love for Her Grandchild (October-December 1917) Editorial Comment (July-September 1918) Indian Gifts to Civilized Man ( July-September 1918) Secretary’s Report in Brief ( July-September 1918) Editorial Comment (Winter 1919) America, Home of the Red Man (Winter 1919) The Coronation of Chief Powhatan Retold (Winter 1919) Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes (Winter 1919) Editorial Comment (Spring 1919) Editorial Comment (Summer 1919) An Indian Praying on the Hilltop (Spring 1919) Address by the Secretary-Treasurer, Society of American Indians Annual ...   IV - POETRY, PAMPHLETS, ESSAYS, AND SPEECHES Side by Side (March 1896) A Ballad (January 1897) Iris of Life (November 1898) A Protest Against the Abolition of the Indian Dance (August 1902) The Menace of Peyote (ca. 1916) Americanize the First American (1921) Bureaucracy Versus Democracy (1921) A Dakota Ode to Washington (1922) California Indian Trails and Prayer Trees (1922) Lost Treaties of the California Indians (1922) The California Indians of Today (1922) Heart to Heart Talk (1922)   Explanatory Notes AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES, LEGENDS, AND OTHER WRITINGS ZITKALA-ŠA, known also as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota in 1876. A lifelong writer and activist, she is best known for a series of semiautobiographical stories about her childhood and schooling in Eastern boarding schools. Zitkala-Ša was a teacher, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, coauthor of an opera entitled The Sun Dance , secretary-treasurer of the first pan-Indian political organization, the Society of American Indians, and editor of its quarterly magazine, American Indian Magazine . She wrote fiction, manifestos, speeches, poetry, and musical scores, retold Sioux legends, and was a prolific letter writer. She was founder and president of the National Council of American Indians, the Washington-based tribal advocacy group that she led until her death in 1938.   CATHY N. DAVIDSON, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and