Zitkala-S̈a - American Indian stories Old Indian legends

American Indian Stories

and

Old Indian Legends

ZITKALA-A (Gertrude Bonnin)

A Dakota Sioux Indian

There is no great; there is no small;

in the mind that causeth all

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

American Indian Stories

and

Old Indian Legends

ZITKALA-A

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: MARY CAROLYN WALDREP

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET B. KOPITO

Copyright

Copyright 2014 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2014, is a republication of the following works: American Indian Stories, published by Hayworth Publishing House, Washington, D.C., in 1921 and Old Indian Legends, published by Ginn and Company, Boston, in 1901.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-79607-9

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

78043001 2014

www.doverpublications.com

Introduction to the Dover Edition

ZITKALAA (RED BIRD) was born Gertrude Simmons in 1876 on a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota. The year after she was born, the U.S. Congress reduced the size of the Great Sioux Reservation to 15 million acres from 134 million. Zitkala-a was sent as a child to a Quaker school in Indiana, where she received an education, but at the cost of being separated from her Native American traditions (a theme to which she would return again and again throughout her life). After returning to the reservation, she became aware of the conflict between the traditional Indian ways and the white culture she had experienced at the Quaker school. Nevertheless, Zitkala-a decided to go back to Indiana and continue her studies, especially in music. She received a scholarship and attended college in Indiana. A talented violinist, she performed with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and also taught music. At this time, she began to collect Native American tales, which she translated into English and Latin. In 1902, Zitkala-a married Raymond T. Bonnin, whom she had known on the Sioux reservation. The couple had a son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.

Zitkala-a was ever sensitive to the practice of forced assimilation of Native American children into the dominant white culture, and this theme surfaced in much of her autobiographical writing. The Boston publisher Ginn and Company brought out her collection of tales, Old Indian Legends, in 1901. Zitkala-a referred to the legends as relics of our countrys once virgin soil. The collection includes tales of Iktomi, the spider fairy, who encounters dancing ducks, offers his old blanket to the Great Spirit, meets a muskrat and a coyote and learns valuable lessons, as well as many other stories of magic and the getting of wisdom.

In addition to her achievement in literature, Zitkala-a worked on an opera, The Sun Dance, which was performed on the Ute Reservation in Utah. The opera was based on the Sun Dance ritual, which was banned for a timeit attracted crowds of thousands and was considered by the authorities to be both disruptive and controversial due to certain provocative aspects of the ritual. Zitkala-a and William Hanson, a music teacher, worked together on the opera, blending Indian music traditions with Western forms to produce the successful opera. The Sun Dance was performed on Broadway in 1938.

In 1921, Zitkala-a published American Indian Stories (Hayworth Publishing House), a compilation of pieces that had originally appeared in print twenty years earlier. Beginning with her earliest years on the Sioux reservation, Zitkala-a describes elements of her childhood and adulthoodlearning Native American beliefs and rituals, going East to the missionary school, attending collegeand concludes with the essay on Americas Indian Problem, in which she argues that the Native Americans in the United States have been poorly served by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency created in 1824 to administer the Indian lands.

Zitkala-a was active in pursuing Native American rights and was politically outspoken at times (leading to her husbands dismissal from the Bureau of Indian Affairs). She was a member of the progressive Society of American Indians, and she and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians, with the goal of uniting the tribes in the U.S. and securing full citizenship and the right to vote. Several years before her death in 1938, Zitkala-a was a co-author of an article that led to the federal governments adoption of the Indian Reorganization Act, which enabled Native Americans to manage their own lands.

Contents

American Indian Stories

and

Old Indian Legends

American Indian Stories

IMPRESSIONS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD

I

MY MOTHER

A WIGWAM OF weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills. A footpath wound its way gently down the sloping land till it reached the broad river bottom; creeping through the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side, it came out on the edge of the Missouri.

Here, morning, noon, and evening, my mother came to draw water from the muddy stream for our household use. Always, when my mother started for the river, I stopped my play to run along with her. She was only of medium height. Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.

Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears; and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, Now let me see how fast you can run today. Whereupon I tore away at my highest possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.

I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mothers pride,my wild freedom and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding myself upon others.

Having gone many paces ahead I stopped, panting for breath, and laughing with glee as my mother watched my every movement. I was not wholly conscious of myself, but was more keenly alive to the fire within. It was as if I were the activity, and my hands and feet were only experiments for my spirit to work upon.

Returning from the river, I tugged beside my mother, with my hand upon the bucket I believed I was carrying. One time, on such a return, I remember a bit of conversation we had. My grown-up cousin, Warca-Ziwin (Sunflower), who was then seventeen, always went to the river alone for water for her mother. Their wigwam was not far from ours; and I saw her daily going to and from the river. I admired my cousin greatly. So I said: Mother, when I am tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it for you.

With a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand, she answered, If the paleface does not take away from us the river we drink.