American Indian Stories (Library of Essential Reading Series) FROM THE PUBLISHER
American Indian Stories (1921) is remarkable for being perhaps the first literary work by a Native-American woman created without the mediation of a non-Native interpreter, or collaborator. Zitkala-ﾽa vividly articulates her disillusionment with the harshness of American-Indian boarding schools and the corruption of government institutions ostensibly established to help Native peoples. At the same time, Zitkala-ﾽa's collection of autobiographical essays and short stories charts the progression of the author's estrangement from her Dakota people that her colonial education inevitably fostered. Much more than an indictment against U.S. attempts at Native deculturation, American Indian Stories portrays one Dakota woman's spirited and successful efforts to resist the restrictions she felt in both reservation life and Euroamerican assimilation.
ACCREDITATION
A woman of the Dakota Sioux, Zitkala-ﾽa was born on the Yankton Reservation of South Dakota in 1876, the same year as the momentous Battle of the Little Bighorn. Born Gertrude Simmons, she later named herself Zitkala-ﾽa, which means "Red Bird" in the Lakota language, and continued to use both names in various contexts throughout her life. Gertrude attended a Quaker boarding school for Indian children in Indiana when she was eight years old. She continued to move between her reservation home and Euroamerican schools, attending Earlham College from 1895 to 1897, after which she became a teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. She later attended the Boston Conservatory of Music in Massachusetts. She was active in the Native-American movement for the rest of her life.
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