1901, Yankton Sioux, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Old Indian Legends, Zitkala-Ša, Sioux cultural resilience

In 1901, the Yankton Sioux writer and activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938) published Old Indian Legends under the Lakota name Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird). Though originally marketed as a collection of traditional Sioux stories for children, Legends functions on a much deeper level. Viewed within historical context, the book constitutes both an assertion of Sioux cultural resilience, and a condemnation of white society's damaging encroachment on indigenous lands. It is unsurprising that these themes emerge. A year before Legends appearance, the 1900 U.S. census recorded only approximately three-hundred and twenty thousand Natives remaining in the United States-the lowest number on record. Zitkala-Ša's Sioux Nation (like many other indigenous nations) had been severely affected over the previous fifty years by territorial loss, the American bison's near-extinction, an imposed farming regime based on land allotment, and traumas such as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, in which more than two hundred Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota perished at the hands of the Seventh Calvary. In Zitkala-Ša's birthplace, Yankton Reservation, the population had meanwhile declined precipitously to under two thousand due to chicken pox, measles, influenza, and other European diseases. These upheavals form the backdrop to Old Indian Legends, in which Zitkala-Ša creates a narrative arch that, this paper argues, forecasts a cultural victory for the Sioux over white society.

In 1901, the Yankton Sioux writer and activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938) published Old Indian Legends under the Lakota name Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird). Though originally marketed as a collection of traditional Sioux stories for children, Legends functions on a much deeper level. Viewed within historical context, the book constitutes both an assertion of Sioux cultural resilience, and a condemnation of white society's damaging encroachment on indigenous lands. It is unsurprising that these themes emerge. A year before Legends appearance, the 1900 U.S. census recorded only approximately three-hundred and twenty thousand Natives remaining in the United States-the lowest number on record. Zitkala-Ša's Sioux Nation (like many other indigenous nations) had been severely affected over the previous fifty years by territorial loss, the American bison's near-extinction, an imposed farming regime based on land allotment, and traumas such as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, in which more than two hundred Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota perished at the hands of the Seventh Calvary. In Zitkala-Ša's birthplace, Yankton Reservation, the population had meanwhile declined precipitously to under two thousand due to chicken pox, measles, influenza, and other European diseases. These upheavals form the backdrop to Old Indian Legends, in which Zitkala-Ša creates a narrative arch that, this paper argues, forecasts a cultural victory for the Sioux over white society.