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A review by neverwithoutabook
American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends by Zitkála-Šá
4.0
In American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa gives us a glimpse of her early life on the Yankton Indian Reservation and her time as a student at White's Manual Labour Institute and Earlham College. The second half of this book is a collection of various essays and traditional stories.
I enjoyed all the stories in this collection but “The School Days of an Indian Girl” broke me. In this story Zitkala-Sa talks about the missionary school that was designed to strip children of their tribal cultures and replace these cultures with knowledge of the dominant one. At first Indians such as her mother thought that the offer of education began "to pay a tardy justice" for the theft of Indian lands and was necessary if their children were to advance in the white world; from
the white culture, however, Gertrude Simmons discovered no compensation for her loss of Sioux culture and habits. Left angry and isolated, she was alienated from her family and decided to create her own name: Zitkala-Sa.
There is so much to learn from these stories I highly recommend you check them out.
I enjoyed all the stories in this collection but “The School Days of an Indian Girl” broke me. In this story Zitkala-Sa talks about the missionary school that was designed to strip children of their tribal cultures and replace these cultures with knowledge of the dominant one. At first Indians such as her mother thought that the offer of education began "to pay a tardy justice" for the theft of Indian lands and was necessary if their children were to advance in the white world; from
the white culture, however, Gertrude Simmons discovered no compensation for her loss of Sioux culture and habits. Left angry and isolated, she was alienated from her family and decided to create her own name: Zitkala-Sa.
There is so much to learn from these stories I highly recommend you check them out.