Tale
Old Indian Legends
Zitkála-Šá · 1901
Synopsis
Fourteen Dakota legends, written in English. Most follow Iktomi, the spider fairy, vain and dressed as a warrior, with deerskin, beads and painted face, who prefers setting traps to hunting: he makes ducks dance with their eyes closed, takes back the blanket he had given to a sacred rock, loses his fish soup to a muskrat, believes a sleeping coyote dead. Other tales do without him: a boy born from a clot of buffalo blood avenges a badger, mice dance in a buffalo skull, a monster swallows whole camps.
Context
The boarding school where she was placed as a child, White's Institute, was run by Quakers. A music teacher at Carlisle, the first off-reservation Indian boarding school, she was dismissed from it in 1901 after publishing critical texts in the national magazines. She returned to her reservation, cared for her mother and collected from her own people these legends, published the same year in Boston, by Ginn, with illustrations by Angel De Cora. She then provided, in 1913, the libretto of an opera presented as the first Native American opera, based on a dance then banned by the federal government.
Who it is for
Short legends, written for children in simple language; a partial French translation, of nine tales, exists in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
The collection was reissued in 1985 by the University of Nebraska Press, together with its author's other writings.
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