Old Indian Legends

About

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) was a Yankton Sioux writer and activist who collected and retold these Sioux traditional stories (1901) in English prose of unusual beauty and authenticity. The trickster Iktomi, the various animal spirits, and the cosmological stories of the collection preserve Indigenous oral narrative traditions in literary form. As group reading, the trickster stories are particularly effective — short, surprising, morally complex in ways European fable traditions rarely achieve.