Old Indian Legends

Zitkala-Sa was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised there by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Yankton Dakota name was Taté Iy?hiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a European-American man named Felker, about whom little was known. Zitkala-Sa lived a traditional lifestyle until the age of eight, when she left her reservation to attend Whites Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana. She went on to study for a time at Earlham College in Indiana and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.[3]

After working as a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, she moved to Boston and began publishing short stories and autobiographical vignettes. Her autobiographical writings were serialized in Atlantic Monthly from January to March 1900 and later published in a collection called American Indian Stories in 1921. Her first book, Old Indian Legends, is a collection of folktales which she gathered during visits home to the Yankton Reservation. Much of the early scholarship on her life is based on the American Indian Stories and, more recently, Doreen Rappaport’s biography The Flight of Red Bird.