RECOVERING LEGENDS: Zitkala-Sa is not exactly a household name. Although her stories ran in magazines alongside fiction by the likes of Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, the American Indian writer and activist fell into obscurity after her death, in 1938. Now Penguin Books hopes to revive her reputation, by making her the first Native American writer with a Penguin Classic devoted to her work.
In March the press will release American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and one of her doctoral students, Ada Norris. Ms. Davidson, a literary scholar and vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, discovered Zitkala-Sa’s stories in the early 1970s, while doing research for her dissertation.
“I was looking for stories by Ambrose Bierce in 1890s editions of magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s,” says Ms. Davidson. “I came across these moving, fabulous stories. They weren’t written in that high-19th-century sentimental style, with a lot of silly, inflated rhetoric, and they were heartbreakingly powerful.”
She sent the citations to the Modern Language Association’s Recovering American Literature project. In 1984 the University of Nebraska Press began releasing scholarly editions of Zitkala-Sa’s work, and the writer later made it into The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin).
“Lo and behold, she’s now a classic!” says Ms. Davidson. “I guess if you’re patient and wait 30 years, it can happen.” In 1997, Dial Books for Young Readers published the story of Zitkala-Sa’s life, but Ms. Davidson credits Ms. Norris with tracking down much of the biographical information in the introduction to the Penguin collection. Ms. Norris is now writing a biography of the writer, whose activism later in life was instrumental in gaining rights, including the right to vote, for American Indians. Meanwhile, Susan Rose Dominguez, a historian at Oberlin College, is writing her own biography, and will contribute the introduction to Nebraska’s new edition of Zitkala-Sa’s stories, due out this fall.
Zitkala-Sa was born Gertrude Simmons on the Yankton Reservation, in South Dakota, in 1876 -- the same year as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Her mother was a full-blooded Sioux Indian. Little is known about her father. When she was 8 years old she was recruited to one of the many boarding schools set up to assimilate Indians, converting them to Christianity and forcing them to abandon their native languages. A cycle of early, memoirlike stories describes the shock of that experience: the discomfort of chairs, the grating squeak of leather-soled shoes, the violation of having her long braid cut off.
“Those stories were contemporaneous with the massacre at Wounded Knee,” says Ms. Davidson. “It’s never mentioned in the text, but every reader would have known.” Zitkala-Sa takes the classic initiation story, or bildungsroman, the editors write, and turns it on its head: “The violence of this initiation rite into white life is so primitive that we are forced to reconsider the norms not of Native American society but of white society. ... The ways of the world are the problem, not the solution.”
The writer, who was also an accomplished violinist, went on to co-write an opera (Sun Dance) and poetry, edit American Indian Magazine, and found the National Council of American Indians. She testified before Congress and met with Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate treaty rights. Yet she was not afraid to ally herself with political enemies when she felt it necessary: She upset other American Indian activists by speaking out against peyote, which she saw as “debilitating and degenerating.” That is just one reason, Ms. Davidson and Ms. Norris write, that her work contributes to contemporary debates about authenticity and assimilation.
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American Indian Stories is part of the publisher’s ambitious project to revamp its Penguin Classics series, expanding it and republishing existing Classics with new introductions and notes -- not to mention new covers.
The first Penguin Classic, a translation of The Odyssey, was published in 1946. “We have about 1,300 titles on backlist now, and this is just the beginning,” says Caroline White, a senior editor at Penguin. Volumes new to the series include Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask, the first full translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and a new translation of The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu.
Not every book has what it takes to become a classic. Ms. White was drawn to Zitkala-Sa because “she writes on themes that are historically interesting and she’s a really good writer.” The editor says she has turned down other possibilities after thinking long and hard about them. For example, she’s been lobbied to publish Susan Warner’s 600-plus-page novel The Wide, Wide World (1850). Aside from the fact that the Feminist Press has an edition (with an afterword by Jane Tompkins), “I just don’t think it’s a good novel,” she says. “It’s very much of its time but not timeless.”
She adds: “We want people to look at our list and think we’ve made the right decision.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 22, Page A15