American Indian Stories

A Yankton Dakota woman's account of her own childhood, the missionary boarding school that took her at eight and cut her hair, and the return to a reservation she no longer fitted. Zitkala-Ša wrote it in English for Atlantic Monthly readers and it is among the first Native American autobiographies written without a white editor between the writer and the page. Sixty paintings of mothers, daughters and children, among them works by George Catlin and Edvard Munch, run through the text and hold the book's account of a childhood taken and a family divided.