American Indian Stories & The Language of String

Brought together across time and form, American Indian Stories & The Language of String braids mixed genres and mixed Indigenous identity into an ongoing exchange. 

American Indian Stories is a landmark of Native American Literature and a searing account of childhood, education, and survival at the crossroads of Indigenous tradition and U.S. assimilation policy. Written at the turn of the twentieth century by Yankton Dakota writer and activist Zitkala-Ša, this hybrid assemblage of legends, tales, allegories, essays, and documentations traces her journey from the freedom of reservation life to the rigid discipline of boarding school, exposing with clarity and quiet fury the cultural violence embedded in “civilizing” institutions and blending memory with myth, weaving in powerful stories shaped by Lakota traditions. Through vivid and intimate prose, Zitkala-Ša negotiates what her own mixed-race Indigeneity means to her and unabashedly makes demands for Native rights, offering a reading experience at once deeply personal and powerfully political. Her stories capture moments of wonder, loss, resistance, and awakening, painting an enduring portrait of a young Native woman learning to name injustice—and herself—within a society determined to silence her. 

This new edition features an introduction and creative response by leading contemporary Native poet and beadwork artist Kim Shuck, who situates American Indian Stories within both its historical moment and its urgent relevance today. In The Language of String, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Shuck explores her own mixed-race Indigeneity and connects to Zitkala-Ša through the practice of beadwork and other embodied crafts, highlighting the complicated and fertile ground in the place of friction between cultures. A foundational text of American literature, American Indian Stories remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the past—and present—of Indigenous experience in the United States.