Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 131.
Abstract
This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) marks a milestone in the scholarship of this crucial figure in Native literary and intellectual history. Meticulously researched, editor Jane Hafen's compilation advances our understanding of this Yankton Sioux writer, activist, and artist, about whom little has been documented. Hafen located a range of her writings in a variety of archives, from early poems written at Earlham College to Iktomi stories and the opera she created in collaboration with William Hanson in 1913.
In her introduction, Hafen provides the most accurate biographical overview of Gertrude Bonnin to date, showing how her life was shaped by major events in Native history as well as by her work with other notable Native intellectuals. Most striking in this introduction, as well as in the collection, is Hafen's discovery of previously unknown materials located in Hanson's papers at Brigham Young University. Contrary to popular assumptions that Bonnin ceased writing fiction after her brief period of national publication in Harper's and The Atlantic, Hafen's collection shows that she kept writing stories akin to those she had previously published, as well as works in other genres such as The Sun Dance Opera, revealing "the somewhat turbulent cultural waters that Bonnin navigated throughout her life."
Organized into three main sections-Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera-Dreams and Thunder embodies what Hafen foregrounds in her introduction: the versatility and complexity of Gertrude Bonnin's work. The explanatory sections that frame the texts are enormously helpful in relating them to Bonnin's career as well as to Yankton Sioux and Lakota/Dakota cultural and literary contexts, and in posing questions surrounding their production. For example, Hafen wonders what Bonnin's sources were for the Iktomi, Stone Boy, and other old stories, and why, if prepared for publication, they were never apparently submitted. In her incisive introduction to The Sun Dance Opera, Hafen details Bonnin's musical expertise, as well as the complexities of this puzzling and problematic collaboration, including Hanson's subsequent appropriation of the Opera as his own work. This particular text promises to extend current research on Bonnin, while the stories and poems will invite comparison to Old Indian Legends and stories such as "Soft-Hearted Sioux."
Hafen closes the collection with a selected bibliography as well as a genealogy of Critical approaches to Bonnin, with an emphasis on how non-Native based approaches often have imposed limiting, even erroneous readings of Bonnin's life and writings. This is an indispensable addition to American Indian Studies in general and to Yankton Sioux literary history in particular.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln