Old Indian Legends and the Work of Preservation
The collection Old Indian Legends, published in 1901, represents a dimension of Zitkála-Šá’s work that is sometimes overshadowed by the autobiographical essays but that was equally important to her and to the communities she was connected to.
The stories in the collection are traditional Lakota and Dakota tales — Iktomi stories, teaching stories, stories that carry the cosmological and moral frameworks of the Dakota world. She collected these stories, translated them from oral performance into written English, and shaped them for a non-Native reading audience without, in her judgment, sacrificing their essential character.
The project of collecting and publishing traditional stories in English was one that several Native writers undertook in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rationale was explicit in many cases: these stories were at risk of being lost as the communities that held them were pressured into transformations that disrupted oral transmission, and publishing them in English created a record that could survive even if the oral tradition could not.
This rationale contained its own contradictions, which Zitkála-Šá was likely aware of. Translating stories from an oral tradition in one language into a written form in another language is a transformation that changes the stories — removes them from the performance context that gives them part of their meaning, strips away the tonal and gestural dimensions of oral delivery, and subjects them to the conventions of written prose. What is preserved is a version of the story, not the story itself.
But the alternative — no record, no transmission to audiences who might not otherwise encounter the stories — was arguably worse. Old Indian Legends was a specific contribution to the work of cultural preservation in conditions of cultural crisis, and it should be understood as such.
The book was received well by critics and readers, and it established Zitkála-Šá as someone with a contribution to make beyond the autobiographical essays — as a writer who could render traditional material in forms that a general English-reading audience could engage with.