Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, and: Native American Women's Writing 1800-1924, an Anthology, and: Sarah Winnemucca (review)

Three important new books have appeared recently on Native American women's writing, and each in its own way expands and deepens this field of scholarship while suggesting new directions and new lines of approach. In Dreams and Thunder Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) has collected some of the previously unpublished works of Zitkala-Sa, the pen name chosen by the Yankton Dakota writer, musician and activist, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. This eminently useful and enlightening volume is the first new publication of literary work by Bonnin since American Indian Stories (1921), bringing to wide readership works that until now only have been visible in archives. It contains fourteen stories, five poems, and the complete libretto of The Sun Dance Opera.

Hafen's introductory material also contributes importantly to wider knowledge about Gertrude Bonnin. Her acknowledgments trace the history of the Bonnin papers, and the introduction contextualizes Bonnin's writing within her life of service and political work. Throughout the volume Hafen provides useful annotations with translations of Dakota words, explanations of Sioux cultural practices, and bibliographic directions for further information on history and culture. At the end of the book she provides a selected bibliography of works on Zitkala-Sa. Hafen also includes two photos and two manuscript pages that enhance the volume; one only wishes there were more.

The first ten stories come from Sioux tradition; Hafen surmises that they lay unpublished so long because of their uncompromising difference from "mainstream standards," despite Bonnin's literary shaping. This shaping is revealed in the exciting juxtaposition of "The Witch Woman," a traditional tale retold in English by Bonnin, and "Squirrel Man and His Double," translated for this volume from Bonnin's handwritten Dakota language manuscript. The two stories are essentially the same tale, but one is intended for an Anglo-American audience, and the other for an audience of Dakota speakers. The last four stories treat social and political issues facing Native people and are similar to the short fiction in American Indian Stories.

Most interesting and long awaited, however, is Hafen's inclusion of The Sun Dance Opera libretto, Bonnin's collaboration with Utah composer William Hanson. The romantic triangle of the opera is set in a traditional Dakota village preparing for the annual Sun Dance, a central religious practice that had been outlawed by the U.S. government for more than three decades. Hafen briefly describes how Bonnin and Hanson changed Sioux songs into melodies that could be notated and played in the tempered scale of Western music. Such radical translation would have erased some tonal subtleties, but also place the opera within the "Indianist" genre popular in the U.S. during the early decades of the twentieth century. Readers will note the libretto's relationship to Bonnin's poetic work, as well as her knowledge of Sioux customs as depicted in the dialogue and action of the play. This volume is essential for readers who wish to study little known works of Zitkala-Sa, and for those interested in the variety of genres produced by Native American writers. A further inducement to acquire the book in its hardback printing is Gertrude Kasebier's beautiful dustjacket photo of Zitkala-Sa as a young woman.

Another recent and noteworthy contribution to knowledge of early Native American women writers is Sally Zanjani's meticulous historical work Sarah Winnemucca. Zanjani provides a complete road map to Sarah Winnemucca's life and also to her book Life Among the Piutes (1883), something earlier biographers have done only peripherally. The scrupulously researched text of Sarah Winnemucca...