Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša by Tadeusz Lewandowski (review)

Since the late 1970s scholars have been increasingly attending to the multidimensional life of Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), focusing intently on her autobiographical essays concerning the Yankton Agency, on her Sun Dance Opera, and, increasingly, on her role as a pan-Indian activist within the Society of American Indians and in her later organization, the National Council of American Indians. Yet, despite how often Zitkala-Ša's writing has been studied by scholars and students of Native American literature, Western American literature, and by Americanists broadly conceived, until now she has received no single, sustained biographical study. Tadeusz Lewandowski's Red Bird, Red Power fills this gap.

Throughout Red Bird, Red Power Lewandowski supports an approach to Zitkala-Ša's life story established in the text's prologue: Zitkala-Ša's vision, employment experiences, textual record, and activist agenda can be conceived of as having a "proto-Red Power grand vision," rather than the "liminal" and "assimilationist" labels some critics have assigned them (16). Lewandowski's presentation of Zitkala-Ša strives to reveal the largely consistent quality of her pan-Indian vision of empowerment, though he does acknowledge the circumstances in which her articulations, self-presentation, and political affiliations attracted definitions of her as persistently troubled by the "complex and harrowing limbo of disrupted identity" (11). Though this phrase is Lewandowski's own, he does fault readers who single-mindedly focus on this kind of "liminality." Lewandowski also cautions against the critical temptation to cast her antipeyote stance and later Catholicism as unilaterally assimilationist qualities. Instead, he urges readers to recognize her "task" as one of "complex negotiation," limited by "historical circumstances" (14–15). Yes, Zitkala-Ša herself states in "The School Days of an Indian Girl" that in adolescence she felt as if she were "hang[ing] in the heart of chaos" between her home community and the world of her European American education. And, yes, she contributed Congressional testimony in 1918 against peyote usage in Native religious rituals on reservations and has been criticized for thus opposing Indigenous religious sovereignty. Lewandowski addresses these complexities, arguing that these biographical facts should not destabilize readers' understanding of essential consistencies of her life story, that she was a woman who "fought the dispossession of Indians with every tool of white society she had mastered," whose overarching work (despite episodic variances) aimed to preserve "indigenous values, virtues, and religious beliefs," and who believed in the "democratic right of tribal self determination" (194–95). Lewandowski illuminates Zitkala-Ša's repeated reinforcement of these convictions and, consequently, presents her as a "forerunner of Red Power" (195).

Lewandowski's text is chronological, dividing Zitkala-Ša's life into chapters organized by experiences recognizable to those familiar with her biography. The thirteen central chapters—roughly fifteen pages each, plus a prologue and conclusion, each chapter focusing on a distinct period—might be read independently as "capsules" to help one better understand the years surrounding particular texts. For example, her years in Boston, studying violin and entering the domain of the Boston literati who would support her short story and autobiography writing, are described in chapter 2, "Carlisle and The Atlantic Monthly," establishing the context for Zitkala-Ša's emergence in print, explaining the impact of her time teaching at Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and tracing the clear physical and emotional paths of her evolution as a writer and activist. Chapter 12, "Princess Zitkala-Ša and the National Council of American Indians," offers a sketch of her activities as founder, with her husband Raymond, of the National Council of American Indians in 1926. Here, Lewandowski summarizes Zitkala-Ša's tactics in "petitioning Congress to enforce recently codified rights," opposing the "corrupt BIA," and "support[ing] meaningful exercise of citizenship rights" by tribespeople throughout the United States (176, 179). Lewandowski crafts the chapter as a coherent period, but at ten pages it is too short to do justice...