American Indian Stories & The Language of String (Paperback)

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.

Zitkala-Ša (1876–1938) was a Yankton Dakota writer, educator, and activist who challenged U.S. policies of Native American assimilation. Through essays, fiction, and speeches —including American Indian Stories- she exposed the harms of boarding schools and cultural erasure. Zitkala-Sa also worked for Native rights, citizenship, and self-determination, becoming a powerful Indigenous voice in early twentieth-century America. 

Kim Shuck has lived long enough that her stubbornly dark brown hair is finally going grey and she is delighted by that. Shuck served as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Part of her term was during the covid pandemic shutdown. Kim is solo author of eleven books and chapbooks. Most of those are poetry collections. Shuck has also edited, co-edited or been edit-curious for, roughly, the same number of books and anthologies. By the end of 2026 she'll have one more chapbook, one more full-length collection, and will have been the very least important editor of a posthumous memoir. Shuck's most recent collection is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In.