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Formats
Paperback Details
  • 09/2024
  • 979-8-218-40301-0 B0D6ZZG9Q1
  • 48 pages
  • $16.99
Hardcover Details
  • 09/2024
  • 979-8-218-43964-4 B0D6DPS8Q9
  • 48 pages
  • $29.99
Scott Feldmann
Author
Zintka!

Young Adult; History & Military; (Market)

A true story of “found and lost”. . . and found again, Zintka! tells the troubled tale of a Native American girl caught between two worlds, accepted by neither. As a Lakota (Sioux) baby and her mother were fleeing for safety they became victims in the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. The infant was kept alive by the warmth of her mother as she lay dying, then taken away and adopted by a prominent soldier and his famous suffragette wife to be raised in their white, high-society circles. Named “Lost Bird” at the moment she was separated from her Lakota caregivers, Zintkála Nuni was chronicled in newspapers from her discovery to her death. She joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, San Francisco’s vaudeville circuit and became an extra in Hollywood silent movies. Zintka died in 1920 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Hanford, California. 75 years later her story was revealed by Renée Sansom Flood in the historical biography Lost Bird: Spirit of the Lakota (Scribner, 1995). Lakota leadership from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota ceremoniously reburied her at the Wounded Knee Monument, near the mass grave of the disaster, which included her birth mother.
Reviews
Colerick and Feldmann's historical montage captures the tragic life of Zintkala Nuni, a baby found alive in her dying mother's arms after the massacre of the Lakota people at Wounded Knee. This stunning YA debut transcends the confines of a single book, as the authors, through their multimedia flagship company, resurrect Zintka’s powerful tale, first brought to light in Renée Sansom Flood’s biography, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota. Through diverse artistic mediums, Colerick and Feldmann employ song, ledger art, winter counts, and film with exquisite, emotionally charged images, ensuring that Zintka’s story will never be forgotten.

This haunting narrative reveals America’s wretched treatment of Indigenous peoples, which Feldmann terms “a 400-year decimation… by guns, germs, and grant deeds.” Zintka—stolen as a trophy from her Lakota mother by General Leonard Wright Colby—embodies that treatment, and the authors pay respect to her attempts to straddle her biological roots and bitter adoptive world. Zintka’s adoptive mother, women’s rights activist and publisher of Woman’s Tribune Clara Bewick Colby, whose husband forged her signature on the adoptive papers in court, grew to love Zintka, but was left penniless when she and Leonard divorced. In evocative imagery, Colerick and Feldmann recount Zintka’s desperate search for belonging, as she moved between husbands, Hollywood, and Clara’s home, accepted by neither her adopted world nor the Lakota people.

The surreal juxtaposition of images of the Lakota, their homes, and Zintka under her Lakota name, “Lost Bird,” strikes a melancholy tone that engulfs while triggering a powerful emotional connection. Feldmann uses digital ledger art—including backgrounds made from broken treaties, news articles, and military documents that record the deaths of soldiers and horses, but not of the Lakota people—to starkly highlight the broken relationship between Indigenous people and white settlers. The images, and Colerick’s emotive song, “Little Bird – Lost Bird of Wounded Knee,” tear at the soul.

Takeaway: Stunning artistic recreation of Zintkála Nuni’s story.

Comparable Titles: Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin, S.D. Nelson’s Sitting Bull.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 09/2024
  • 979-8-218-40301-0 B0D6ZZG9Q1
  • 48 pages
  • $16.99
Hardcover Details
  • 09/2024
  • 979-8-218-43964-4 B0D6DPS8Q9
  • 48 pages
  • $29.99
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