In this book—another important hero’s story by Doreen Rappaport—we learn of the life and struggles of Zitkala-Sa, aka Red Bird, aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. Zitkala-Sa was taken from her family on the Yankton Sioux reservation and sent off to a school where she was forced to be “civilized”—forced assimilation.

As part of my redesign I had to contend with an ironic challenge—there are few fonts which include the necessary symbols for Yankton Sioux pronunciation—it seemed to fit with the theme of non-inclusion. As a matter of fact if you wiki her today you’ll see the author was forced to borrow from czech orthography. In order to do justice to actual Sioux names and phrases (that’s the point of the book isn’t it?) with something other than a generic typeface I had to edit the font and add symbols to the unicode. A cool challenge in service of a great book about an important figure in the struggles of indigenous peoples in the U.S.

http://doreenrappaport.com/e-books/the-flight-of-red-bird-the-life-of-zitkala-sa/

Sa, Zitkala (2000). The school days of an Indian girl in The American 1890s: A cultural reader. Duke University Press