Renee sansom flood biography
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Renee Sansom Flood | Lost Bird SDPB
Renee Sansom Flood - 12/18/99
Q. Tell a about the atmosphere in late 1800’s
I think it was an atmosphere of fear…the Lakota were ghost dancing and there was a total misunderstanding of the ghost dance and the media was involved in that fear. They wrote things that made it seem worse than it was. The headlines were blood and guts and the Indians were going to attack, the Lakota were on their way to Rapid City to attack and that wasn’t the truth. And so the uprising was generated in the media, the headlines and it scared the people, it scared the settlers and it scared the people who had been living in the Black hills for a long time. The Indians could read, so they would get those newspapers and they saw what had been written about them and read it. It generated fear and loathing and so that’s what generated those atrocities against the Lakota in the months before the Wounded Knee massacre.
Q. Why do you think the media was presenting it • This “powerful and chilling” (Publishers Weekly) konto of a young girl taken from her native land in South Dakota after the 1890 massaker of Lakota men, women, and children describes the story of Lost Bird and the destruction of life for a Native American orphan being raised as a white child outside of her tribe. • This is a companion book for the award winning short film “Lost Bird (Zintkala Muni) which also includes lead sheet for the song “Little Bird – Lost Bird of Wounded Knee”. 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. A Lakota (Sioux) baby and her mother who were fleeing for safety became victims in the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. The baby was found four days after a South Dakota blizzard, alive by the warmth of her mother’s dead body. She was adopted by a prominent soldier and his famous suffragette wife to be raised in their white, high-society circles. Zintka was not accepted there because of racial prejudices in the era of forced assimilation. Neither was she was accepted by her own people when she sought out her roots, in part because she did not speak their language. Named “Lost Bird” at the moment she was separated from her
Lost Bird of Wounded Knee
When Lost Bird was found alive as an infant beneath the fryst body of her dead mother following the månad 1980 massaker at Wounded Knee, a general from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry made the choice to adopt her. While the general, Leonard W. Colby, who would later become the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, swore to provide Lost Bird with a good life, his true meaning of adopting the Native American infant was to exploit her to bring in prominent tribes to his lag firm.
After growing up a lonely child with no true meaning of belonging, Lost Bird lived a brief but harsh life filled with sexual abuse, painful marriages, tribe r ZINTKA!