Review of
Little Sioux Girl,
by Lois Lenski, a book in the Roundabout America Series
Five out of five stars
A book based on a real place and people.
Published in 1958, this short book for young adults is
about Eva White Bird, a girl living in the Standing Rock Reservation in South
Dakota. She lives in a small village where there is a church, school, a house
for the schoolteacher and a dozen log cabins. While the residents raise and
gather a great deal of their food, there are times when they must travel to the
nearest town in order to acquire necessary supplies. That is not always
possible, for the road is often impassible. There are few amenities, so their
living condition can be described as “primitive.”
The people in
the small village winter in their cabins but travel to other cabins along the
edge of the river for the summer. It is cooler there and there is plenty of
wild berries and other things to gather. The Native Americans are very familiar
with what is edible and how to store it for the winter.
Although the
people would be described as poor and living in primitive conditions, they
generally are happy. While they have to work, the children are often free to
roam and have the whole outdoors to swim, run and otherwise burn off their
youthful energy.
The location
described in this book was an actual place in the Standing Rock Reservation
visited by the author in 1950. By the time this book was published, the village
was abandoned. She describes the life of the people in the village, what they
do, how they live and some of the difficulties they faced. In the middle to
late fifties, the local small school buildings were lost to consolidation.
While that made economic sense, when great distances are involved, it also
meant the death of the small villages.
