Chronicle of a Lakota Girl Raised White / Baby found at Wounded Knee grew up to face an identity crisis

LOST BIRD OF WOUNDED KNEE

Spirit of the Lakota By Renee Sansom Flood Scribner; 384 pages; $25

In 1981, South Dakota social worker Renee Sansom Flood was shown an 1891 photograph of a U.S. brigadier general holding an Indian baby: "I turned the picture over, and on the back was written: 'Zintkala Nuni, Lost Bird, found on the field of Wounded Knee on the fourth day after the battle by the side of her dead mother and adopted by me. Yours, L.W. Colby.' . . . I looked at the child's face and saw there the same expression that I had seen many times on the faces of Indian children who had been taken from their parents and placed in foster care. I stared at the piercing, hypnotic eyes of the handsome General Colby. That look was a dare."

Flood accepted the challenge. Horrified by the prejudice against Native Americans she had encountered in her work, haunted by the somber face of Zintkala Nuni Colby, the next day she packed up her small son and drove five hours to the Nebraska town where Zintkala had spent much of her childhood. Flood believed that by investigating this one adoption, she might better understand "a moral tragedy of major proportions": the epidemic of Indian child adoption (35 percent of Indian children were not living with their parents, according to a 1983 Fielding Institute report) and the frighteningly high incidence of Indian teenage suicide.

The result of Flood's obsession is "Lost Bird of Wounded Knee," a moving chronicle of one American woman's life and a perceptive study of white racial ambivalence. "Lost Bird" is not flawless: Flood has more material than she knows what to do with and frequently breaks up her narrative pace with information that would be more appropriate in a footnote. She's also at times an awkward stylist. But she is a passionate advocate with a great story to tell, although Zintkala herself sometimes becomes lost in Flood's outpouring of detail about Native American history, American feminism and white bigotry.

Leonard Wright Colby was not an ideal father, although he was an interesting specimen of 19th century American entrepreneurship, according to Flood. Brilliant, scheming, charming when he chose to be, Colby believed that Wounded Knee was a matter of "wanton murders and cruel massacres of hundreds of unoffending people, (that) has passed into history as one of the stains upon the national honor of the United States," as he wrote in an official report. He also regarded his new daughter as "a most interesting Indian relic . . . a living symbol of white victory," and later used her adoption to ingratiate himself into lucrative legal contracts with various Indian nations.

Zintkala's new mother, Clara Bewick Colby, was a different story. Already middle-aged, Clara was a committed suffragist, the publisher of the Women's Tribune, a colleague and confidante of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "Lost Bird" is in fact a dual biography of Zintkala and her mother, portrayed here as a genuinely valiant woman, whose relationship formed a complex intersection of social attitudes and conflicts.

While Clara, according to Flood, came to love Zintkala and encouraged her natural vivacity, courage and musical talent, she also viewed her, in a spirit typical of Victorian reform, as a noble savage to be "uplifted" by white civilization. Zintkala was petted and sheltered, praised in her mother's Tribune editorials; she was also forbidden to play with black neighborhood children and taunted by white peers for her dark skin. Clara did attempt to educate Zintkala about her heritage, Flood notes, but with the help of white anthropologists.

By the age of 5, Zintkala was on her way to a major identity crisis, and her father was tiring of both his wife and his living relic. Colby's desertion of his family left the intrepid Clara the task of supporting herself and Zintkala with journalism and lectures on feminism.

The rest of Zintkala's short life can be deduced merely by looking at the book's index: "Zintkala Nuni: burials of, chronic illnesses of, depressions of, divorces of, fears of, identity problems of, marriages of, nervous breakdown of." The list goes on. She was expelled from various schools for defiant behavior; ran away from Clara to find other Lakota, only to be rejected by them for "going by white ways"; and married disastrous men (the first one gave her syphilis).

Flood indicates that perhaps Zintkala's only real glory days were spent in show business: in Wild West shows as a "cowgirl" doing tricks on horseback; as an extra in silent Westerns; and, memorably, as Pocahontas at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. The jacket photograph of "Lost Bird" shows her in this role, a tall, handsome young woman with faraway eyes. She died in 1920 at age 30 in Hanford (Kings County), of influenza complicated by syphilis.

But Zintkala's life bears a coda: Her story has intrigued many others, both Native American and white -- there is, in fact, a Lost Bird Society -- and in 1991, Flood writes, their efforts saw Zintkala's bones brought home and reinterred at the Wounded Knee Memorial Gravesite.