Seasons of Rita is the story of the cultural clash between American and Indian ways and the personal cost to one person, Rita, and to her people, the Sauk. After Indian School and an exploitative marriage to a “White” man she returned to live in the Sauk community and was gradually reincorporated into the tribal religion and became one of the last people to know the old ways.

Rita was born in a traditional Sauk village, but the authorities took her as a child to an Indian boarding school. She was the first generation to experience forced assimilation in the English language and Christian missionary teaching. After years in the school her life and thought were a mixture of “White” and “Indian” ways. She spent the rest of her life resolving these conflicts. This is her story.

Carol K. Rachlin is one of the most recognized writers in Native American Studies. She has written more than a dozen books (some coauthored with Alice Marriott), ranging from American Indian Mythology to American Epic, Peyote, and Dance around the Sun.

After a graduate degree in cultural anthropology at Columbia University Rachlin worked at the American Museum of Natural History. She began making field trips to Oklahoma to record Indian life, thought, and religion. During that research, she taped dozens of hours of interviews with Rita telling her life story from 1881 to 1945. From those tapes Rachlin compiled the texts for this book.

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from Seasons of Rita

ISBN: 978-1-935604-12-9. Cloth. $29.95. 216 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9825439-0-0. Paper. $19.95. 216 pages

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