"Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty, misunderstanding, and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would find out where she really belonged."

Zintkala Nuni, known as Lost Bird, (1890-1920) was an infant who survived the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota and a 4-day blizzard before being discovered shielded under the frozen body of her dead mother. General Colby, in SD on a cleanup mission, took an interest in her and after kidnapping her a few times from Lakota families, adopted his "war trophy" and delivered Zintkala to his suffragette wife, Clara Bewick Colby.

That's the premise of this biography that was supposed to be about Zintkala Nuni's life but was far more about Clara Colby. A contemporary of Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara attempted to "civilize" her adopted Native daughter and find a place for Zintkala in White society. Needless to say, it didn't go well.

This book took me 4 months to finish and for a multitude of reasons pissed me off. I was hungry to learn about Zintkala and instead found myself reading about the White suffragette experience. There are lots of those books around, painfully little about Zintkala. General Colby was an incredible asshole. Zintkala was treated to the ignorance of the day, that her nature was uncivilized and skin color made her less than. Like many people who are separated from their communities, she never found the place where she fit in. And at the end of the day, the book was about her adopted mother, not her.

Perhaps there wasn't enough documentation to craft a biography and historical fiction would have been a better way to tell Zintkala's story.