https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.19260
This article investigates the transformation of Amerindian narratives through the adaptation of the Ghost Dance episode in Dwight Jon Zimmerman’s Saga of the Sioux (2011), a derivative work based on Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). While Brown’s original is often commended for its emphasis on Indigenous perspectives and resistance, Zimmerman’s adaptation, intended for a younger audience, illustrates the consequences of narrative simplification, editorial framing, and ideological reframing. This study critically examines how themes of resistance, spirituality, and cultural identity embedded in the Ghost Dance are reinterpreted, diminished, or altered in the adaptation. Employing comparative textual analysis informed by postcolonial theory and narrative ethics, the research highlights how retellings of traumatic histories, especially by non-Indigenous authors, may simultaneously preserve and distort subaltern voices.
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Vol. 19 No. 1 (2026)
Published: 2026-06-30
10.31261/RIAS

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.