American Indian Autobiography by H. David Bramble III

Abstract

Reviews 255 Times. Libby Beaman may well have been ahead of her time in resisting 19th-century strictures on women; however, too much of this book reads as if it were written in the last year, not in the last century. TERRENCE COLE University of Alaska Fairbanks American Indian Autobiography. By H. David Bramble III. (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1988. 278 pages, $35.00.) This work presents an engaging, if troubling, argument about the evolu­ tion of Native American autobiography. Brumble begins with a key problem: is autobiography a Western genre? He believes that it is, and that it reflects a movement from tribal consciousness to self-consciousness—a progressive move­ ment. He examines early coup tales, and hunting and warfaring tales, and sees in them a lack of narrative connection, a lack of self-reflection, that one also finds in preliterate Greek and Egyptian societies. His central thesis is that the anthropologists’ forms of inquiry led the Indian interpreters who worked closely with them to evolve the first “true” Indian autobiographies because these Indians internalized the “why” format of Western thought, and devel­ oped a sense of self apart from tribally determined identity. For Brumble, Momaday’s Way to Rainy Mountain completes a cycle in which a now fully conscious, highly educated mixed-blood Kiowa man can transform the earlier narrative lapses and intense tribal consciousness into an artistic form. The hypothesis is interesting in its consideration of how knowing and expressing oneself change in relation to a dramatically different Other. What is naive in Brumble’s account isthe notion that oral forms are less sophisticated than literary ones, particularly in the context of performance, and that the movement towards autobiography is an evolution of “self” for Native Ameri­ cans. Just because the narrative connections we comprehend are not a part of an oral presentation does not mean that a person has no sense of self within community. Moreover, it could be said that those writing in an already estab­ lished literary form are less creative than those who, confronted by the new, struggle to express themselves in new ways. There is a surprising degree of ethnocentrism in American Indian Auto­ biography. There also is an assumption that the early male narrative forms are the forms, and that women’s stories are secondary. The attacks on fellow women scholars (Sands, Bataille, Underhill) are severe, and a major female writer is diminished as but an imitator of forms (Silko). The breadth of Brumble’s reading is impressive. His insights are far more narrow, highly judgmental, and misleading. ALANNA KATHLEEN BROWN Montana State University ...