Collaboration or Colonialism: Text and Process in Native American Women's Autobiographies

Abstract

Just whose life is this, anyway? is a reasonable question for the scholar of Native American composite autobiography to ask. It is, in fact, the most essential question to ask of a genre of American Indian literature that is actually more process than product. It is the question that provides entree into the complex relationships of oral and written discourses and into the degrees of white and Native authorship that rise out of the omissions, manipulations, and cross-cultural negotiations encoded in the text of any collaborative inscription of a Native American life. Personal narratives solicited from Native American men and women by non-Indian collectors who then structure, edit, introduce, interpret, and publish these autobiographies have been a particularly problematical subject in Native American studies. Personal narratives by Native women have been further problematized by gender bias. For decades, like most women's literary production, they were deemed too insignificant for serious study or relegated to case-study status which focused on content rather than attending to form, style, or narrative intentions. Until the advent of feminist studies, Native women's lives were a consistently marginalized form of discourse, seen as irrelevant to the structures imposed on cultures by the almost exclusively male cadre of anthropologists who controlled academic politics and publishing norms. Collecting and analyzing the narratives of Native women for academic publication was risky business for scholars because it was an enterprise too literary, too divergent from the scientific model espoused for field projects to produce authoritative data. Furthermore, there were no critical models for understanding the value of Native women's personal narrative until recognition of women's autobiography as a separate genre with characteristics and criteria separate from male autobiography gained the attention of es