Native Sources: American Indian Autobiography

Abstract

M i c k M c A l l i s t e r Dancing Badger Press Native Sources: American Indian Autobiography If we come to American Indian autobiography hoping for a direct experience of American Indian life with as little mediation as possible, we are as likely to find it as we are to find unpolluted water or food without chemical additives; our success is based in part on our definitions, our tolerances, and our tastes. The auto­ biography has an inherent close focus that at once provides a wealth of personalized detail and, at the same time, runs contrary to the very idea of cultural generalization. To illustrate, imagine attempt­ ing, as rare historians have brilliantly done, to capture the spirit of a time and place like New England of the 1830s in three or four exemplary lives. Or imagine choosing a single contemporary per­ sonal memoir to represent “Americans in the last half of the twenti­ eth century.” The diversity of American Indian experience and val­ ues across the dimensions of time, location, and cultures must, as we learn more about it, overwhelm the thinking generalizer. The history of American Indian autobiography has as its unify­ ing thread the desire to preserve, define, or create that direct expe­ rience. This desire to have autobiography serve as a cultural record sparked anthropologists’ great interest in “life stories” from the twenties through the sixties. However, much of the anthropological collecting was tainted by a kind of naivete about the effect of the collector on what was collected. As physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger discovered about observations of physical matter, the subject could not be “observed” without the observation affecting his or her life. If the life were written from translated field notes, then the editorial work of the anthropologist almost inevitably shaped the content and presentation. Even if it were 4 Western American Literature based upon the subject’s own journals and transcripts of her own words, it would, like Don Talayesva’s in Sun Chief, be modified by the editorial process and, almost inevitably, revised and augmented as a result of the anthropologist’s expectations, consciously or not. The best known instance of collector intervention is the contro­ versial relationship of John G. Neihardt to Black Elk Speaks. Since Robert Sayre and Sally McCluskey first brought the question for­ ward, there has been a broad spectrum of scholarly response to the realization that Neihardt did considerably more than “collect” this life. Raymond de Mallie and others have brought from their study of the relationship between Black Elk Speaks and Neihardt’s field notes a new understanding of the nature of the interaction between collector and subject. Scholars like David Brumble have posited in light of this problem that an American Indian autobiography is by its nature a bicultural document. Just as the reader brings cultural preconceptions to the finished document, the intervening collec­ tor/editor adjusts the literary artifact to accord with cultural and personal notions of what is interesting, what important, what incon­ sequential. Aside from the pictographic biographical materials studied by Hertha Wong, all American Indian autobiographical materials come into being through non-Indian agencies, often for non-Indian rea­ sons. The ego as the neurotic post-Renaissance man conceives it is a peculiarly Western idea. For a member of a traditional Indian cul­ ture, only very limited autobiographical information is likely to be significant. Within these cultures, a Plains Indian man might tell “coup stories” in the interest of personal advancement, children might be told stories from the lives of exemplary men and women as part of their education (with an emphasis on same-sex exem­ plars), individuals with shamanistic powers might preface the use of those powers with a life story to validate those powers. Often the narrator might arrange for an audience of validators—members of the tribe familiar with the speaker’s exploits and willing to vouch for the accuracy of the account. The earliest self-expressing American Indian autobiographies— those of William Apes, Peter Jones, George Copway—often were confessional, stories of fallen savagery redeemed by Christian con­ version, less validation of traditional culture than repudiation of it. Mick...