Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks, Diaries, and Text Construction

Abstract

Abstract When scholars talk about Native American autobiography, the assumption is that they mean the ethnographer-collected life histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because autobiography has been considered a distinctly Western impulse emphasizing individuality and has been defined as the story of one’s life written by oneself, pre contact personal narratives spoken, performed, and painted by communal-oriented indigenous peoples have generally been overlooked. Even thoughtful critics like Arnold Krupat insist that ‘‘Indian autobiography has no prior model in the collective practice of tribal cultures.”But long before Anglo ethnographers came along, Native Americans were telling, performing, and painting their personal histories. One potential tribal model of autobiography, at least among Plains Indian males, is the pictographic personal narrative. The symbolic language of pictographs allowed pre-contact Plains Indians to “read” about one another from painted robes, tipis, and shields. According to Helen H. Blish, pictographic hides were a “widely practiced” form of artistic personal history. Such “personal records” were “quite common …among the Plains Indians/’ and, says Blish, “these are the most frequently found pictographic records. “In the Great Plains, in particular, pictography was highly developed and ‘‘universally employed and under stood.’ ‘Such picture writing was used to convey everyday messages announcements, rosters, personal letters, business and trade transac tions, and geographical directions and charts (Blish 20; Petersen)-as well as tribal histories (known as winter counts) and autobiographical narratives.