Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

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, precontact personal narratives spoken, performed, and painted by more communally oriented indigenous peoples have generally been overlooked. Thoughtful critics like Arnold Krupat insist that “Indian autobiography has no prior model in the collective practice of tribal cultures” (31). But long before Anglo ethnographers came along, Native Americans were telling, performing, and painting their personal histories. One potential preliterate model of autobiography, at least among Plains Indian males, is the pictographic personal narrative. The symbolic language of pictographs allowed preliterate Plains Indians to “read” about each other 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” (21).’