Pre-Literate Native American Autobiography: Forms of Personal Narrative

Abstract

Of few literary critics involved in study of Native American autobiography, most have avoided traditional Native American autobiographical modes, choosing instead to discuss as-told-to life histories which were solicited, translated, recorded and edited by a white collaborator. William Bloodworth distinguishes anthropological (or as-told-to) autobiography from authentic Indian autobiography, which springs from desires of Native Americans to tell stories of their individual lives, rather than from wishes of an Anglo anthropologist (69-70). In contradistinction to Bloodworth, Kathleen Mullen Sands writes that the most distinctive characteristic of American Indian autobiography is of narrator and recorder editor (57). Likewise, H. David Brumble III refers to Native American autobiographies as documents which are interesting because of questions raised by collaboration between subject and collector, and because they record transition from a preliterate to a literate people in one-hundred-fifty short years (2-3). Arnold Krupat, who offers most comprehensive discussion of Indian life histories, states that the principle constituting Indian autobiography as a genre [is] principle of bi-cultural composite authorship (33). Indian autobiography, then, is place where two cultures meet, the textual equivalent of frontier.' Sands, Brumble, and Krupat agree on importance of bicultural composite authorship of American Indian autobiography. This is a valid definition for a particular historical period (from late nineteenth to early twentieth century), but it overlooks early Native American self-expressions. Before white ethnographers came along, Native Americans were telling their stories. Certainly they were told in different forms, with different emphases, for different audiences and purposes, but they were told. William Smith recognizes this when he defines Indian autobiography as verbal expressions, whether oral or written, of American Indian lives (237). Lynne Woods O'Brien further