The As-Told-To Native [Auto]biography: Whose Voice Is Speaking?

Abstract

The As-Told-To Native [Auto]biography:Whose Voice Is Speaking? Edward Valandra (bio) For a week in June 1993 the Oglala Lakota hosted the Oceti Sakowin to discuss several issues of national importance,1 especially the ongoing exploitation of Lakota spirituality. At this meeting, participants drafted a statement in resolution form (Lakota Summit V Resolution). Unanimously ratified by at least one hundred community-based representatives, the resolution declared "war against exploiters of Lakota spirituality." Arguably, the resolution validates what Native communities in general say about various disconcerting activities of non-Natives and their Native accomplices who tend to distort the cultural realities, spiritual or otherwise, of indigenous peoples. Among those targeted were flea markets, New Age retail stores, pseudoreligious corporations, and the academy. Grouping academics' activities with flea markets and specialty stores might not be a good comparison—after all, flea markets at least offer better bargains for your money. The Oceti Sakowin summit resolution severely condemns those "academic disciplines which have sprung up at colleges and universities institutionalizing the sacrilegious imitation of our spiritual practices by students and instructors under the guise of educational programs in 'shamanism.'" But another equally disconcerting problem mentioned in the resolution concerned those authors who "are selling books that promote the systematic colonization of our . . . spirituality." Indeed, anthropology and religious studies are especially guilty of both activities, while [End Page 103] almost all humanities disciplines are guilty of engaging in the latter.2 An unfinished task of the academy is to challenge those institutional norms in academia that Native country perceives pejoratively as having all the value of the detritus found in flea markets and specialty shops. Ethnic or American studies, Native studies, and other interdisciplinary programs that use Native knowledge to foster a desperately needed cross-cultural understanding between and among diverse populations obviously represent a laudable development for the academy. Selling colonialism-tainted books is far more damning for ethnic or American studies (both of which are pluralist-oriented disciplines) and Native studies (a sovereignty-oriented discipline) than is a three- or four-credit religious studies course in vicarious shamanism, and therefore the potential damage to these disciplines' creditability is especially high. This essay analyzes at least one troubling area where colonialism-tainted material has gained a foothold in Native literature: the "as-told-to" Native [auto]biography. Given this general context of the academy's integrity deficit among Native communities, the following analysis will consist of two parts: first, identifying Native intellectuals whose critiques of Native literature either directly or indirectly address the as-told-to Native autobiography phenomenon and, second, examining several popular Lakota autobiographies to illustrate the shortcomings of this genre of Native literature. This analytical framework will reveal significant patterns in the as-told-to Native autobiography that have been rightly construed by Native peoples as offering little more than supermarket tabloids for the academy—tabloid material that perpetuates colonialism-tinted misrepresentations and hence invariably pollutes Native and other cross-cultural disciplines. These controversial works leave the reading public with a plethora of contrived fancies. Whose Voice Is Speaking? Kathryn Shanley and Robert A. Warrior both believe, as do other third-generation Native writers, that the late 1960s marked a decisive moment in Native literature. Texts such as N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins surfaced to remind society that Native peoples had not vanished but were, in fact, thriving. Measuring the outcome of this literary moment, Warrior notes, Twenty-five years ago, building a library of American Indian writers from books in print would have taken up no more than a few feet of shelf space. With the emergence of literally hundreds of writers since and the reprinting of many authors before 1968, the yield now is yards and yards.3 [End Page 104] So, in a span of time equivalent to a generation, non-Native society has witnessed an exponential proliferation of Native literature that continues unabated. Having "captured" the speaking of English first, Native peoples are more comfortable with literary endeavors now than were previous generations. This proliferation reveals an emerging recovery of Native intellectual traditions that Warrior's Tribal Secrets addresses in...