“The Real Geronimo Got Away”: Eluding Expectations in <em>Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior</em>

Abstract

“The Real Geronimo Got Away”Eluding Expectations in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior Anita Huizar-Hernández (bio) If you had to pick a single person to stand for Indianness, you could do worse than Geronimo, the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere and the defeated prisoners we imagine they became. —Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places Of course the real man they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away. — Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead The name Geronimo conjures up a wide variety of images, from World War II paratroopers to children jumping off the high dive to the code-name for the U.S. military’s covert operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. Well over one hundred years after his surrender to the U.S. military in 1886, Geronimo’s image remains a prominent part of the national imagination as a free-floating signifier for bravery, daring, and danger. Of the many things Geronimo is associated with, however, his own autobiography is not usually one of them. The hypervisibility of Geronimo’s name and face is contrasted with the comparative invisibility of what the man himself had to say in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior. Why is Geronimo so much more prevalent than Geronimo? Though Geronimo’s autobiography has not been completely ignored, particularly by interested academics, there is something about the text that is at odds with the dominant representations of Geronimo, positive or negative, [End Page 49] that have become so frequent and familiar within U.S. popular culture. In this essay, I argue that Geronimo’s relative obscurity is due to its generic constraints and enigmatic content, both of which frustrate the reader by eluding easy interpretation. This interpretive opacity is all the more exasperating given the pervasive nature of Geronimo’s image, for since its publication in 1906, Geronimo has been defying readers’ expectations. By refusing to tell either extreme of the Geronimo mythology, that is, by rejecting the image of both “the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere” and “the defeated prisoners we imagine they became,” Geronimo challenges our ability to make such a straightforward distinction in the first place (Deloria, Indians 136). geronimo, in his own words? One of the reasons Geronimo’s autobiography has received surprisingly little attention is the complexity of its authorial voice. The title Geronimo: His Own Story would seem to make the authorship of this text clear and simple: the reader expects the story of Geronimo as told by the man himself. As is always the case with Geronimo, however, the reality is much more complex than first impressions might suggest. In actuality, Geronimo, like other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives of the lives of Native American people, is a hybrid text somewhere between a biography and an autobiography.1 R. D. Theisz refers to this canon as “bi-autobiographies” and defines them as texts that present “segments or all of the life of a Native American man or woman, narrated orally or in writing, which is then recorded by a non-Indian editor, generally from among social scientists or literati” (66). Arnold Krupat identifies a third party within this collaboration: a translator (For Those 45–46). The end result, then, is not a straightforward telling of one’s own life but an opaquely polyvocal narrative. Geronimo: His Own Story is no exception, narrated by Geronimo to Oklahoma school superintendent S. M. Barrett through Apache translator Asa Daklugie. The first step in analyzing Geronimo, then, is a careful examination of the specific workings of this culturally, linguistically, and epistemologically complex collaborative process. As Krupat cautions, any analysis of this genre “requires consideration of the language, culture, and history both of Native Americans and of Eur-americans [sic]” (For Those xi). In [End Page 50] order to emphasize this inherent cultural duality, he proposes using the term “original bicultural composite composition” in lieu of autobiography (31). Untangling how this duality operates, as Hertha Dawn Wong warns, is no easy feat. Analyzing these texts requires readers...