American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Autobiography has had many functions in American Indian communities: as a powerful means of constructing tribal identities; a form of cultural preservation; a mode of surveillance in the hands of reservation and government agents; a springboard for thinking about issues of sovereignty, nationalism, and historiography; and a therapeutic tool to help deal with historical and personal trauma. Traditional forms of self-life narration existed prior to European invasion and occupation and included pictographic and oral narratives such as personal artistic representations on buffalo robes and naming ceremonies. This tradition of a wide range of personal narrative styles continued and expanded as Indians gained literacy in English and began to tailor their experiences to new literary forms such as the spiritual autobiography and the classic chronological personal narrative, at the same time maintaining older modes of self-life narration. Scholars such as Gerald Vizenor, Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong, Robert Allen Warrior, Vine Deloria Jr., H. David Brumble, Arnold Krupat, Kathleen Mullen Sands, and David Murray have opened up the field of American Indian autobiography by considering not just the ethnographic and practical uses of Native American autobiographies, but the various cultural, political, personal, historical, and linguistic contexts that inform indigenous subjectivity. Much of the previous scholarship focused on the important issues of mediation, yet this discussion often obscured the Indian voice of the text and shifted the focus of the scholarship away from indigenous lived experience to that of the non-Indian editor. Autobiography constitutes the most prevalent form of discursive production by indigenous people in North America. As such, it has the potential to contribute in meaningful ways to tribal communities’ processes of nation building and the reconfiguration of tribal intellectual and cultural sovereignty through the recovery of Native voice and agency in mediated texts. As the contributors to this special issue demonstrate, personal narratives are employed for a variety of political tools, such as recognition struggles, and foster empowering intellectual discourse around issues of community, gender, race, identity, and history. The collection of essays that follows engages with these previous interventions into Indian autobiography, but also opens up new ways of reading tribal self-life narration.

In the opening pages of Marilou Awiakta’s Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom, the author offers a metacommentary on her delightfully hybrid text, likening it to a “double-woven basket (Cherokee-style).” The image resonates on many levels with the author’s tribal traditions and thus serves to foreshadow the text’s wealth of material on Cherokee culture and history, but readers soon discover that Awiakta actually integrates the design of the double-woven basket into the very form of her text. In so doing she produces a book that through its combination of circularity and quadratic symmetry resists the linearity of traditional Western narrative and challenges many of the epistemological assumptions that follow from that tradition. My reading of Selu builds on a recognition and appreciation of the form of the text by examining a less explicit but, I argue, equally significant manner in which the double-weave basket structure serves as a metaphor for the text’s complex autobiographical dimensions. In particular, the double-weave design of traditional Cherokee basketry is replicated not only in Awiakta’s affirmation of both her Celtic-Appalachian and Eastern Band Cherokee roots but also in her simultaneous expression of a collective tribal identity and an individualistic artistic identity. Throughout Selu Awiakta demonstrates her ability to weave back and forth between autoethnography, on the one hand, in which her representation of selfhood is collective, virtually inseparable from her insider’s explanations of Cherokee myths, history, and cultural practices, and conventional Western autobiography, on the other hand, in which she gives a narrative account of the development of an autonomous, in this case artistic, identity. This autobiographical double-weave of relational and autonomous modes of subjectivity, of identification and individuation, underscores Mick McAllister’s observation that “an American Indian autobiography is by its nature a bicultural document.” It also serves as a good example of what Arnold Krupat has called, in a different context, a cosmopolitan critical perspective, in which American Indians and members of other historically marginalized groups are negotiating with increasing deftness competing socially constructed definitions of selfhood to find discursive freedom in the cultural borderlands.

At the close of the eighteenth century, the missionary zeal of the Second Great Awakening had failed to open many roads into Cherokee country. Although our lands had been drastically reduced by treaty and war over the course of interactions with the British, French, and Americans, the Cherokee nevertheless represented a powerful military and political force impervious to unwelcome overtures from evangelistic missionaries, however enthusiastic. By the close of the nineteenth century, though, missionaries’ inroads were well established, and thousands and thousands of Cherokees had converted to Christianity. Among the earliest and most influential of converts was Catharine Brown, the daughter of a relatively affluent family from an Alabama town and an early attendant of the Brainerd mission school, established in eastern Tennessee in 1817 under the direction of the largely Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. On her arrival the missionaries were doubtful that the proud and beautiful Cherokee woman could acclimate to their strict lifestyle, but she soon became a favored student, whose enthusiasm led many of her family and other Cherokees to the new religion. Less than two years after her conversion, she was sent to take charge of a school at the town of Creek Path, and only three years later, in 1823, she died of tuberculosis at the approximate age of twenty-three. After her death Rufus Anderson, a ranking official with the American board, began a biographical article on her for that body’s publication, the Missionary Herald, but he found the subject matter compelling enough to warrant a separate edition, culled from Brown’s letters and others’ recollections and documents. Her memoirs, though heavily edited and frequently altered by Anderson’s ready hand, offer a rare opportunity to consider the adaptation available to a subject.

The Residential School experience was, beyond question, intolerable. . . . [All] too often, “wards of the Department” were overworked, underfed, badly clothed, housed in unsanitary quarters, beaten with whips, rods and fists, chained and shackled, bound hand and foot, locked in closets, basements and bathrooms, and had their heads shaved or hair closely cropped. —John Milloy, A National Crime We cannot understand the full horror of Indian Residential Schools until we understand that their very existence, in however benign a form, constituted an abomination. —Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game Still, today, I do not regret going into the Residential School. —Rita Joe, Song of Rita Joe Canada’s official residential school policy, functioning between 1879 and 1986, acted as a weapon in a calculated attack on indigenous cultures, seeking—through such now infamous procedures as familial separation, forced speaking of non-Native languages, and propagandist derogation of precontact modes of existence and Native spiritual systems—to compel its inmates into assimilation. The results of this onslaught are now widely documented. Native children were divorced from their traditional Native cultures yet at the same time were refused entry into prosperous white Canada through inferior educational practices and racism, institutionalized to occupy a liminal space characterized by disillusion, identity crisis, and despair. The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong identifies residential schooling as “the single most devastating factor in the breakdown of our society. It is at the core of the damage, beyond all other mechanisms cleverly fashioned to subjugate, assimilate, and annihilate.”

Debra Magpie Earling, author of the 2002 novel Perma Red, does not appear as a named character in her text, which has been designated as a work of fiction. Yet the content and construction of the novel have been major forces both arising from and shaping Earling’s autobiographical experiences within her immediate biological family and as a member of the Salish-Kootenai community. Intertextual readings of the interviews, short stories, and personal dedications Earling has published before and since Perma Red’s publication powerfully articulate the autobiography embedded in this novel. Eighteen years in the making, Perma Red is an intricate, intimate expression of self-life narration that is Earling’s act of publicly honoring the Aunt Louise she never met but who has lived with Earling daily through family and community stories. Perma Red is set on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in the 1940s, where turbulent Native-Anglo antagonisms continue to constrict social, educational, and economic spaces for the reservation’s Native inhabitants as part of the colonial legacy. In lush prose, with minimal dialogue, Earling describes Louise White Elk’s difficult, dangerous life and in doing so offers up an eloquent fictionalized eulogy to Earling’s actual Salish Aunt Louise, who died brutally and young on the Flathead Reservation in 1947. In rendering this fictionalized portrait of her biological aunt (whom I refer to exclusively as “Aunt Louise” in this essay, to distinguish her from the fictional “Louise White Elk” or “Louise”), Earling not only demonstrates her characters’ bonds of female kinship through memory as a site of empowerment, but Earling herself becomes a significant “cotagonist” through her storyteller’s memory and voice, constructing her own family history within the continuum of Bitterroot Salish community.

One night my Father had a vision in his sleep, he saw an old man standing at a distance on the horizon of a low hill. . . . Then the old man spoke, saying, “I came to tell you of my life, I give it to you, you will live until you die of old age, but before that time you will pass away in order that you may demonstrate the power which I am giving you. The power to arise after you have passed away.” —Garter Snake, in Fred P. Gone’s “Bull Lodge’s Life” In 1980, on behalf of the Gros Ventre people, George P. Horse Capture published The Seven Visions of Bull Lodge, as Told by His Daughter, Garter Snake. The Seven Visions describes a lifetime of personal encounters with Powerful other-than-human Persons by the noted Gros Ventre warrior and ritual leader, Bull Lodge (ca. 1802–86). The life history recorded in Seven Visions is also distinguished by its provenance, for it has been almost exclusively mediated at various stages of its production by Gros Ventre people themselves: Bull Lodge recounted his life experiences to his daughter during the latter half of the nineteenth century, who then “gave” (that is, narrated so as to authorize reproduction of) her father’s “life story” to tribal member Fred Gone during her own old age. Gone then carefully translated and inscribed the narrative in written English just as the United States was entering World War II, and the text was later edited and published by tribal member Horse Capture during the Red Power movement. All told then, Bull Lodge’s words concerning his own life have been purposefully recontextualized and redeployed by his own people on multiple occasions since he gave voice to them more than a century ago.

In Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, Jim Chibbo carries on an epistolary dialogue with his pal Hotgun in a humorous, trickster-inspired Creekified English (or Anglicized Creek) vernacular following each chapter. In these conversations Chibbo takes literary critics (including his alter ego, Womack) to task for work that maps non-Indian theories onto indigenous texts in ways that imply that indigenous writing is inferior. Quoting the trickster figure Rabbit, Chibbo responds to a suggestion that it’s impossible to write a “Red book”: “Only if you believe white always swallows up Red. I think Red stays Red, most ever time, even throwed in with white. Especially around white. It stands out more.” In other words, Chibbo privileges indigenous epistemologies even as he places them in sometimes pleasurable, sometimes vexed dialogue with “white” critical practices. In the past decade scholars such as Womack have paid increasing attention to examining tribal literatures, histories, and ethnographies through indigenous lenses. These practices seek to bridge gaps between the kind of critical, often abstract, work we do as indigenous academics and the communities that produce the texts we write about. What Womack and others suggest isn’t an outright rejection of Western research methodologies and any attendant engagement of indigenous voices with the West. Rather, they stress how attention to indigenous narrative strategies enables scholars to tease out what indigenous philosophies and aesthetics might look like when translated into and produced in English, circulated through the print medium, and subjected to the scrutiny of a universalizing humanistic gaze. This scholarship illustrates how “Red stays Red,” even in the face of oppression, historical change, and the emergence of innovative ways of storytelling, not in some static, essentialist way that draws on fixed notions of tradition but in a way that understands “Red” to be vibrantly alive and in dialogue with multiple contemporary contexts.

In their volume American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives, Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands assert that “American Indian women’s autobiography defies definition while simultaneously demanding it; the complexity and variety challenge the boundaries of literary categories yet call attention to it as a separate entity in the history of literary expression. It is a problematical form that may best be addressed and analyzed in terms of the process of its creation rather than as an established genre.” They are referring, of course, to a specific type of life narrative, the collaborative or as-told-to autobiography. What is problematic about American Indian women’s autobiography is not its form, but the scholarly emphasis on the process of creation and the lack of critical attention paid to it as an established genre. While the processes of creation, collaboration, and inscription of American Indian women’s autobiographies play important roles in our reading and reception of these texts, an overemphasis on these processes can obscure the Native voice, shifting the focus away from lived experience of the Native subject to that of the non-Native editor. Further, Native women have often been viewed by non-Native scholars and critics as playing minimal roles in the political and ceremonial lives of their tribal communities, with the result that their self-life narratives have been subordinated to those of Native men. Yet American Indian women’s autobiographies recount a specific type of life experience that has often been overlooked, one that is equally important to our understanding of the genre. The challenge, then, is to develop ways of reading these texts that balance the recovery and recognition of the Native voice and agency contained within them with the processes of creation and the contexts of production that shape them.