American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Native American autobiography did not begin in the nineteenth century when white ethnographers began to collect Indian life histories. Although aboriginal notions of self, life, and writing (auto-bio-grapheme) differed from those of Europeans, pre-contact natives did share their personal narratives. Instead of writing about their lives, though, individuals, often in collaboration with the tribe, shared their stories in oral, artistic, and dramatic modes. This intra-cultural collaborative narration became what Arnold Krupat calls ”bicultural composite composition.” Contemporary Native American autobiographers have attempted to re-create these collaborative processes and to modify aboriginal traditions of personal narrative, often consciously combining their Indian traditions with their white educations. One of the most accomplished examples of this is N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday’s belief in the transforming capabilities of the imagination, in the synthesizing potential of memory, in the identity-inducing possibilities of the land, and in the power, beauty, and grace of the word, all find their way into The Way to Rainy Mountain. He says: In one sense, then, the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.