American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.