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.