Content area
Full text
ARNOLD KRUPAT, ED., Native American Autobiography: An Anthology.Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 560 pp. $45.00 cloth, ISBN 0-299-14020-2; $17.95 paper, ISBN 0-299-14024-5.
Arnold Krupat, a pioneer in the area of Native American literary studies, has done a tremendous service in developing and legitimating this field of scholarship. Now, in bringing together a representative sampling of the stories and writings of Indian people (texts defined as Native American autobiographies), Krupat continues to expand the boundaries of the field. Native American Autobiography: An Anthology includes the stories of twenty-nine Indian people representing over two dozen tribal backgrounds and ranging from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century letters and writings of David Fowler (Montauk), Samson Occom (Mohegan), and William Apess (Pequot); through the nineteenth and twentieth century efforts of anthropologists and editors to record the stories of Indian people such as Black Hawk (Sac & Fox), Geronimo (Apache), Two Leggings (Crow), Frances Philips (Tubatulabal), Yellow Wolf (Nez Perce), and Black Elk (Lakota); and to the twentieth century writings of Charles A. Eastman (Wahpeton Sioux), Gertrude Bonnin (Dakota), Peter Kalifornsky (Kenai Dena'ina), and several contemporary Native American poets and novelists.
This collection of narratives must necessarily raise many questions about the historical process that has produced these texts. As Krupat notes at the outset of his collection, "The genre of writing referred to in the West as autobiography had no close parallel in the traditional cultures of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas" (3). The romantic privileging of self as evidenced in the genre of autobiography is a Western construct that modernity has imparted to the nonWestern peoples of the world. While American Indian people do relate their own stories to other people, it is crucial to understand that these stories are categorically distinct from our idea of autobiography.
Albert Yava (Tewa/Hopi) explains that the intentionality behind and the focus within such Indian narratives diverge from a privileging of the individual. As he notes, his story is neither for nor about him; he is merely one part among many in his story.
Maybe our young people will get an inkling of what life was like on this mesa when I was a boy, or how it was in the time of our...