Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers focuses on the pioneering collaborative work between Native women storytellers and women ethnographers/editors. This book explores what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification. In this review of the intersubjectively relational methodologies of these women, we see that the most exemplary ethnographies are integrally grounded within and of value to the tribal communities of the Native women storytellers.
Telling a Good One is the first comprehensive examination of the collaborative process that creates a Native American life story. Kathleen Mullen Sands draws on her partnership with the late Theodore Rios, a Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) narrator, to address crucial issues surrounding the inscribing of a life story. Sandsøexamines the creative, critical, and cultural processes behind this increasingly popular mode of self-expression. The impetus, initial negotiations, interview process, narrative content and style, and the editing and interpretation phases of a Native American life story are all given equal scrutiny. Of particular interest are Sands's successes and failings as a collaborator and the influence of Tohono O'odham culture and its tradition of storytelling on Rios's actions and words. Sands examines the effects of her personal background and academic training on her actions and decisions, how her experiences compare with other collaborative autobiographies and biographies, and the role of academia and publishers in shaping expectations about the content and format of Native American biographies and autobiographies.
Portillo analyzes traditional autobiographies and memoirs alongside interviews and social media to explore the intricacies of Native American women's voices and the stories that they share.
In the last few years, there have been myriad media reports regarding Federal Indian boarding schools and their grisly history of violence and cultural erasure against Native people in the United States. The US government recently acknowledged its role for the first time with the Department of the Interior's publication of the "Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report." In this book, Alicia Carroll tells the history of one form of literary Native resistance to this violence, that of the collaboratively written autobiography. Focusing on work by Hopi boarding school residents, Carroll shows readers that collaborative autobiographical authorship is a practice of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, using a method they dub indiscipline: a strategy of defying, refusing, or purposefully failing to follow mandates to conform to settler colonial sex and gender norms, including heteronormativity, the binary construct of sex and gender, and the idea of personhood itself. Through collaboratively written autobiography, Carroll argues that Native authors not only resisted colonial attempts to use sex and gender to alienate them from their homelands and bodies, they created an important Indigenous literary genre that informs our understanding of Native life and art today.
An award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist renders a powerful history of her family and the way in which tribal history informs her own past. Ultimately, she sees herself and her people whole again and presents an illuminating story of personal spiritual triumph.
This book focuses on the collaborative work between Native women storytellers and their female ethnographers and/or editors, but the book is also about what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification and meaning. Regardless of discipline, academic ethnographers who conducted their field work research during the twentieth century were trained in the accepted scientific methods and theories of the time that prescribed observation, objectivity, and evaluative distance. In contradistinction to such prescribed methods, regarding the ethnographic work conducted among Native Americans, it turns out that the intersubjectively relational work of women (both ethnographers and the Indigenous storytellers with whom they worked) has produced far more reliably factual, historically accurate, and tribally specific Indigenous autobiographies than the more “scientifically objective” approaches of most of the male ethnographers. This volume provides a close lens to the work of a number of women ethnographers and Native American women storytellers to elucidate the effectiveness of their relational methods. Through a combined rhetorical and literary analysis of these ethnographies, we are able to differentiate the products of the women’s working relationships. By shifting our focus away from the surface level textual reading that largely approaches the texts as factually informative documents, literary analysis provides access into the deeper levels of the storytelling that lies beneath the surface of the edited texts. Non-Native scholars and editors such as Franc Johnson Newcomb, Ruth Underhill, Nancy Lurie, Julie Cruikshank, and Noël Bennett and Native storytellers and writers such as Grandma Klah, María Chona, Mountain Wolf Woman, Mrs. Angela Sidney, Mrs. Kitty Smith, Mrs. Annie Ned, and Tiana Bighorse help us to understand that there are ways by which voices and worlds are more and less disclosed for posterity. The results vary based upon the range of factors surrounding their production, but consistent across each case is the fact that informational accuracy is contingent upon the the degree of mutual respect and collaboration in the women’s working relationships. And it is in their pioneering intersubjective methodologies that the work of these women deserves far greater attention and approbation.
Drawing on the life stories of Native Americans solicited by historians during the 19th century and, later, by anthropologists concerned with amplifying the cultural record, Arnold Krupat examines the Indian autobiography as a specific genre of American writing.
Using contemporary autobiography theory, and literary and anthropological approaches, Wong traces the development of Native American autobiography from pre-literate oral, artistic, and dramatic personal narratives through late nineteenth and early twentieth-century life histories to contemporary autobiographies.
