Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Native American Autobiography - Gender And Autobiography

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GENDER AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: "The Ethnographic Perspective: Early Recorders," in American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, pp. 27-46.

[In the following essay, Bataille and Sands discuss the movement toward the ethnographic study of Native American life, which included a new focus on the female experience.]

To fail to understand another person's life story is, in general, to reject one's own humanity. Whether recorded in the extremity of personal or cultural annihilation, or in the midst of joy and productivity, the anthropological life history offers a positive moral opportunity to pass on stories that might otherwise never be told. For those who are bearers of a tradition, the opportunity to tell their story can be a gift;...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overview
4. Problems Of Authorship
5. The Evolution Of Native American Autobiography
6. Political Issues
7. Gender And Autobiography
8. Autobiographical Works During The Turn Of The Century
9. Further Reading
10. Copyright

1. Autobiography