In part, the genre of Alicia Elliot's "On Seeing and Being Seen: the Difference Between Writing with Empathy and Writing with Love" is a narrative essay. A narrative essay tells a personal story with a beginning, a middle, and an end and is often characterized by the use of the pronoun "I."

Elliot's essay is narrative in part because it tells the story of her development as a native writer and the obstacles that initially thwarted her path. At first, she had no Native writer role models, so she tried to write as if she were white. She comments that none of her fictional characters had:

a Haudenosaunee dad or white bipolar mother. Things were simple; things were normal. Rich boys and brand names were normal.

She felt both disadvantaged as a Native writer and the target of resentment from white writers who thought she would have an advantage as a Native American....

(The entire section contains 451 words.)