[In the following excerpt from his introduction to his anthology, Krupat reviews the historical trends and the major issues involved in Native American autobiography.]

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, misnamed "Indians." Like people the world over, the tribes recorded various kinds of personal experience, but the western notion of representing the whole of any one person's life—from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and old age—was, in the most literal way, foreign to the cultures of the present-day United States. The high regard in which the modern West holds egocentric, autonomous individualism—the "auto" part of "autobiography"—found almost no parallel whatever in the communally oriented cultures of Native America.

Just as the "auto" part of "autobiography" was alien to Native understanding, so, too, was the "graph" part, for alphabetic writing was not present among the cultures of Native America. Tribal people were oral people who represented personal experience performatively and dramatically to an audience. Personal exploits might be presented pictographically (i.e., in tipi decorations or other types of drawing), but never in alphabetic writing. When, after considerable contact with the Euramerican invader-settlers, some Native people did attempt to offer extensive life histories, these made their way into writing in two distinct but related forms. One of these I refer to as "autobiographies by Indians," and the other as "Indian autobiographies."

Autobiographies by Indians are individually composed texts, and, like western autobiographies, they are indeed written by those whose lives they chronicle. For the Native American to become author of such a text requires that he—and later also she—must have become "educated" and "civilized" and, in the vast majority of cases, also Christianized. Indian autobiographies, as I have detailed the matter elsewhere, are not actually self-written, but are, rather, texts marked by the principle of original, bicultural composite composition. That is to say, these texts are the end-products of a rather complex process involving a three-part collaboration between a white editor-amanuensis who edits, polishes, revises, or otherwise fixes the "form" of the text in writing, a Native "subject" whose orally presented life story serves as the "content" of the autobiographical narrative, and, in almost all cases, a mixedblood interpreter/translator whose exact contribution to the autobiographical project remains one of the least understood aspects of Indian autobiography. Historically, Indian autobiographies have been produced under the sign of history and (social) science, while, with certain exceptions, autobiographies by Indians have been produced under the sign of religion, nonscientific cultural commentary, and art.

Both Indian autobiographies and autobiographies by Indians may be seen as the textual equivalent of the "frontier," as the discursive ground on which two extremely different cultures met and interacted. In this regard, Native American autobiography may usefully be studied for what it tells us about Native culture, Euramerican culture, the view each had of the other, and the shifting relations, i.e., the discursive/textual relations but also material relations of power, between them. In the multicultural age we all inhabit, self-lifewriting by Indians—Native American autobiography—is important not only for its intrinsic interest, but also because it can provide a different, alternate, or, indeed, radically other perspective on the meaning of the terms ("self-life-writing") one cannot help but use in referring to it.

For example, Native American conceptions of the self tend toward integrative rather than oppositional relations with others. Whereas the modern West has tended to define personal identity as involving the successful mediation of an opposition between the individual and society, Native Americans have instead tended to define themselves as persons by successfully integrating themselves into the relevant social groupings—kin, clan, band, etc.—of their respective societies. On the Plains, to be sure, glory and honor were intensely sought by male warriors who wanted, individually, to be "great men," but even on the Plains, any personal greatness was important primarily for the good of "the people." These conceptions of the self may be viewed as "synecdochic," i.e., based on part-to-whole relations, rather than "metonymic," i.e., as in the part-to-part relations that most frequently dominate Euramerican autobiography.

In the same way that Native American autobiography can put the western concept of the self in perspective by making us see that what we have taken as only natural is, instead, a matter of cultural convention, so, too, can it offer a critical perspective on the western conception of the importance of writing. This is a subject that has occupied the attention of a great many theorists of late, perhaps because we are currently in a stage of transition to what Walter Ong has called a "secondary orality," a condition in which print media and writing certainly exist but do not occupy the social-functional position they held before the computer revolution.

Let me turn here to a brief historical sketch of Native American autobiography.

The earliest Native American autobiography I know is an autobiography by an Indian, by the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan, who produced a short narrative of his life in 1768. In 1791, Hendrik Aupaumut, referred to as a "Mahican," included a good deal of what might be taken as autobiographical material in his Journal of a Mission to the Western Tribes of Indians. Neither of these texts was published in its author's lifetime, Occom's reposing for many years in the Dartmouth College Library before finally appearing in 1982, Aupaumut's seeing print—somewhat obscurely—in 1827. This latter date is perhaps not strictly an accident, for it was in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that American interest in the first-person life history (only recently, in 1808, named autobiography by the British poet Robert Southey) began to grow. Just two years after Aupaumut's work, the Reverend William Apess, a Pequot and a Methodist minister, published the first extended autobiography by an Indian to attract a relatively wide readership. Apess's A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess a Native of the Forest, Written by Himself appeared in 1829, and went through several editions in its author's lifetime. It is the christianized Indian's relation to Euramerican religion that thematically dominates the early period of autobiographies by Indians.

Only a few years after Apess's autobiography was published, there appeared in the West (Cincinnati) the first of those compositely produced texts I call Indian autobiographies. This was the Life of Ma-Ka-tai-sheme-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, the autobiography not of a Christian Indian but, rather, of a resisting Indian who came to public attention as a result of his military opposition to the encroachment of whites onto Indian lands. After being defeated in the Black Hawk War of 1832, the last Indian war to be fought (for the most part) east of the Mississippi, Black Hawk endured imprisonment and a public tour of the East before being allowed to return home. Once back on his ancestral lands on the Rock River in Illinois, he narrated the story of his life. Black Hawk was a traditionally-raised Sac and Fox person who did not speak English and did not write any language—nor is it clear, in the distinction proposed by Watson and Watson-Franke, whether his autobiography was "elicited or prompted by another person" or whether it was, instead, "self-initiated."¹ Indeed, this distinction itself, while logically tenable, is empirically almost impossible to apply. Black Hawk's editor, the young journalist J.B. Patterson, claimed that Black Hawk himself initiated the autobiographical project, but we also know that Black Hawk was much solicited by various Euramericans for the story of his life, and he may have been urged in this direction by Native people, too. In any case, even if the Native subject of an Indian autobiography was pressed to the task by a journalist, historian, or anthropologist, we now understand that only those Native persons who found such a task consistent with their own needs and desires eventually complied. This would be the case as well for autobiographies by Indians, for even these ostensibly "self-initiated" texts were not "initiated" in a vacuum, but in a cultural and historical context which "prompted" some Indians who could write about themselves to do so while others simply did not.

Although I believe that we can rarely know with any assurance the full motivation behind a given Indian autobiography, we can in many cases know something about what may be called its mode of production. Here, again, Black Hawk's autobiography is exemplary, for the text is one that comes into being through the collaborative labor of Black Hawk, who is its subject and the person to whom the "I" of the text refers; of Antoine LeClair, a mixedblood person who served as official government interpreter to the Sac and Fox Indians, and who transcribed and translated the old war chief's words into written English; and of J. B. Patterson, who ultimately "edits"—inscribes and fixes in writing—the text we read as "Black Hawk's autobiography." What kind of transcription LeClair must have made, in that age before the tape recorder, we do not know, nor do we know what kind of English LeClair would have written by way of translation, inasmuch as no notes or transcripts seem to have survived.

It is reasonable to imagine, however, that LeClair presented Patterson with a text in what has since been called "Red English," the English that Native people with little or no formal schooling speak and sometimes write. In the absence of a text from LeClair, it may be useful to cite an autobiographical text roughly contemporary with his—one which, like Black Hawk's story, is more a military memoir (in this case, of the American Revolution and the War of 1812) than a personal narrative. I quote here a brief passage from the autobiography of Chainbreaker, also known to the whites as Governor Blacksnake. Somewhere between the years 1833 and 1843, when he was ninety or a hundred years old, Chainbreaker told his story to Benjamin Williams, who was nearly fifty years his junior and, like Chainbreaker, a Seneca. Williams' manuscript was not taken up by an editor until very recently (1989), when Thomas Abler prepared it for print. Abler's editing, however, is very different from that of J. B. Patterson, in that he has not transformed Williams' text into standard English, as Patterson almost surely did for LeClair's text. In the quotation below, the square brackets are Abler's additions:

The year [1799] Certifies that from a personal Acquanted called good lake—that year he was Sick Confined on his bed he was not able to Rise from the bed and it hapen one morning He was called to Rise and go to Door. He Did So—Saw three [or four?—both have been written] person Standing by the Door And Take hands with him all—and comminced That he felt Vend [faint] and fall down on the ground By theirs feets and lost his Senses. . . . ²

What I would have the reader consider is that there are, broadly speaking, two ways to read this sort of text. One way is to take it as a rather pathetic approximation of the conventional standard of educated authors. The other is to take it not so much as failed English but as an invention, a hybrid or creolized language based on English. Standard English provides a vocabulary and a set of grammatical rules, which, on the one hand, may have been imperfectly mastered but which, on the other, may simply have been adapted, creatively manipulated for the purposes at hand, and, of course, manipulated in relation to the writer's prior familiarity with another language (Seneca).

I do not for a moment suggest that Benjamin Williams was consciously engaged in inventive experimentation, nor does it seem likely to me that, if we did have a manuscript from Antoine LeClair, we would necessarily find it a shining example of the creative transformation of English. I do, however, suggest that the reader worry less about the formal "errors" of this English and try to imagine more the Indian linguistic modes that it may convey. Like Black Hawk's autobiography, many of the Indian autobiographies we read in "good" English have some intermediate version—intermediate between speech in a Native language and writing in standard English—that exists, or once existed, in some variant of this written "Red English," or "Reservation English."

One version or another of the triangulated textual generation of Black Hawk's autobiography—Indian subject, mixedblood interpreter/translator, Euramerican editor/amanuensis—became standard for the texts I call Indian autobiographies; and it is important to keep in mind the very particular mode of production of these texts, because it bears, among other things, upon the virtually irresistible question of whether or to what degree Indian autobiographies give us the "real" or "authentic" Indian.

To open this question is potentially to lead the reader into a patch of theoretical thorns. One line of thought urges that we give up entirely the desire for "reference," the desire to encounter the "real" Black Hawk and other persons we know to have existed outside of and beyond the words of their autobiographical texts, but whom we can only know through the words of those and other texts. Another, oppositional, line of thought insists upon the referentiality of the autobiographical text, admitting that, while the language of the text inevitably mediates our encounter with the real, historical subject of the autobiography, still, the abiding appeal of autobiography is exactly the sense we have of an encounter with lives other than and apart from our own. If the former view insists that any feel for the real is only a produced effect of language, the latter tends to insist upon the autobiographical "pact" between writer and reader involving a conventionally-prescribed commitment to tell the "truth," albeit in words. I incline to the latter view while taking very seriously the warnings of the former as to the inevitable disparities between—in the terms of Michel Foucault—the order of words and the order of things.

As I have noted above, the Indian autobiography in its first manifestations appears as a historical document of the nineteenth century, as whites urge Indians who had resisted the "advance" of "civilization" to tell their story and explain their resistance. Interest in the resisting Indian, the world-historical chief or warrior, would persist well into the twentieth century, no longer as a "dominant" societal concern, in Raymond Williams' sense, but as a "residual" one. From early in the twentieth century, Native persons were approached for their life stories not because they had uniquely distinguished themselves in war or diplomacy or any other public or historical activity, but because they were considered "representative" of their culture, persons who might be attended to precisely because they were not extraordinary, because they were not among those great men whose biographies, as Thomas Carlyle had put it, comprised what we call history. Rather, as Paul Radin said of the informant he named "Crashing Thunder," the appropriate subject of the anthropological life history would more nearly be "a representative middle-aged individual of moderate ability," one who could "describe his life in relation to the social group in which he had grown up."³

In an approximately parallel fashion, autobiographies by Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century may be said to shift their emphasis from a relation to Euramerican religion to a relation to Euramerican culture and society, as in the texts of Charles Alexander Eastman, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear, among others. These Native writers spoke for the ongoing value of traditional tribal ways, while generally accepting many of the values of the dominant "civilization."

It is clearly social science, in the form of an anthropological interest in the professionally and academically defined categories of culture and culture-and-personality that dominates the production of Indian autobiographies from about 1913 (the date of Paul Radin's first Winnebago autobiography) into at least the early 1940s, when Franz Boas, the dominant figure in American anthropology for half a century, called life histories of use only for illustrating the "perversion of truth by the play of memory with the past."⁴ Parallel to the work of the professional anthropologists in this period, however, are the efforts of "amateurs"—journalists, westerners, and devotees of things Indian—in obtaining the life stories of warriors like Wooden Leg, who participated in the Custer fight (1876), Yellow Wolf, who was part of the "flight" of the Nez Perces (1877), and Plenty-Coups, chief of the Crow, among other aged Natives who saw and made "history."

Although non-Natives continue to this day to produce Indian autobiographies in collaboration with Native people, the most noted Native American autobiographies of late have been autobiographies by Indians, the self-written texts of Native people who first came to public notice as artists, as writers of poetry and fiction. I am thinking foremost of N. Scott Momaday, whose 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the novel House Made of Dawn ushered in the contemporary "Native American Renaissance" in written literature. Momaday's two autobiographies, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), in which oral and tribal histories are combined with the author's personal history, and The Names (1976), in which reflections on this personal history are combined with passages of modernist prose-poetry and family photographs, are widely known and have been widely influential. They have, for example, influenced Leslie Marmon Silko, whose novel Ceremony (1977) first brought her to the attention of the dominant culture, and whose loosely autobiographical text, Storyteller (1981), includes not only photographs of the author and her family, but short stories and poems as well. At least one anthology of autobiographical statements by Native-American writers currently exists, and there are several collections of interviews with Native American artists which provide a good deal of autobiographical reflection. Most recently, the mixed-blood Chippewa novelist and poet Gerald Vizenor has produced a substantial body of autobiographical writing. . . .

With respect to the material I have selected and my arrangement of the volume [Native American Autobiography: An Anthology] as a whole, let me say the following. With the exception of Part One, I have generally followed a chronological order from the eighteenth century to the present. In parts Two and Three, which present Native American autobiographies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I have taken Native "response" to the white invaders—i.e., the decisions to become Christian or resisting Indians—as a useful ordering principle. My decision here may be criticized for ethnocentrism, since, even though the response is Indian, it is the Euramerican invaders who are represented as acting, with Native peoples re-acting. The only answer to such a charge is that history did, in fact, happen this way. From perhaps the sixteenth century in the Southwest, and from early in the seventeenth century on the East Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast, Native Americans had to factor into their lives the presence and pressures of an increasingly numerous, highly aggressive group of new arrivals. This is not to say that Native people stopped doing most of what they had always done, or that they adopted a new center to their lives. It is to say that for many of the Native persons who came to the autobiographical project, their lives could not be recounted independently of some relation-reaction to the encroaching whites. (The exceptions to this generalization have their life stories grouped in Part One, "Traditional Lives," about which I shall have more to say below.) In the excerpts both from the converts' and the combatants' life histories, I have tried to present, in whatever measure possible, some sense of both the ongoing, uninterrupted quality of these lives and the temporally specific, new, and unprecedented reactiveness of these lives.

For all that I have taken acceptance or rejection of Christianity and Euramerican "civilization" as providing useful distinctions among eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Native American autobiographies, it is hardly the case that these categories account for all the Indian lives written during this period. Paul Cuffe's brief autobiography (1839), for example, tells the story of a part-black, part-Indian seaman who shows no particular interest in Christianity, and active resistance to white dominance in Cuffe's New York of the 1830s was altogether a thing of the past. Something similar would be true for the Seneca Chainbreaker, also known as Governor Blacksnake, whom I have mentioned above: his life could not, no more than Paul Cuffe's, easily be thematized in terms of a resistance to or acceptance of Christianity and "civilization." We could also say much the same sort of thing of Okah Tubbee, part black and part Choctaw, whose extraordinary story of his life in Mississippi was published in 1848.

With regard to those many Native American autobiographers for whom my Christian/resisting distinction accounts relatively well, it should not be thought that either acceptance or resistance can directly be translated into some version of treason or heroism. While an older climate of opinion would have approved the converts and scorned or pitied the traditionalists, it is more likely, these days, that the reader's sympathies will lie with the resisters rather than with the Christian Indians. Such good/bad or hero/traitor judgments will do no service to the particular persons and texts involved, regardless of the criteria for "goodness," "heroism," or their presumed antitheses.

William Apess, for example, while a passionate convert to Methodism, was equally passionate as an activist for Native American rights, and in his denunciation of racism in all its forms. Along with his autobiographical texts, he published a "Eulogy on King Philip," which named this warrior chief of the Pequots the greatest man that America ever produced. In a later day, Charles Alexander Eastman, a university and medical school graduate and youthful practicioner ministering to the Lakota at Wounded Knee, for all his movement "from the deep woods to civilization," fought tirelessly for the recognition of the worth of traditional Native American values. His autobiographies are structured in a manner easily recognizable to Euramericans as rags-to-riches success stories of the type frequently associated with the name of Horatio Alger, but they are equally structured (if perhaps more loosely and less recognizably) according to a fairly widespread Native use of what Robin McGrath, in her comments on Inuit Eskimo autobiography, refers to as "a sort of male Cinderella."⁶ This figure is represented by "the orphan boy Kaujjarkuk" among the Inuit and by other traditionally known protagonists among other Native peoples. Eastman's "baby name" in Lakota (Sioux) was Hakada, "the pitiful last [of five children]." From the victory at lacrosse that won him the name of Ohiyesa, "the winner," to his success as a kind of young warrior in the white man's world, Eastman's narrative of his rise to prominence has traditional Native as well as Euramerican models.

This may also be the place to say that the reader should not assume that persons named "Wooden Leg" or "Black Elk" are somehow "more Indian" or "authentic" than persons named "William Apess," "Charles Alexander Eastman," or "Maria Chona." Eastman, as I have just noted, was also known as "Ohiyesa," although he did not publish under that name—as Zitkala Sa was also Gertrude Bonnin, or, indeed, the great Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, was also George Guess, and as the Paiute Wovoka, initiator of the Ghost Dance religion, was also Jack Wilson. We need to recall that the Spanish in the Southwest tended to bestow names familiar to them, names, for example, like Maria Chona, rather than—as the English did at least sometimes—to translate names from the Indian, e.g., "Chainbreaker" or "Black Hawk."

Once the West was "won," and the "frontier" closed, Indian acceptance or rejection of "civilization" was no longer an issue of historical concern for Americans; rather, the only issue seemed to be whether the Indian would "vanish" or survive. For the American Indian to survive, it was assumed that he or she would have to become the Indian-American, and, like other hyphenate Americans (Italian-American, Chinese-American, etc.), be melted into general Christian, bourgeois, capitalist citizenship. Government policy toward Native people in this period was founded on the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which sought to destroy tribal culture by an attack on the tribally (e.g., communally, "communistically") held landbase. The project was, in many ways, a continuation of the effort, in a phrase of Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian school, to "Kill the Indian and Save the Man." The autobiographical texts in Part Four of the anthology, "The Closed Frontier," provide personal responses to this exceedingly difficult—some have called it "transitional"—time for Native American people.

One response to the generally accepted notion that the Indian as Indian could not survive was what came to be called "salvage anthropology," a determined effort on the part of professional anthropologists to document the record of cultures presumably slated for oblivion. This led to those Indian autobiographies I have grouped under the heading for Part Five [of Native American Autobiography], "The Anthropologists' Indians." Here, again, it needs to be said that such a phrase is not meant to imply in any way that the Native people who complied with the anthropologists' request to "tell the story of their life" somehow betrayed themselves or their culture, yielding themselves up to alien purposes. To the contrary, the more these matters have been studied of late, the more it has become apparent that the Native subjects of the anthropologists' life histories had their own purposes for engaging in the autobiographical project; they "used" the anthropologists to the same or even greater extent than the anthropologists "used" them.

While the professional anthropologists were interested in Indians as the embodiment of a particular culture, there remained, as I have said, a number of amateurs who were still interested in those surviving Native people who had, indeed, made "history." Their labors resulted in the composite composition of such Indian autobiographies as those of Yellow Wolf, Wooden Leg, and Geronimo, among many others. Although the "resisting Indians" had resisted somewhere between 1832 and 1890, many accounts of their resistance did not appear until the 1930s, a period marked by intense concern to overturn the materially and culturally destructive Dawes Act. The Merriam Report of 1928 severely criticized federal Indian policy, and, upon Franklin Roosevelt's election to the presidency, major changes were instituted. Roosevelt's appointment of John Collier, a strong and knowledgeable admirer of Native American cultures, led to the passage in 1934 of the Wheeler-Howard Act, (also called the Indian Reorganization Act), which gave Native Americans an opportunity to decide for themselves how they would live. Their decision, unfortunately, had to be made known to the federal government by parliamentary means that were untraditional, and, indeed, to many Native people repugnant; nonetheless, for all its defects, Wheeler-Howard was a clear admission on the part of the federal government of the worth and potential viability of Native cultures. . . .

Notes

¹ Lawrence Watson and Maria Barbara Watson-Franke, Interpreting Life Histories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1985), p. 2.

²Chainbreaker: The Revolutionary War Memoirs of Governor Blacksnake, as told to Benjamin Williams (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 210.

³The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (New York: Dover, 1963), p. 2.

⁴ Franz Boas, "Recent Anthropology II," Science 98 (1943): 335. . . .

⁶ Robin McGrath, "Oral Influences in Contemporary Inuit Literature," in The Native in Literature: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy (Oakville, Ontario: ECW Press, 1987), p. 161.