ABSTRACT
Autobiography, as it is generally understood in the West, did not traditionally exist as a genre of discourse among the indigenous peoples of the present-day United States. Necessary for the production of autobiography in the Western sense are, minimally, a culturally sanctioned concentration on the individual self or person and the technology of alphabetic writing. Neither of these was present in the Native cultures of America, which tended, in the first instance, to construct conceptions of the person in more nearly collective (family, clan, moiety, tribe) than individualistic terms, and, in the second, to employ oral rather than written means to communicate, store, and transmit information. Although as Lynne O’Brien has shown, there most certainly are aboriginal records of personal activity, achievement, and inspiration in coup stories, pictographs, and the recitation of visions and visitations, the typical Western autobiographical concern to record the whole of an individual’s life, usually from an evolutionary or developmental perspective (e.g., I started here and arrived, in time, there) took hold among Indian people (so far as it does so at all) only as a consequence of the pressures upon them of Euroamerican people.
