ABSTRACT
The image of Indian women in American culture has been largely a product of misinformation, stereotyping, and political convenience, yet Indian women have, over the past century and a half, been frequent and eloquent spokespersons for their tribes and activists for Indian causes. Many tribal women have also chosen to tell or write their life stories for a nontribal readership, giving voice to a wide range of personal intentions and experiences. However, despite the substantial canon of American Indian women’s autobiographical texts, little attention has been given until recently to these works even by scholars in the fields of autobiography and American Indian literatures. In many cases, this is because the works are hard to find, often obscured by misclassification in libraries, not kept in print by publishers, or not marketed widely. And, of course, like all women’s literature, they suffer from marginalization, but to a much higher degree, particularly when they challenge the princess/squaw image of Indian women held by American culture. As critic Sidonie Smith points out:
if the autobiographer is a woman of color or a working class woman, she faces even more complex imbroglios of male-female figures: Here ideologies of race and class, sometimes even of nationality, intersect and confound those of gender. As a result, she is doubly or triply the subject of other people’s representation, turned again and again in stories that reflect and promote certain forms of selfhood identified with class, race, and nationality as well as sex. In every case, moreover, she remains marginalized in that she finds herself resident on the margins of discourse, always removed from the center of power within the culture she inhabits. (1987: 51)
Indian women autobiographers participate in two cultures, tribal and Euroamerican, and the marginality of Indian women’s autobiographies is complicated by factors unique to their tribal source. Autobiography is not an indigenous form of literature for American Indian peoples. The traditional literature of tribal peoples is oral in nature and communal, consisting of myths, tales, songs, and chants performed in ceremonial context or told for the purpose of instructing and entertaining the community. Only since the nineteenth
century have Indian peoples used written forms to record their histories and produce literary works, and until this century, only a minority of Indians wrote in English. Furthermore, individualism is not a highly regarded value in tribal societies, so to relate one’s life story is to put oneself forward in a way that may elicit criticism from one’s own community.
