Native American forms of autobiography

An autobiography does not have to be a book. That is the possibility the opening criticism asks us to take seriously. Scholars have concentrated on written life histories that Native Americans told to non-Native collaborators, who then translated, recorded, and edited them. That explains the intimidating phrase “bicultural composite authorship”: people from two cultures helped produce the account, in different roles.

There is nothing inherently contradictory about calling that an autobiography. Someone can tell their own story while another person writes it down. The problem is the scholars' narrow focus. If we only count those written accounts, what other ways of telling a life story are we missing? And what assumptions are we making about what a life story ought to look like?

The second paragraph starts answering both questions. In a number of these cultures, identity includes a person's relationships with their community, their surroundings, and even the cosmos. The individual still matters; the individual is understood in relation to those other things. Personal history also gets expressed as events happen, with other people participating. That differs from looking back much later and writing an account of an entire lifetime.

At first, this might sound like the ordinary way we tell friends and family what has happened to us. But the examples push the idea further. A new name can mark an important deed. A song can communicate personal history. A vision can become a tribal performance. These are ways of expressing a life, even though they do not resemble a written memoir. Calling the result seemingly more fragmented describes the contrast with a continuous retrospective account; it does not establish that these forms are inferior.

The third paragraph makes that broader understanding tangible. A tattoo records valor. A shield communicates accomplishments or aspirations. A robe can display a pictographic battle history and take part in a reenactment. These objects are not merely decorations in the author's examples: their designs express something about a particular person's life. A painted tepee can likewise record achievements, dreams, and visions, with other tribal members helping to paint it.

That last detail sets up the conclusion. The community does more than provide a background of shared customs. Its members can actively help express the individual's story. The author calls this intracultural collaboration: participation within the culture. Keep it separate from the bicultural collaboration at the beginning, where Native and non-Native people produced a written account together.

Then comes an important qualification. We should not turn the contrast into a claim that European autobiography is purely individual and untouched by society. Any autobiographer has some idea of an audience, and that shapes the account. Autobiography can therefore be both an individual story and a cultural narrative. Other people's participation does not stop it from being autobiographical.

Our takeaway is broader than “scholars missed some artifacts.” They missed forms of personal history and the ideas about identity, experience, and expression behind those forms. We also should not flatten the highly diverse cultures discussed here into one universal set of practices. The argument is that the familiar European model does not capture all the ways these Native Americans expressed their lives. The final sentence adds one more possible influence: people who transmit an account can also shape it through their own cultural perspectives.