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Umi-Uta-1915.Pdf (720.7Kb) REINVENTING THE SELF: NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by KRISTIN LYNN ROZZELL Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2007 Copyright © by Kristin Lynn Rozzell 2007 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge Dr. Kenneth M. Roemer. He inspired me to focus upon Native American literature and was willing to serve as my supervising professor in a long distance capacity. I would also like to thank my committee members: Dr. Wendy Faris and Dr. Stacy Alaimo. Your comments were valuable guides. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends who believed in me. November 20, 2007 iii ABSTRACT REINVENTING THE SELF: NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Publication No._________ Kristin Lynn Rozzell, PhD. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2007 Supervising Professor: Dr. Kenneth M. Roemer Native American women’s autobiographies are complex writings that stretch the very genre itself. As the genre of autobiography is reinvented by both early and contemporary texts, the nature of self expression through that genre is also reinvented. With Leslie Marmon Silko’s inventive 1981 autobiography Storyteller as the guide post for what an autobiography can be, I examine other autobiographies by Native American women that come before and after this work, naming some works autobiographies for the first time. Naming a work an autobiography gives credence to the autobiographer’s chosen means of writing her life. Native American women reveal who they are in their writing by revealing who their community is. Their choice to focus on their community iv by mixing genres and voices in their narratives reveals their belief that self cannot be expressed in isolation. This dissertation covers both early autobiographies – Sarah Winnemucca’s trail- blazing 1883 autobiography Life Among the Piutes and Zitkala-Ša’s fascinating 1920 autobiography American Indian Stories – and contemporary works -- Silko’s influential 1981 Storyteller, Anna Lee Walters’ 1992 Talking Indian, which includes many short stories, and Luci Tapahonso’s 1993 Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing, which favors the poetic style. Lastly, this dissertation will examine the 1997 compilation Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, edited by Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo. Together under the umbrella of autobiography these works suggest that Native women writers have reinvented not only the genre but the very idea of the self. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………….…………iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………….…………iv Chapter 1. AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF ADAPTABILITY…………………………………..1 1.1 Writing the Self……….………………………………………………...…...1 1.2 Gender Background, Misconceptions and Challenges…..………………....21 1.3 Disparate Worldviews: Colonizer and Colonized…………….…………....26 1.4 Orality to Literacy…………………………………………….………...….30 1.5 Criticism of Native American Women’s Autobiographies………………...34 1.6 Understanding the Impact of Contact…………………………………........38 1.7 Overall Perspective…………….……………………………………...……45 2. ENTER THE WRITTEN WORD……………………………………………...48 2.1 Literacy and Early Autobiographies………………………………………..48 2.2 Life Among the Piutes: A Trailblazing Autobiography…………….…..…..56 2.3 American Indian Stories: Fiction Joins Autobiography………….……...…71 2.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………..….…...….100 3. STORYTELLER’S INFLUENCE.…………………………………………....103 3.1 Writing Their Way………….………..……………………….………..…103 3.2 Getting to Storyteller...................................................................................112 vi 3.3 Experiencing Storyteller…….………………………………….…………126 4. EXPANDING THE GENRE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY………………….......144 4.1 A Talking Autobiography………………………………………………...144 4.2 A Singing Autobiography………………………………….……………..164 5. SPEAKING TOGETHER……………...……………………………….…….184 5.1 Autobiographical Compilations……….……………………………….….184 6. LITERATURE WITH A PURPOSE……………………………………....….219 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………....224 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION……….……………………………………...…240 vii CHAPTER 1 AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF ADAPTABILITY 1.1 Writing the Self According to Eric Hvelock in his The Muse Learns to Write, “The concept of selfhood and soul…arose at a historical point in time and was inspired by a technological change, as the inscribed language and thought and the person who spoke it became separated from each other, leading to a new focus on the personality of the speaker” (120). As Euro-American culture became more and more adept at writing, we also became prolific at reflecting on the self as something outside the person. According to Arnold Krupat, Southey is “credited with coining the word [autobiography] in English in 1809” (For Those 29). It is, then, through the genre of autobiography that writing about the self has become most prominent and has succeeded with readers accepting it on a scale from fiction to the embodiment of the writer’s identity. Writing about the self, according to David Murray, “has long had a special importance for underprivileged and under heard groups in America” (66). Autobiography, in particular, is the most direct way for minorities to “act out and confirm the development of an identity,” which most likely is undervalued and misunderstood by the rest of society (Murray 66). This sentiment is echoed by Linda 1 Tuhiwai Smith in her Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People; she believes indigenous people, in particular, have a “very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying” (28). It is the testimonies of the minority, underprivileged, indigenous people of North America that is the focus of this study, specifically autobiographies by Native American women. Defining the parameters of Native American sometimes turns to blood quantum, sometimes to community opinion/tribal affiliation, and even to “an idea which a given man has of himself” (Momaday 49). All the Native American works of this study are written by individuals who have Native American blood, but identity is an extremely complex issue for Native Americans and had the parameters of this study called for it, I would have included any works written by an individual who calls him or herself a Native American. When critical ventures turn to Native American autobiographies, there is usually a mention of how unnatural this genre is for a people who do not think of the individual in terms of autonomy. Kenneth M. Roemer in his introduction “Native American Writers of the United States” from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, points out the “irony” of Native American writers “drawing authorship and authenticity from [oral/communal] traditions to which individualized notions of authorship are foreign” (xiii). One contributor to Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann’s autobiographical compilation, I Tell You Now, included a letter with her submission, pointing out that it is 2 “bad form for Indians” to write about themselves ( xii). Another chose not to contribute. David Brumble, however, makes an important point that “when the anthropologists, poets, and amateur historians began collecting autobiographies from the Indians, they were not asking the Indians to participate in an endeavor that was entirely foreign to them” (46). Brumble writes in his American Indian Autobiography about “preliterate traditions of American Indian autobiography,” such as coup tales that recounted an individual’s special deeds, and Hertha Dawn Wong, in her Sending My Heart Back Across the Years, devotes time to “pre-contact oral and pictographic autobiographical narratives.” Pre-contact, self was not a completely foreign concept to Native Americans, but that self was always relational, connected to others in the tribe or to the tribe as a whole. It is the idea of the individual self completely separated from the self and all other selves and expressed through the tool of writing that was foreign to Native Americans. According to the Tohono O’odham point of view, “Literacy is…evidence that Europeans are lost, ignorant and detached from a knowledge of themselves” (Wilson xxiii). This belief stems from the idea that oral language is alive and written language is dead. According to Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy, for primary oral cultures, words are “occurrences, events” that have “magical potency” (31, 33). To speak about oneself orally, then, is a “mode of action” that adds to that self (32). The written self, therefore, because it attempts to capture one idea of that self, could never be for primary oral cultures a true self, only a dead version of it. As writer Leslie Marmon Silko puts 3 it, for Native Americans, “The life of a story is not something that any individual person can save” (Barnes 51). Capturing something alive and locking it in a permanent state “dooms” the oral because it “fixes the spiritual ideas,” and spiritual ideas aren’t meant to be fixed, studied or collected (Ruoff, American 14 and Lincoln 45). The Colonizer’s culture, however, did believe that some form of the self could be written, and this is the culture through which Native Americans were introduced to writing and the West’s particular ideas of the self. Early Native Americans, as they began to write, joined the autobiographical tradition, but early autobiographies were by no means seamlessly part of the Euro- American tradition of autobiography. According to Nina Baym, a rigid system of “periodization
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