‘I’ I S N O T F O R I N D I A N: F E M A L E S E L F-P O R T R A I T S I N C O N T E M P O R A R Y N A T I V E A M E R I C A N A U T O B I O G R A P H I C A L W R I T I N G Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz eingereicht von Mag. Maria Theresia E R N S T am Institut für Amerikanistik Erstbegutachter/in: tit. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter W. Hölbling Zweitbegutachter/in: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Roberta Maierhofer 2012 f o r w o m e n No girl child born today should responsibly be brought up to be a housewife. Too much has been made of defining human personality and destiny in terms of the sex organs. After all, we share the human brain. Betty Friedan, 1968 CONTENTS 1. Introduction 7 2. The Subject of Men’s Autobiography 11 3. The Subject of Women’s Autobiography 15 4. Language is Privative – Language is Present 28 5. The Origin of the Word 36 6. New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives 44 6.1 The Subject of Native American Women’s Autobiography 44 6.2 Native American Women’s Autobiography 49 7. The Lived World of Native American Women 54 7.1 Inventing Identity in Contemporary Native American Autobiography 55 7.2 The Women’s Unique Themes 58 7.2.1 Wilma Mankiller: A Prized Woman 58 7.2.2 Mary Crow Dog: A Struggling Woman 68 7.2.3 Mary Brave Bird: A Harmonious Woman 90 7.2.4 Janet Hale: A Vigilant Woman 105 7.3 The Women’s Shared Themes 117 7.3.1 Theme One: Spirituality 118 7.3.2 Theme Two: Indianness 146 7.3.3 Theme Three: Mother-Daughter Bonding Relationships 166 7.3.4 Theme Four: Racial Discrimination 192 7.3.5 Theme Five: Reciprocity and Inclusiveness 213 7.4 Connections to Other Women 223 7.4.1 Connection 224 7.4.2 Creation 240 7.4.3 Oppression 257 7.4.4 Voice 258 8. Conclusion 263 9. Bibliography 276 10. Picture Credits 288 The following abbreviations will be used for frequently referenced titles: Mankiller: A Chief and Her People – MK Mary Crow Dog: Lakota Woman – CD Mary Brave Bird: Ohitika Woman – BB Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter – BL 1. Introduction The advent of female literature promises woman’s view of life, woman’s experience: in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world; it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. … But hitherto … the literature of women has fallen short of its functions owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness – it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write is the aim and besetting din of women; to write as women is the real task they have to perform (G. H. Lewes 1 quoted in Showalter 3). Just as “the real task” (G. H. Lewes quoted in Showalter 3) of women’s fictional literature is “to write [novels] as women” (ibid.), so do contemporary Native American women autobiographers attempt to achieve this very same goal. Today’s American Indian women autobiographers surely do not suffer from the lack of a reading audience, nor do they lack the attention from scholars and critics. Both of Mary Brave Bird’s autobiographies, for example, are national bestsellers. Yet, my principal incentive for writing this dissertation is the fact that critics have never been sure what separates, but also what unties them as women, or whether these Native American women share a common heritage connected to their womanhood. Writing about female creativity, Showalter (cf. 3) argues that for many decades women have had a hard time struggling to overcome the influence of male literary tradition in order to create an original and independent art. Whether this is true for the works of the autobiographers that I have chosen for this thesis will be discussed in the following chapters. Are Wilma Mankiller, Mary Brave Bird, and Janet Campbell Hale just imitators of the white male autobiographical tradition, or are they innovators? When one encounters Native American women’s autobiography, everything seems out of place: the sense of the self, of history, and of autobiographical form differs from their appearance in models handed down by the male tradition. Rather than situate American Indian women’s autobiography as a poor relative to this impressive tradition and its legacy that links the individual man to the general sweep of history, I position it in relation to women’s writing. 1 George Henry Lewes (18th of April 1817 to 28th of November 1878) was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theater (cf. Lewes at Wikipedia 1). 7 Chapter 2, “The Subject of Men’s Autobiography”, is written to inform the reader on both classical and contemporary male theories of autobiography. I attempt, for example, to demonstrate autobiography’s dialectical dynamics by acknowledging the autobiographical subject as a historical production and by recovering both the erased Native American women’s voices and their lived experiences. These efforts set the scene for Chapter 3, “The Subject of Women’s Autobiography”, in which I examine the autobiographical I of women’s self-representational writing: its history and identity, its construction and movements, where one can find it, how one can recognize it, and the contexts which make it invisible. In short, what distinguishes it and how it works. In the following chapter, “Language is Privative – Language is Present”, I use the insights created by post-structuralist theories of language to discuss the categories that have defined one’s knowledge of autobiography: the self and history. Thus, I focus on the problems with pronouns as they swirl around, and may indeed create, autobiography, especially the pronoun that conjoins ‘I read’ and ‘I write’ and also covers over the differences between the self and the text, the self in history, and the self who writes: I, the medium of autobiography. Chapter 5, “The Origin of the Word”, investigates the relationship between the self and language. The biblical account of origin supplies a foundation for this investigation, which centers on the second Genesis story of creation. It is this second story that I use to show why female language limps behind male experiments with language. Chapter 6, “New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives”, concentrates on Native American women writers in the contemporary United States. I illustrate their dilemma of being marked ‘other’, for example as religious minority, ethnic anomaly, national outsider, and worst of all, as woman in the profoundly well-established model of patriarchy. Next, I attempt to place the self in Native American women’s autobiography in its proper context, removing the authors of my primary literature from a white, male interpretive context in order to discover the ways in which these American Indian autobiographers create subjectivity - their self-portraits - in their texts. In material and psychological ways, these writers have removed themselves from an economy in which they would have merely functioned as objects of exchange. Wilma Mankiller’s endeavor to run for principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and Mary Brave Bird’s 8 political stand during the siege of Wounded Knee, no less than Janet Hale’s estranged life refuse the white men’s traditional narrative of a patriarchal culture with the image of woman as speechless. I locate their difference from male autobiography, and also to some extent from (white) women’s autobiography, as evidence of a difference within autobiography, a genre, in which Native American women’s writing functions as that which cannot be limited. The analysis of my primary works offers numerous answers to the question of what it means to be a Native American woman in the United States of today. I attempt to read these women’s lived experiences as demanding literary, but also deeply personal efforts at delving into problems of cultural tradition, of self-identity, of historical change, and of individual achievement. These outstanding women are literally telling stories, they are singing, so listen, listen. Read, read and interpret. Thus, in chapter 7 remarkable memories are investigated and grouped according to themes which are based on an alteration of the Translation Model which is used as a visualization of how the author’s life themes are individual yet united, interflowing, and connected. The model is divided into five sections, which cover the Native American researcher, the three American Indian autobiographers, their unique and shared themes, and the themes which connect them to other women. In chapter 7.2, “The Women’s Unique Themes”, and its subchapters, one will find cherished memories and intimate stories revealed and interpreted as the treasures they are. Some of my interpretative attempts appear to be simple and matter-of-factual, while others offer the complexity and detail of secondary literature. The analysis of the women’s shared themes - spirituality, ‘Indianness’, mother- daughter bonding relationships, racial discrimination, and reciprocity - focuses on storytelling as an artform, and the span of stories these authors have shared with their readers is a mosaic. They are breathtaking, from the cherished oral histories of the Nunnehi, that is the Immortals, Beloved Woman, Selu or Corn Woman, War or Pretty Woman, First Woman, and White Buffalo Calf Woman, recording the path the Creator has offered to indigenous women, to these autobiographers’ honest memories of their ancestors.