Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography by Hertha Dawn Wong (review)

Reviews 169 self’ in Native American autobiographies. There is also an excellent and ex­ haustive bibliography. X^KJ.TCHEN RONNOW Wayne State College ySending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native. American Autobiography. By Hertha Dawn Wong. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 246 pages, $35.00.) As academics continue to consider the several varieties and forms of ethnic expression in American literature, writers have increasingly come to rely on theoretical (re)examinations of texts. Hertha Dawn Wong’s Sending My Heart Back Across the Years is, according to the author, a “suggestive rather than encyclopedic” consideration of several native traditions of self-narration and their subsequent interaction with Euro-American forms of autobiography. Drawing heavily on Bakhtin’s dialogic theories and the autobiographic work of Arnold Krupat, Wong attempts to relate Native American autobiographical forms from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives to contempo­ rary autobiographies. Wong has an interest in expanding our current definition of autobiography (self-life-writing) into new frames of reference more appropri­ ate to Native American cultural experience. Consequently, she suggests the terms communo-bio-oratory (community-life-writing) and auto-ethnography (self-culture-writing) as improvements to our current lexicon. Wong’s re-casting of autobiography adds needed critical sophistication to our readings of Native American texts since, in coining a terminology sensitive to unique genres, she manages to account for the subtleties of transitional oral and literate forms which reflect traditions and beliefs absent from Euro-American culture. For a book organized around historical periods, Sending My Heart Back suffers from a rather facile consideration of the ways in which external circum­ stances have dictated the literature she examines. Historically, the progression among the genres Wong describes can be framed in terms of Native American governmentality. The Native American political experience has been a triangu­ lar relationship involving sovereignty, discipline, and government. The autobi­ ographies Wong describes have as their primary target the Native American population and their essential character reflects the need for apparatuses of security necessary to protect tribal culture. Three factors—government, terri­ tory, population—constitute the deep historical links between the variety of genres in Native American culture and the conditions of their expression. W ong’s material lends itself nicely to contemporary cultural criticism, but the absence of historical analysis ham pers the argum ent because the hegemonic relationship between Euro-American and Native American culture 170 Western American Literature entails a paradoxical phenomenon. The texts she describes are consummate expressions of a politics using “old voices newly calibrated . . . to address the ethnic plurality of the late twentieth-century”; these works are meaningful because they define a real space for political struggle and contestation. Taken individually, the chapters of Sending My Heart Back provide useful readings of important texts. However, Wong is unable to bring the same attention to the larger issue of the m anner in which this body of literature traces the contours of Native American governmentality. As a result, Wong’s volume is a useful rhe­ torical/literary study when it might have been a much needed work of cultural criticism. v ^ h r i s t o p h e r D. FELKER Massachusetts Institute of Technology yOnderstanding Gary Snyder. By Patrick D. Murphy. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. 186 pages, $29.95.) In Gary Snyder’s “Bubbs Creek Haircut” the narrator speaks of looking down upon “reflections [that] wobble” on the surface of a “half iced-over lake, twelve thousand feet,” but as he climbs higher he notices that “the crazy web of wavelets makes sense/seen from high above.” Patrick D. Murphy’s excellent little book weaves the same kind of sense into the myriad details of Snyder’s life and work. Obviously well-acquainted with the unpublished material in the Snyder Archive at the University of California Library at Davis and the extant scholarship on Snyder, Murphy “spots that design”in things as he relates early texts to later ones, poems to poetics, and the experiential to the aesthetic. With his marvelous ability to intertwine biographi­ cal matters, chronological facts, publishing details, and critical commentary on Snyder’s writing, Murphy provides us with...