Diverse Patterns of Relationalities: Expanding Theories of Women's Personal Narratives

Grandmother's Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life by Alma Hogan Snell and edited by Becky Matthews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, 215 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941 by Melissa Walker. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, 341 pp., $42.50 hardcover.

Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000, 240 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

Idella Parker: From Reddick to Cross Creek by Idella Parker, with Bud Crussell and Liz Crussell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999, 240 pp., $19.95 hardcover.

Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death by Nancy K. Miller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 208 pp., $14.95 paper.

As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson report in the introduction to their anthology Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, the theoretical challenges to the marginal status of women's "autobiographical practices" in the tradition of that genre have produced two decades of scholarship about women, writing, and identity in a field that continues to evolve (1998). Whereas gender-based theories of autobiography of the 1980s looked at the ways in which women's autobiographical writings established a relational process of identity distinct from the individuating process often perceived in canonical autobiographies by male writers, Hertha D. Sweet Wong, writing in the nineties, extended that model to consider a subject to be "not either individual or relational" but "more or less individual or more or less relational in diverse contexts" (1998, 169). Like the autobiographical writings by Native American women that led Sweet Wong to this rethinking of the dualism between individual male Euro-American and relational female Native American, the five works under review in this article reveal what Nancy K. Miller calls the "patterns" of relationality and connection associated with women's autobiographical writings in general (41). These writers constitute their identity both through their writing and in relation to various and different communities. By giving voice to a variety of cultural positionalities and personal relationships, their works serve to break down the dominant culture's misrepresentations of various groups often defined in opposition to one another and to make dynamic and diverse "concepts of relationality" (Sweet Wong, 168).

In Grandmother's Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life, Alma Hogan Snell announces in her title two of the relationships that constitute her identity. Early in the narrative she specifies that a "grandmother's grandchild," or káalispaabite in Crow, should not be confused with a mother's child who did not have to learn about survival because her mother would probably live long enough to care for her. Before Alma had reached the age of two, her mother died of tuberculosis and Alma became a káalispaabite to her grandmother Pretty Shield, learning "the ways of survival" of the Crow people by watching and helping and listening. The editor's introduction to Grandmother's Grandchild begins with Snell's words as she stands with outstretched arms in the kitchen of her modular home in the hills of Montana: "I feel like I'm pulled in two directions. I live in this modern world of high technology, but I desperately want to hold on to the past" (1). Snell's is not a desire to return to an idyllic (idealized, reductionist) myth of a Native American past; it is a commitment to one of Pretty Shield's most compelling lessons, demonstrating "the value of using the past to live in the present" (12). Since the late 1970s, Snell has been sharing with school children, universities, and museums, the lessons taught to her by Pretty Shield, from the wisdom of plants and their medicinal uses to Pretty Shield's moral imperative "not to discriminate, and not to discriminate is a value I would hold on to," Alma says (164). Snell's life and this personal narrative testify to...