A Supplement to An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies

H. D A V ID B R U M B L E I I I University of Pittsburgh A Supplement to An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies This supplement* is based on the same assumptions that guided the composition of An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). 1.) I include only first-person narratives, no biographies. I realize of course that some of these narratives have been reworked by editors; it is even the case that some remain in the first person simply because an ethnographer decided to cast his data in one form rather than another. Still, as I argued in the Bibliography, first-person narration amounts at least to a claim that the material is being presented from the narrator’s point of view. Biography, of course, makes no such generic claim. 2.) Since many of these are as-told-to narratives, the better we understand the relationship of the Indian “autobiographer” and his collaborator, the more fully we will be able to understand these often fascinating narra­ tives. As I did in the Bibliography, then, I provide here some account of the nature of the composition of each narrative — was there an editoramanuensis ? An interpreter? Was the narrative guided? What kind of editing was done? I also provide birthdates (sometimes tentative), date of narrative, and tribal affiliations; and where the autobiographer’s name leaves any doubt as to gender, I include an M /F designation. *For much of what follows I am indebted to Professor William C. Sturtevant. 244 Western American Literature The numbering of items in this supplement meshes with the number­ ing in the Bibliography, and number references here can, of course, refer back to the Bibliography. The first name given in each item is the name of the autobiographer; where a second name is given, it is the name of the editor-amanuensis-anthropologist. The name in caps is the one most likely to be found in card catalogues and indices. Most of those who will rejoice to discover the narratives listed here might also be interested to read some recent works of related scholarship. Arnold Krupat’s “The Indian Autobiography: Origins, Type, and Func­ tion” (American Literature, LIII [1981], 22-42) relates some early Indian autobiographies (especially Patterson’s Black Hawk [1833]; see no. 68 in the Bibliography) to conflicting nineteenth-century attitudes toward Indians and to some other as-told-to autobiographies of the period — Daniel Boone’s, Davy Crockett’s, and Kit Carson’s, for example. The article is a real contribution to our too small understanding of the history of American Indian autobiography. Paul Olson’s “Black Elk Speaks as Epic” (in Virginia Faulkner and Frederick C. Luebke, eds., Vision and Refuge: Essays on the Literature of the Great Plains [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982], pp. 3-27) is far the most learned treatment of Black Elks Speaks (see no. 66 in the Bibliography). My own response to Karl Kroeber (“Reasoning Together,” Canadian Review of American Studies, XII [1981], 260-70) contains a brief account of the confessional form of Sam Blowsnake’s Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920; see no. 73 in the Bibliography). Although he does not discuss the autobiographies per se, much of Dell Hymes’s “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Phila­ delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) does demonstrate how far from literal are many of the translations which are labeled “literal” in the ethnological literature. This must instill a healthy humility in the bosoms of those of us who work with Indian materials in translation. Hymes’s discussion of the assumptions of the ethnographer-translators is quite pertinent to the study of the autobiographies. Karl Kroeber’s Traditional Literatures of the American Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981) is a collection of essays by Kroeber, Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, Jarold Ramsey, and Barre Toelken and Tacheeni Scott. The essays do not bear directly on the autobiographies. But since, for example, they do discuss narrative patterns, problems of translation, and the relation between religions and texts, they can be important to the H. David Brumble III 245...