Pretty Shield's Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory

Over several cold March days in Montana, three friends gathered around a wood stove in an unused building on the Crow reservation. They met for more than pleasant reminiscing: from the start all three considered their conversation as an important means of cultural preservation for the Crow Nation. Frank B. Linderman, who had spent the last forty-six years of his life living in Montana and building relationships with Native peoples, took careful notes while he watched the hands of a Crow elder, Pretty Shield, as she shared her life's story through sign language.¹ Linderman conversed fluently with Pretty Shield in Plains Indian sign language, yet to ward off any misinterpretation, Pretty Shield also spoke simultaneously in the Crow language while another Crow woman, Goes Together, translated into English for Linderman's added benefit. Although Linderman had spent a lifetime in Montana and had just published the memoir of another important Crow leader, Plenty Coups, he records this as the first extended conversation he had ever had with Native women. In the resulting text, Red Mother (1932), later renamed as Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, he writes of his desire to document "a woman's story" (16), a perspective that he regarded as underrepresented and undervalued in Native American autobiography.² To correct the trend, Linderman directly and repeatedly requests a Native woman's perspective in his interview questions. As a result the book draws continual attention to the race and gender of Pretty Shield, not only throughout the text but also throughout the book's many paratextual elements, such as its cover images, illustrations, dedication, foreword, and title page.

As an ethnographic collaboration, Pretty-shield presents a two-body problem: as the non-Native recorder of a Native informant, to what extent did Linderman control, limit, or misrepresent Pretty Shield's life narrative? On the one hand, critics such as Stephanie Sellers question Linderman's qualifications, as a privileged white man immersed in Western culture, to chronicle the life of a Crow woman (79). Sellers devotes a chapter of her book to addressing her numerous critiques of the text, including instances of Linderman's ethnocentrism, his qualifications to write Pretty Shield's story as a cultural outsider, the absence of the Crow creation story, and Linderman's missed opportunities to "ask the right questions" about Crow culture (78–82). On the other hand, Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Sands compliment Linderman for embedding explanatory notes within the text rather than marginalizing them in an appendix, for maintaining Pretty Shield's achronological narrative of her life, and for recording her story with "sensitivity and insight" (45–46). As such debates demonstrate, the body politics of racial and gender identity and the role they play in Native autobiography lead one into a contentious intellectual hot spot in Native studies. Yet a recent shift in the field proposes a reexamination of Native American autobiography that restores attention to the Native subject as well as the non-Native ethnographer. As Michelle Raheja and Stephanie Fitzgerald argue, previous focus on the ethnographer's mediation "often obscured the Indian voice of the text and shifted the focus of the scholarship away from indigenous lived experience to that of the non-Indian editor" (1). Similarly, David Carlson protests readings of Native American autobiography for how "authentic" they may or may not be. He calls such approaches, following Robert Warrior, a "critical dead-end" and instead suggests readings of "how individual autobiographical acts can reveal a process of self-definition whose engine was engagement with legal models of Indianness in a highly charged communicative context" (14). Such a reframing, he suggests, considers Native autobiographies as "something more complex than capitulation to colonial power; they produced a vibrant tradition of Native American literary and political discourse that should be better appreciated today" (14). In all, their scholarship advocates for a revisiting of as-told-to narratives and, rather than debate "whose text" we are reading, how "authentic" it may be, or in what ways the recorder falls short, that we more productively reconsider the complex instances of...