Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography

Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography

by Hertha Dawn Wong
     
 

Using contemporary autobiography theory and literary, historical, and ethnographic approaches, Wong explores the transformation of Native American autobiography from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives through late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century life histories to written contemporary autobiographies. This book expands the definition of

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Overview

Using contemporary autobiography theory and literary, historical, and ethnographic approaches, Wong explores the transformation of Native American autobiography from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives through late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century life histories to written contemporary autobiographies. This book expands the definition of autobiography to include non-written forms of personal narrative and non-Western concepts of self, highlighting the incorporation of traditional tribal modes of self-narration with Western forms of autobiography and charting the historical transition from orality to literacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:
9780195069129
Publisher:
Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:
03/28/1992
Pages:
256
Product dimensions:
5.69(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.73(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction3
1Native American Self-Narration and Autobiography Theory11
Native American Concepts of Self, Life, and Language13
The Web of Self-Narration: Native American and Euro-American Autobiographical Traditions20
2Pre-Contact Oral and Pictographic Autobiographical Narratives: Coup Tales, Vision Stories, and Naming Practices25
Coup Tales26
Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Names and Autobiography37
3Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks, Diaries, and Text Construction57
Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries58
A Cheyenne Diarist and Indigenous Text Production77
4Literary Boundary Cultures: The Life Histories of Plenty-Coups, Pretty-Shield, Sam Blowsnake, and Mountain Wolf Woman88
Two Crow Life Histories91
Two Winnebago Life Histories104
Performance, Ceremony, and Self-Narration113
5Oral and Written Collaborative Autobiography: Nicholas Black Elk and Charles Alexander Eastman117
Nicholas Black Elk118
Charles Alexander Eastman139
6Contemporary Innovations of Oral Traditions: N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko153
N. Scott Momaday155
Leslie Marmon Silko186
Conclusion196
Notes201
Works Cited225
Index237

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