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

256 Pages·1992·15.99 MB·English

by  Hertha Dawn Wong

Sending My Heart Back
Across the Years
This page intentionally left blank
Sending My Heart Back
Across the Years
TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN
NATIVE AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Hertha Dawn Wong
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1992
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wong, Hertha Dawn
Sending my heart back across the years ;
tradition and innovation in native
American autobiography / Hertha Dawn Wong.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-506912-9
1. Indians of North America-—Biography—History
and criticism. 2. Autobiography. I. Title.
E89.5.W66 1992 818.009'4920009297—dc20
91-36639
The following sections of chapters have been published previously in other forms:
an early, much different, version of parts of Chapters 1 and 2 was published as
"Pre-Literate Native American Autobiography: Forms of Personal Narrative," MELUS
14.1 (1987) 17-32; a different version of one section of Chapter 6 appeared as "N. Scott
Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain: Contemporary Native American
Autobiography," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12.3 (1988) 15-31;
and a portion of Chapter 3 was published, in slightly different form, as "Pictographs as
Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries," American Literary History 1.2 (1989) 295-316.
24689753 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
When I began writing this book in 1984,1 had little idea that I was part
Native American, one of the unidentified mixed-bloods whose forebears
wandered away from their fractured communities, leaving little cultural
trace in their adopted world. In 1986, when my mother told me that her
grandparents had been Indian (her grandmother was from the Plains, and
her grandfather from what was then called Indian Territory), I found a
new insight into the meaning of irony. I had believed that I was a non-
Indian writing as an outsider about Native American autobiographical
traditions. Did my newly discovered part-Indian heritage now make me
an' 'insider,'' someone who might speak with the authority of belonging?
"Of course not," was my first response. Because my ancestry is
German, Scotch-Irish, and French as well as Native American, because I
do not believe that blood quantum alone determines Indian identity, and
because we do not have a community to which to return, I felt that I could
write only as dimly related to, but outside of, the indigenous communities
of the United States. But over the years, I have met other displaced
mixed-blood people, all of us wrestling with the various labels, the
rankings of legitimacy and illegitimacy, imposed on us by others and
accepted or resisted by ourselves. Such absolute and dualistic categories
(either/or, Indian/non-Indian, insider/outsider), constructed and imposed
by those in power (and often adopted or internalized by native people), do
not and cannot comprehend the complexities of multiple ethnicity. As
many people have pointed out, so much of twentieth-century Native
American experience, particularly in California, where so many urban
and mixed-blood Indians do not fit the categories constructed for them, is
the experience of this multiple marginality.
When I am asked the inevitable question, "Are you Indian?" what,
then, do I say? "Yes, kind of"? Native people of mixed descent,
vi Preface
particularly those who have been displaced from their communities,
often have a choice to make about self-identification, a problematic
luxury unavailable to full-bloods or those who, undeniably, "look
Indian." For years I have been wrestling with how to answer this
question with honesty and integrity. Like many urban mixed-blood
Indians, I am not a member of a native community, but much of what my
mother taught me reflects traditional values long associated with Native
American cultures (although she did not label her teachings "Indian").
Finally, it seems, questions of identity are intensely personal; they can
be resolved only with a sound conscience, a good spirit, and the help of
family or community. They cannot be answered once and for all, but
must be reconsidered perpetually. Part of our challenge is to reconstruct
disrupted family histories, to examine the silences, erasures, and editings
left by those who have gone before us. To deny my part-Indian family is
to erase them and to perpetuate the historical invalidation of native
people. To pretend that I have some kind of ethnic authority to speak on
behalf of others would be dishonest and irresponsible. Insisting on either
position is unfulfilling; locating a boundary zone from which to speak is
difficult. According to my mother's findings, my great-grandmother was
from a Plains tribe; and according to records at the Oklahoma Historical
Society, my great-grandfather may have been Creek or Chickasaw or
Choctaw or perhaps Cherokee, but several generations later their great-
granddaughter is an undocumented mixed-blood person. So I write from
the borders (a very crowded space these days) as one who observes and
listens with openness and sensitivity, but who, of course, presents only a
particular angle of vision.
Stories of our lives, told (or withheld) by our families and retold or
edited by us, shape our identity. Self-narration is part of the process of
self-construction and self-representation. When our stories change, when
silences are spoken or narrative vacancies become inhabited, we are
transformed. Over the years, the unfolding narrative of my family history
and the narrative of this book on autobiography have taken on striking
parallels. Both are concerned with one of the fundamental activities of
autobiography: reconstructing a past from the present moment and
laboring to understand how our ancestors' long-ago stories shape and
reshape our self-narrations today.
As in all such endeavors, there are many people to thank. In the earliest
stages of the project, when many academic advisers warned that if I wrote
Preface vii
about Native American autobiography I would face terminal unemploy-
ment, Robert F. Sayre and Wayne Franklin were enthusiastic supporters.
They have continued to be invaluable mentors. Thanks is due also to
those scholars who made it possible to write about Native American
autobiography in an English Department. Lynne Woods O'Brien's slim
volume on Plains Indian autobiography initiated my interest in nonliter-
ate autobiographical forms, while H. David Bramble's suggestive intro-
duction to his bibliography of Native American autobiographies inspired
me to continue. Since then, the work of Gretchen Bataille, H. David
Brumble, Arnold Rrupat, Kathleen Mullen Sands, A. LaVonne Brown
Ruoff, and others has contributed to the growing discourse on Native
American autobiography.
James Olney has been generous with his time and expertise. His
1988 NEH Summer Seminar on Autobiography offered a fruitful atmo-
sphere in which to revise part of the manuscript. In 1989, the National
Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a summer stipend that
allowed me to devote myself to further revisions. I am particularly
grateful to those at the California State University, Chico, who offered
me substantial released time from teaching so that I could continue my
work. Thanks also to the University of California, Berkeley, for assis-
tance with the considerable expenses of obtaining photographs and
permissions.
Many staff members of various museums, institutions, and libraries
have provided invaluable assistance. Richard Buchen and Craig Klyver,
both from the Braun Research Library at the Southwest Museum in Los
Angeles, assisted in my search for and preparation of photographs for the
sketchbooks of Zo-Tom, Howling Wolf, and the Cheyenne diarist. John
Aubrey, curator of the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry
Library in Chicago, was generous of spirit and time, inadvertently
leading me to the Cheyenne autographs in Wuxpais' sketchbook. Joseph
Porter, curator of the Western Historical Collection at the Joslyn Art
Museum in Omaha, provided timely assistance as well. I am indebted to
John Ewers, retired ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution, and
others who provided clues in locating the Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf
sketchbooks. In addition, I am grateful to Hilda Neihardt Petri for
permission to use Standing Bear's drawings which, belong to the John G.
Neihardt Trust, as well as to the staff of the Western Historical Manu-
scripts Collection of the University of Missouri, Columbia, for their
assistance in preparing them. A heartfelt thank you to Karen Daniels
viii Preface
Petersen, who has been consistently generous with her vast knowledge of
Plains Indian pictographic sketchbooks.
Special thanks to the many people who read the innumerable versions
of this manuscript, particularly Susan Jaret McKinstry, Steven Crum,
Tom Fox, and Cheryl Allison Leisterer, and to Andrea Lerner, who, with
a gentle nudge and lively intellect, helped me to reenvision my preface. I
am grateful to Jonathan Brennan for his precise indexing and editorial
skills, to Rebecca Dobkins for her remarkable organizational assistance,
and to two special people at Oxford University Press: Irene Pavitt for her
editorial expertise and Elizabeth Maguire for her support. Thank you also
to my Native American students and friends in Minnesota, South Dakota,
and California who continue to teach me about community, and to my
family, particularly Dianne and Chaarles Sweet and Ruth, George, and
Judith Wong, who have been sources of inspiration. My most special
thanks, though, goes to Richard Wong, who diligently read every draft of
this book in its many incarnations since 1984 and who has offered me
unfailing and exceptional support for almost twenty years.
Berkeley, Calif. H. D. W.
November 1991
Contents
Introduction 3
1 / Native American Self-Narration and
Autobiography Theory 11
Native American Concepts of Self, Life, and Language 13
The Web of Self-Narration: Native American and Euro-American
Autobiographical Traditions 20
2 / Pre-Contact Oral and Pictographic Autobiographical
Narratives: Coup Tales, Vision Stories,
and Naming Practices 25
Coup Tales 26
Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Names and Autobiography 37
3 / Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks,
Diaries, and Text Construction 57
Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 58
A Cheyenne Diarist and Indigenous Text Production 77
4 / Literary Boundary Cultures: The Life Histories of Plenty-
Coups, Pretty-Shield, Sam Blowsnake,
and Mountain Wolf Woman 88
Two Crow Life Histories 91
Two Winnebago Life Histories 104
Performance, Ceremony, and Self-Narration 113