Intro


Features:
▪ Complex mixtures of post-apocalyptic worldviews, an awareness of the miracle of survival, and a hope that goes beyond survival and endurance to senses of tribal and pan-tribal sovereignty and identity.
▪ Unflinching awareness of the impact of tragic losses and a presistent articulation, even celebration, of the good stories of survival, including a strong will to defend tribal and cultural sovereignty and identity.
▪ Complex and multidimensional concepts of communal identity and of language and place/time.
1) Communal senses of identity - common for people to identify themselves as embodiments of families, clans, bands, single tribes, and multiple tribes,
2) authorial senses of responsibility to the community,
3) communal senses of authorship and literature reflected in the uses of oral traditions.
▪ Crucial link between landscape and community identity, the spatial emphasis in many Native religions, the organic ties between storytelling and place, the central belief that the 'environment' is not a place way out there but instead a place in the middle, a community home.
▪ Epistemological perspectives on history are often inclusive of story, myth, and symbolism and therefore inevitably clash with conventional history rooted in the search for verifiable facts and committed to ratoinal plausibility.

Genres:
▪ Mixtures of autobiography and history - George Copway's The Life, History and Travels of Kah-gepga-gah (1850) and N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969).



Canada


George Copway (1818-1869), Ojibway.
w Generally considered the first bok in English by a Canadian Native: Copway's autobiography in 1847: The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, a Young Indian Chief of the Ojebwa Nation, a Convert to the Christian Faith, and a Missionary to His People for Twelve Years; With a Sketch of the Present State of the Ojebwa Nation, in Regard to Christianity and Their Future Prospeccs. Also an appeal; With All the Names of the Chiefs Now Living, Who Have Been Christianized, and the Missionaries Now Laboring Among Them. Written by Himself. Life story of a Native.
w Also The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850), generally conceded to be the first tribal history in English by a North American Native.
w The Ojibway Cinquest: A Tale of the Northeast (1850), a poem about the last major battle between the Ojibway and the Sioux, attributed to him, though he may not have written it

Early work:
w in the main, limited to autobiography, histories, diaries, and journals.
w Before Copway - John Richardson (1796-1852), Ottawa (mixed). Wrote poetry, newspaper articles, travel accounts, and a series of sometimes lurid, sometimes sentimental, almots always gothic novels. Wacousta; or, The Prophesy (1832) most famous. The Natives in his works are generally cast as standard gothic villains poised to wreak Jacobean mayhem on sentimentally drawn whites.
w His contemporaries: Peter Jones, Peter Jacobs, Henry Budd, Georg eHenry, Francis Assikinack, Peter Dooyenate Clark, Louis Jackson, John Brant Sero, Oronhyatekha, Lydia Campbell.
w Peter Jones was a leading Methodist preaches of the times and a friend to George Copway. Jones's writings were not pbulished until after his death; autobiography Life and Jouranls of Kah-He-Wa-Quo-Na-By, Wesleyan minister (1860).
w Lydia Campbell's Sketches of Labrador Life (1894) described Inuit life at the turn of the century and was the first autobiography we know of by an Inuit.
w While Copway, Jones, and Campbell have enjoyed a modicum of contemporary interest, most of the Native writers of this period have remained unknown.
w Louis Riel (1844-1885), Metis. Generally knwon for his political and military activism on behalf of the Metis in Manitoba, but he was also a poet whose Poésies religieuses et politiques was published in 1886. His collected writings consists to a great extent of letters.

E.Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), Mohawk.
w One of Canada's best-known Native writers.
w Two volumes of poetry: The White Wampum (1895) and Canadian Born (1903). Collection of Native legends and stories: Legends of Vancouver (1911). Two collections of short stories: The Shagganappi (1913) and The Mocassin Maker (1913).
w Her works deal with Native people and her own Native heritage. Brought public attention to Native people and to Native culture through the powerful descriptions in her poetry and prose of Native life and the natural world.

The first half of 20th century:
w Khalserten Sepass, Edward Ahenakew, Deskaheh, and Dan Kennedy were making speeches, producing articles, writing poetry and stories. Autobiograpies, such as Anatua's Land of the Good Shadows: The Life Story of Anauta, an Eskimo Woman (1949), and Charles James Nowell's Smoke from Their Fires: The Life of a Kwakiutl Chief (1940). We have not discovered any novels, collections of short stories, volumes of poetry, plays, and the rest.

Contemporary:
w 1969 White Paper, or More Properly the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy. A political document - a termination document that called for the federal govvernment to abrogate its legal obligation to Natives through the simple expedient of unilaterally terminating the goverment's relaitonship with treaty and status Natives.
w Prior, much of Native lit was confined to local publications - newspapers, journals, etc - and very little of it reaches a provincial market, let alone a national market. Thus - anthologies. One of the first ones Kent Gooderham's I Am an Indian (1969), a collection of short essays, stories, myths, and poems. The first anthologies to deal strictly with contemporary literature by Native writers (short prose) wre Maria Campbell's Achimoona (1985), which features the work of 8 Native writers, and a special issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine (No. 60, 1987) edited by Thomas King, which collected 18 stories by 14 Native writers.
w Poetry: E. Pauline Johnson in terms of number of books remains Canada's major Native poet. Also - Sarain's Stump's There Is My People Sleeping (1970); Howard Norman's The Wishing Bone Cycle (1976); George Kenny's Indians Don't Cry (1977); etc etc etc. Contemporary poets such as Beth Cuthand, Jeanette Armstrong, Shirley Bruised Head, Anneharte, Simon Frog, Lorriane Rekmans, Lenore Keeshing-Tobias, etc etc etc.

Contemporary fiction:
w Markoosie's short novel, Harpoon of the Hunter (1970). Can be used to mark the beginning of contemporary fiction, though there may be earlier novels of which we are not aware.
w Orville and Wayne Keon's Thunderbirds of the Ottawa (1977), and Lynn Sallot and Tom Peltier's Bearwalk (1977). Basil Johnston's collecction of humorous short stories about reserve life, Moose Meat and Wild Rice (1978). Howard Norma's collection of Swampy Cree stories Where the Chill Came From (1982).
w Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree (1983), a novel that dealt with the foster-home system and the difficulties Natives had in trying to make a place for themselves in a white world.
w Jeanette Armstrong's Slash (1985), a part history lesson, part novel, in that it follows the fictional travels of a young Native man as he participates in most of the major political events of the late 60s and early 70s (the Trail of Broken Treaties, Wounded Knee).
w Ruby Slipperjack's Honour the Sun (1987). Began to move away from focusing on a single alienated Native character (a mark of earlier novels in both the US and Canada) and dealt instead with the idea of community and communal concerns.
w This focus shared by Basil Johnston's second book, Indian School Days (1988). Advertised as an autobiography, the book is in reality a fine episodic novel that looks at the Native and non-Native community that forms at a Jesuit boarding school.
w Yvonne M. Klein's translations of Jovenne Marchessault's autobiographical trilogy: Luike a Child of the Earth, Mother of the Grass. Her Lebian Triptych (1985) is a major piece of feminist writing.
w Jordon Wheeler's Brother s in Arms (1989), a collection of three novellas; Thomas King's episodic novel Medicine River (1990), Harry Robinson's Write It on Your Heart (1989), a seminal colleceiton of stories that represent a transitional form of prose standing between traditional oral stories and contemporary written stories.

Drama:
w The most vibrant of the contemporary genres, having been sparked, in no small degree, by the wide critical acclaim accorded to Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters (1988). The play centres on a group of Native women on a reserve and weaves both traditional and contemporary materials together to create a resilient community that draws strength from both the past and the present.
w Highway has also written Aria, a one-woman play that portrays individual owmen from Hera to a contemporary Indian woman on the street; Juke Box Lady, about alcohol and drug abuse; The Sage, the Dancer, and the Fool, which chronicles a day in the life of a Native in a city; Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, a play that does, as The Rez Sisters, with a group of Native man.
w One of the first contemporary plays by a Native writer to be produces was Minnie Aodla Freeman's Survival in the South, which was produces in 1971.



Mediation


'Translation and mediation' by David Murray

Questioning, not only of the boundaries and particular nature, but even of the separate existence of such a thing as Native American literature. It is important to see that such a category is by no means self-evident or obvious. It is also important to examine what is at stake for outsiders and insiders in establishing lines of difference between Native American and other literature, as this is related not only to larger quesitons of cultural difference but also to the independent and sovereign political status of Native Americans.

If we think of oral tradition as the original Native American literature, it follows that naything we encounter as Native American literature is already some steps removed from this, in that is is in textualised form and is either translated or written by omeone in English who is some distance from that tribal and oral situation. The literature we encounter is always, and inevitably, at some distance from a communal and oral traditional culture and this does not give it a lesser claim to be called Native American literature.

Oral traditions:
w While early travelers, missionaries and settlers sometimes recorded Native American myths and stories in translation as curiosities, or evidence of supersition, there was little interest in their form, or sense of their value as literature. With anthropology in the 19th century came a growin sense in US that whole cultures wre disappearing -> a need to preserve some record of what was disappearing. Part of this exercise in what has been valled 'salvage ethngraphy' was the colletion of many volumes of myths, tales, ritual chants, or songs. These volumes failt o make it accessible to the general reader as literature (what has to happen to it to make it accessible reveeals what literature is expected to be).
§ A text transcribed from a native language, with an interlinear translation, which translates each word exactly, then a looser translation into more correct and fluent English, plus accompanying notes explaining context and even sometimes a musical transcription, using Western notation.
§ In later collections, audio recording also provide another record of the storytelling or musical event. One ignored area was the performance aspect of many of these stories within their community.
§ The aim is authenticity - to give as complete a record of the relevant information as possible, rather than shaping it to white literary expectations. The original concern was ethnographic, documentary, and scientific, and so was in sharp ocontrast with the mor epopular presentations of Native American literature at the time and later, which drew on ideas of the doomed nobility of a simple people. Versoins of Native songs and poems were popular, but what passed as Native American was often just recirculated clichés of Native nobility and harmony with nature, sometimes given an extra pathos by the idea that Natives were doomed to extinction.

Appropriation:
w White poets using the ethnographic sources and making them accessible by bringing out their aesthetic dimensions; claming that that specific expressions of Native culture could communicate with other cultures at an aesthetic level - that is, that something transcended their particular form and language, and could be communicated in the new versoins.
w But the writers were, in fact, reduplicating their own very culture-bound idea of what the poetic and the universal was - influenced by modernist ideas, ethnographic texts which involved narrative elements and repetitions were stripped down to resemble a Japanese haiku form and then this similarity to other forms was claimed as evidence of its universaility.
w Idea that it was legitimate to strip down and select from something created by a specific person and in a specific time and place and present it simply as a Navajo poem, or even more generally an Indian lament, because the products of such cultures were assumed to be anonymous and communal, and therefore the part could always stand for the whole. What is actually a fragment of a whole become reconstituted as part of a different whole, that of tribal unity, and universal poetry, and this is because the 'primitive' art-object was supposed to be able, because of its provenance in a culture which was undivided, to synthesize everything in that culture. (NEW AGE!)

Conditions of production and circulation of any text. In any situation where we have a text written by a Native American certain sets of conditions have to have been met:
w The author either spoke or wrote English or was helped by a translator or editor.
w In order for the book to have been published it needs to have been in the interestests, whether commercial, political, academic, or whatever, of those who controlled the publishing outlets [whites].
w Many Natives learned to write and read in English with the help of Christian church, and the only things deemed worthy of publishing were those which expressed views consonant with Christian teachings. Thus - first publications are from Christian Natives.

Awareness of being overheard by a white audience, or even of having them as primary audience:
w Samson Occom's Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772) - an essay by a Christian Native. Addressing Natives about the 'evils of alcohol,' but also preaching to the audience who are made up of fellow Natives and white onlookers.
w William Apess - An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man (1833) - he presents the disastrous effects of white incursions on Native communities. Apess is holding up several images of the white man as well as the Native American. (the 'mean and abject' Native is just as much the white man's creation as is the civilized and Christianized Native).
w Postcolonial critics have developed the complex implications of mimicry - the interplay of identities and the turning back upon the dominant group of its own ideas of identity through imitation, and shown how the play and exploration around similarities by whites depends on an implicit and underlying idea of difference.
w Instead of searching for a 'hidden transcript,' subversiveness of the text, we need to see the texts as sometimes undecidable, multifaceted, and perhaps multivoiced.

Features of early works:
w Accounts of traditional Native life, with an emphasis on what was distinctive, traditional and positive, as in the collections of tales by Charles Eastman or Ohiyesa
w A concern for what was changing, what did not fit the pattern of clear difference. E.g. Stresses and fractures caused by what was supposed to be the positive process of 'Indian boarding school education' in the work of Gertrude Bonnin or Zitkala-Ša, where she describes the experience of feeling, at the moment of greatest success in winning a school prize, that she was also thereby failed her mother.
w Written by authors who themselves were living the contradictory pressures of progress and tradition, these writings often constitute a shifting and unstable interrogation of the dominant society's assumption that progress and assimilation can and should be achieved.

20th century:
w The expression was predominantly in autobiographies, tribal histories or journalism rather than in strictly literary forms.
w But - Mourning Dove's Cogewea: the HalfBlood (1927), John Joseph Mathew's Sundown (1934), D'Arvy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936). These books dealt with the inability on the part of their protagonists to reconcile the conflicting demands of the tribal and the modern, and the focus on the figure of the mixed-blood as a metaphor for larger communal conflicts of identity is one which continues to present. But - also the tendency to talk of the Natives as 'they' rather than 'we' - characteristic of the stance taken by many of the older Native American writers.
w Earlier writers were struggling with sets of assumptions contained in the language and the literary conventions which they wree using.
w The fact of having to use English does not entail a passive adoption of white values. Rather, in the spirit of all those earlier creative and syncretic adaptions of European culture noted by anthropologists and historians and echoing Apess's looking glass, they see this as an act of cultural and political assertion (Joy Harjo, Gloria Bird, Reinventing the Enemy's Language (1977)). 'Reinventing' in the colonizer's tongue and turning those images around to mirror an image of the colonized to the colonizers as a process of decolonization indicates that something is coming into focus that will politicise as well as transform literary expression.

Identity: how to approach the question of changing definitions of identity?
w One reponse suggested by the fusion of some postmodern and postcolonial ideas has been to question the necessity or usefulness of fixed boundaries which define identities whether at a personal, racial, or national level. Identity shouldn't be predicated on the sort of boundaries of race which have defined Natives (James Clifford).
w 'mixed-blood' Native:
§ often used as a metaphor for the historical processes which were changing and in many ways destroying Native communities. It is central to a great deal of Native literature, indicative of the demoralized and directionless condition of Natives deprived of the ability to continue in traditional ways.
§ But - representing ways of mediating and negotiating, rather than being defeated by, contradictions. The mode of presentation then becomes comic rather than tragic and the use of the traditional figure of the shape-shifting trickster who can change identities has been quite widely adopted and circulated as corresponding to postmodern ideas of constantly reinvented identity, and a lack of fixed values or identity.
§ Either this figure offers a point of common ground on which Natives and other can meet and Natives can celebrate an identity not limited by racist conceptions, and even become a model of how to combine past and present as Vizenor's trickster heroes, or it is a specious identification which ignores the reality of tribal life and caters for a postmodern consumption of images rather than reality.

Approaches:
w Elizabeth Cook-Lynn - 'nationalist perspective.' In a world dominated by white control of the means of representation she wants the tribal position to have 'the last word,' link this cultural situation with the larger need for political sovereignty. For Native writers the body of nationalist material made up of myth, history, and earlier cultural expressions 'must sform the body of the critical discourse that dunctions in the name of the people; the presence of the Indian nation as cultural force.'
w Craig Womack - the challenge to present a nationalist or community-rooted literature. Red on Reed (1999) demonstrates the wealth of material actually available to draw on in tribal traditions, through accounts of Creek and Cherokee writeres past and present, also makes an argument for the importance of a tribal specificity, as the basis for an assertion of literary as well as political sovereignty. Womack sees the Native perspective (and literature) as the original tree itself, not just a branch; sees it separate and prior to the American canon. This means shifting the literary criteria from generalized ones that might apply to all literatures, to a more politicized aesthetic, in which 'autonomy, self-determination and sovereignty serve as useful literary concepts.'
w Jace Weaver - has critized what he calls the 'gymnastics of authenticity' by which white critics have denigrated the idea and importance of Native identity and cultural specificity in favor of a univeralism. The charge often laid against universalism is not just that it plays down the local, indigenous, and specific but that what it claims as universal in fact actually reflects the values of the most powerful group [whites] who can define what is universal. Thus 18th century Enlightenment universalism actually embodied many white European values which were assumed to be of absolute validity, and so was actually Eurocentric rather than universal.
w Louis Owens - rather than accepting tribal or cosmopolitan oppositions, he sees the positive ways in which Native literature can cater for its different readerships and yet allow a privileged position to the Native reader as insider. 'One effect of this is subversive: the American Indian writer places the Eurocentric reader on the outside, as "other," while the Indian reader (a coparatively small audience) is granted, for the first time, a privileged position.'



Gender issues


'Women writers and gender issues' by Annet Van Dyke.

w Native women attended reservation schools and boarding school after the rise of the reservations in 1851, but even before that some women (like Jane Johnson Schoolcraft) were relatively well educated. But the turn of the century, a number of Native women were highly educated and some had college degrees.
w As writers, they took elements of the oral storytelling tradition that had always been an integral part of their culture and incorporated them into the genres of novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. Some like Winnemucca and E. Pauline Johnson called upon Native oration techniques to perform for the public, cultivating the 'Indian princess' imiage to give them authority and to attract white audiences.
w Native writers extended such elements as the belief in the sacredness of language and earth, attention to place and landscape, propagation of cultural values, and concern for the community welfare as opposed to the concern for the individual into their writings.
w Paula Gunn Allen - if women are seen in the proper perspective as the center of Native American culture, the image of the dying Indian and the extinction of Native American culture would be replaced with an image of a thriving and continuing culture (? hmmm...)
w Many early Native American women writers were privileged and acculturated; the had relatively high status either because of their educational background or their standing in their communities.
w They often employ 'double-voiced discourse' which addresses two audiences from the often-jarring standpoint of being both within and outside Native culture. They often combine genres and use non-linear structures in their writings to achieve their goals.

The contributions in four overlapping areas:
1) They fought against stereotypical popular culture representations of Native women
2) They attempter to reinstate the importance of women to Native American culture
3) They contributed to the continuity and preservation of Native culture, not only by extending Native American values and materials into their writings and advocating for their people, but also by showing their belief in Native culture as something strong and vital
4) By extending Native Amreican elements such as the oral tradition into their work, they created new forms of literature.


Jane Johnston Schoolcraft or Bame-wa-wa-ge-shik-a-quay, Woman of the Starts Rushing Through the Sky (1800-41) - one of the first Native women to publish; an Ojibwe writer . Born to a Scotch-Irish fur trader and a Native (Ojibwe) mother. Her writing reflect her educational background - the influence of English poets of the pre-Romantic and Romantic period coupled with her knowledge of Ojibwe culture; she combines both European and Native elements.

Sarah Winnemucca or Thocmetory or Shell Flower - the first Native woman to publish an autobiography. She wrote her Life Among the Piutes: their Wrongs and Claims (1883) to advocate for her people who had been relocated a number of times in conflicts with Euro-Americans over their land. Her autobiography draws upon her experience as an orator, using a narrator who shifts her perspective as she grown older throughout the work. Winnemucca writes from within the history of the nation and the land, using mixed genres of tribal stories, personal experiences, and contemporary events. Throughout her work, she reminds her readers that the status of women in Paiute society was much higher than in Euro-American society; an important theme is the abusive treatment of Native women by white men.

S.Alice Callahan (1868-94), Muscogee-Creek. The first Native woman to write a novel, also the first to write a novel in Oklahoma, then Indian Territory. A highly educated Creek (or Muskogee), she was what of the 'Creek aristocracy' - Native Amreicans who had amassed a fair amount of wealth and who held prominent positions in both Native American and Euro-American societies.
Wynema (1891) -
▪ has a Native American theme. Draws upon mainstream literary traditions of the time, couching her reform goals into the genre of women's sentimental fiction. Written to garner the understanding of a white audience, and, in particular, the woman reader, the novel employs the tactic of using a white, Christian woman reformer as a central character to guide her Native character Wynema to maturity and 'civilization' while Genevieve is being educated about Creek culture and Native issues at the same time. This tactic employs Callahan's bicultural authorial voice, her mixed heritage perception of being both within and outside of Creek culture. She also subverts the domestic ethic that women's place is in the home by asserting that the world and the home are one and the world should be ordered by the values of the home.
▪ The plot describes the acculturation and romances of two heroines. Part One chronicles Genevieve's adjustments to life as a Methodist teacher in the Muscogee-Creek Nation, aided by Wynema and the Reverend Gerald Keithly. Both Parts One and Two describe the 'civilizing' of Wynema. The latter chronicles the Creek girl's acculturation while visiting Genevieve's family in the South. By the end of the novel, Genevieve marries Keithly and Wynema weds Robin, Genevieve's brother.
▪ Because Cllahan was writing hte novel during the hostilities of late 1890 that led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, she incorporates into the novel an episode in which a Methodist missionary and Robin dash off to the Sioux Nation to help friends there.
▪ Although the novel is primarily a sentimental romance, Callahan does include discussions of Creek culture, politics, and women's rights. Like other women writers of the period, Callahan uses the traditon of the sentimental romance for politicla purposes.

E.Pauline Johnson, or Tekahionwake or Double Wampum (1861-1913) Canadian Mohawk. The first Native woman to publish collections of poetry and short stories. She as well came from a privileged background: her father was a Mohawk leader, a well-known orator and mediator between the Mohawks and the whites; her mother was British-born. The White Wampum (1895), Canadian Born (1903), Legends of Vancouver (1911), The Shagganappi (1913), The Moccassin Maker (1913, posthumous). She often uses romantic plot to protest the treatment of women and Native Americans; many of her heroines are mixed-blood people facing problems resulting from their heritage.

Zitkala-Ša or Red Bird or Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938), Yankton-Dakota. She is the first of the writers considered here to attend a boarding school for Native Americans; this colored all of her writings. She is credited with helping to organise the modern pan-Indian reform movement, serving as a model for women's involvement.
▪ Old Indian Legends Retold by Zitkala-Ša (1901). Many of these stories features the Dakota trickster, Iktomi, and were aimed at reaching across cultures to teach Native values to both adults and children. She was one of the first to publish traditional Native stories without the invervention of white ethnographers.
▪ American Indian Stories (1921) - autobiographical stories. She depicts her life on the reservation as idyllic and her entry into the white world as typified by the boarding school as full of cruelty and alienation. The Indian boarding school which set out 'to civilize' the students; racism.


Women's autobiography
▪ The image of Native women in American culture has been largely a product of misinformation, stereotyping, and political convenience, yet Native woman have been frquent and eloquent spokespersons for their tribes and activists for Native causes.
▪ Three separate traditions to Native autobiography:
- Composite: characterised by oral narration by the subject and recording, structuring, and editing by a nontribal person to form an extensive record of the subject's life.
- Written: often affected by extensive editing by a nontribal person, so it too may share, in varying degrees, the bicultural method of composition.
- Multigenre form: a recent innovation by contemporary by women - creative writers, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, who mix oral tradition, personal narrative, fiction, and poetry into works that might best be called cultural memoirs.
▪ Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) - not only a personal narrative but also a cultural history of the Northern Paiute tribe from early contact with whites to the 1880s, and a plea for an end to unjust treatment of her people. Tradition of 19th century male autobiography beause it focuses on her public roles and deeds. Femal tradition because of her attention to domestic detail, her concern with the role of women within her tribe, and her role as teacher to the children of her tribe.
▪ During my Time by Florence Edenshaw Davidson. Demonstrated the continuing viability of the collaborative method of Native autobiography. Davidson focuses on the domestic avctivities and family relationships that are commonly the concern of women's autobiography. Her narrative is one of cultural chance and adaption which focuses on her roles in the home and family as a stabilizing factor ina time of radical change in male roles.
▪ Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller - a new kind of autobiographical text which uses fragments of personal narrative to bind together traditional stories, contemporary fiction, and poetic versions of stories central to the identity of the Laguna people. She demonstrates the remarkable flexibility of autobiographical writing: it adapts to new needs, accomodates non-Western ways of knowing and expressing one's life, generates new concepts of text, and expands the definition of what is literary.