The As-Told-To Native [Auto]biography: Whose Voice Is Speaking?

The As-Told-To Native [Auto]biography Whose Voice Is Speaking? Edward Valandra

or a week in June 1993 the Oglala Lakota hosted the Oceti Sakowin to discuss several issues of national importance,' especially the on- going exploitation of Lakota spirituality. At this meeting, participants drafted a statement in resolution form (Lakota Summit V Resolution). Unanimously ratified by at least one hundred community-based rep- resentatives, the resolution declared "war against exploiters of Lakota spirituality." Arguably, the resolution validates what Native communities in general say about various disconcerting activities of non-Natives and their Native accomplices who tend to distort the cultural realities, spiritual or otherwise, of indigenous peoples.

Among those targeted were flea markets, New Age retail stores, pseudoreligious corporations, and the academy. Grouping academics' activities with flea markets and specialty stores might not be a good comparison-after all, flea markets at least offer better bargains for your money.

The Oceti Sakowin summit resolution severely condemns those "academic disciplines which have sprung up at colleges and universities institutionalizing the sacrilegious imitation of our spiritual practices by students and instructors under the guise of educational programs in 'shamanism."' But another equally disconcerting problem mentioned in the resolution concerned those authors who "are selling books that pro- mote the systematic colonization of our ... spirituality." Indeed, anthro- pology and religious studies are especially guilty of both activities, while

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almost all humanities disciplines are guilty of engaging in the latter.2 An unfinished task of the academy is to challenge those institutional norms in academia that Native country perceives pejoratively as having all the value of the detritus found in flea markets and specialty shops.

Ethnic or American studies, Native studies, and other interdis- ciplinary programs that use Native knowledge to foster a desperately needed cross-cultural understanding between and among diverse populations obviously represent a laudable development for the academy. Selling colonialism-tainted books is far more damning for ethnic or American studies (both of which are pluralist-oriented disciplines) and Native studies (a sovereignty-oriented discipline) than is a three- or four-credit religious studies course in vicarious shamanism, and there- fore the potential damage to these disciplines' creditability is especially high. This essay analyzes at least one troubling area where colonialism- tainted material has gained a foothold in Native literature: the "as-told- to" Native [auto]biography.

Given this general context of the academy's integrity deficit among Native communities, the following analysis will consist of two parts: first, identifying Native intellectuals whose critiques of Native literature either directly or indirectly address the as-told-to Native autobiography phenomenon and, second, examining several popular Lakota autobiographies to illustrate the shortcomings of this genre of Native literature. This analytical framework will reveal significant patterns in the as-told-to Native autobiography that have been rightly construed by Native peoples as offering little more than supermarket tabloids for the academy-tabloid material that perpetuates colonialism-tinted mis- representations and hence invariably pollutes Native and other cross- cultural disciplines. These controversial works leave the reading public with a' plethora of contrived fancies.

WHOSE VOICE IS SPEAKING?

Kathryn Shanley and Robert A. Warrior both believe, as do other third- generation Native writers, that the late 1960s marked a decisive moment in Native literature. Texts such as N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins surfaced to remind society that Native peoples had not vanished but were, in fact, thriving. Measuring the outcome of this literary moment, Warrior notes,

Twenty-five years ago, building a library of American Indian writers from books in print would have taken up no more than a few feet of shelf space. With the emergence of literally hundreds of writers since and the re- printing of many authors before 1968, the yield now is yards and yards.3



So, in a span of time equivalent to a generation, non-Native society has witnessed an exponential proliferation of Native literature that continues unabated.

Having "captured" the speaking of English first, Native peoples are more comfortable with literary endeavors now than were previous generations. This proliferation reveals an emerging recovery of Native intellectual traditions that Warrior's Tribal Secrets addresses in a series of four questions.4 Two of his four questions relate directly to our discussion. First, "to what extent do the various conceptual and analytical categories currently available in American Indian scholarship provide an adequate framework for the emergence of a mature Native cultural and literary criticism?5 Second, "how much responsibility do Native intellectuals of today have for addressing such issues as economic and social class, gender, and sexual orientation within Indian life, issues that have been for the most part overshadowed by academic and popular fascination with Native Americans?"6

Responding to these questions, my discussion examines several popular as-told-to autobiographies of people from my nation, the Lakota. Examining the body of literature from one nation rather than several allows for a fuller cultural, if not literary, criticism of the shortcomings of this style of dictated works.

Also, because the Native autobiography, as Shanley notes, is a much-sought-after voice and thus a fast-emerging field of study within the academy (hence Warrior's "academic and popular fascination" statement), the distortions of Native life and cultures found in the so-called Native autobiography constitute a call to Native scholars to reclaim our intellectual heritage. Shanley, for instance, charges readers to challenge the fallacious assumption that a particular Native autobiographic voice represents the whole of a Native nation (or nations).7

In Manifest Manners, Gerald Vizenor perhaps goes farther than most Native intellectuals in articulating how an as-told-to Native autobiography distorts lived reality far beyond Shanley's caveat against as- suming that one Native autobiography represents the voice of a whole people. "Manifest manners," writes Vizenor, are "the simulations of dominance; the notions and misnomers that are read as the authentic and sustained representations of Native American Indians" (5-6).

On one hand, the historical nature of the Native autobiographical literature readily confirms Vizenor's notion of manifest manners. For example, Vine Deloria Jr. notes that the increase of manifest manner literature corresponded to the highly active period of Native political rebellion (1968-75):

In the next four years it seemed as if every book on modern Indians was promptly buried by a book on the "real" Indians of yesteryear. The public overwhelming[ly] turned

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to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox to avoid the accusations made by modern Indians in The Tortured Americans and Custer Died for Your Sins. The Red Fox book alone sold more copies than the two modern books. Each takeover of government property only served to spur further sales of the Brown review [Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee] of the wars of the 1860s. While the Indian reading public was in tune with The New Indians, The Tortured Americans, The Unjust Society ... and other books written by contemporary Indians on modern problems, the reading non-Indian public began frantically searching for additional books on the Indians of the last century.8

In other words, the non-Indian literary world refused to consider Native peoples in a modern context, thus hindering the accurate depiction of contemporary Native issues. Unfortunately, Native autobiographies proved to be no exception to this trend.

As Deloria continues his discussion of Indians in the white Ameri- can imagination, he inquires rhetorically whether three autobiographies largely covering the nineteenth century "can correctly inform the reader on the [contemporary] struggle of the Navajo and Hopi against Peabody Coal Company at Black Mesa?"9 Even to the most casual reader, the question obviously answers itself in the negative. Astonishingly, though, many whites and even a few Natives argued otherwise.

The literary world's response to Deloria's searing critique of how the Indians are depicted in popular culture is not encouraging. Where are the hard-biting texts that address the contemporary issues and problems confronting Native North America (e.g., sovereignty, self- determination, genocide)? Arguably, the literary distortion of Native reality through manifest manners that Deloria criticized is not a thing of the past.

Vizenor argues that Natives who willingly participate in the simulations of dominance-that is, in the literary field using their own voice, telling their own stories-are the warriors who "encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as their ancestors once evinced on horses, and they create their stories with a new sense of survivance. The warriors bear the simulations of their time and counter the manifest manners of dominance."'1 For Vizenor, Luther Standing Bear (1868?-1939), a Sicangu Lakota and product of the Carlisle Indian School, exemplifies a post-Indian warrior who successfully manipulated the simulations of dominance to further Native survivance. Although Standing Bear had his hair cut short, learned to speak fluent English, and traveled extensively in the non-Lakota world with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, he strongly advocated Native survivance in his now-classic works, Land of the Spotted Eagle, My Indian Boyhood, Stories of the Sioux, and My People The Sioux."



Vizenor welcomes this post-Indian warrior development if only because such Native participation uses the simulations of dominance in establishing "that sensation of a new tribal presence in the very ruins of the representations of invented Indians."'2 Native writers since Standing Bear, by virtue of their persistent "writing presence," have confronted the literature of dominance's ideology on its very own terms, resulting in a cultural and literary coup. Vizenor describes this coup when he writes that "the process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers began representing their own cultures.""'3 Indeed, a visit to Native country today would indicate that there are enough post-Indian warriors to sustain a formidable Native literary assault on the literature of dominance.

Since the late 1960s the sheer volume of Native literary works has forced the Native intellectual community to admit that the "representation of Indians" encompasses a kaleidoscope of Native experiences, all of which-to use Vizenor's terms-undermines the manifest-manners simulation legacy, thus calling a halt to "the continuance of the surveil- lance and domination of the tribes in literature."'4 While we can ap- plaud the authentic representation that an expanding post-Indian warrior space brings to Native literature, there are also associated risks.

For instance, the as-told-to Native autobiography demonstrates that Native literature can present a radical kind of post-Indian warrior appearance but, on closer inspection, confirms Vizenor's notion of manifest manners, since the as-told-to Native autobiography usually involves a Native person telling her or his "story" to a non-Native. Equally important for Native people in considering the "autobiographies" is the status or station of the individual who is doing the telling: what is that person's relationship to their own traditional community?

Intimately connected to this question of traditional community status are several other unnerving issues that make the Native intellectual community cringe but that it cannot avoid. Specifically, a community might validate a Native person as a community member but strongly disavow her or his literary product as a misrepresentation of the community. In other words, as in Warrior's Tribal Secrets, Native intellectuals should ask its population of post-Indian warriors-of-simulations to consider what, exactly, a particular post-Indian warrior should simulate.

Wading through the complex crosscurrents of Native communities and their literature, a person might feel paralyzed by the daunting task of understanding the Native experience. Had this task truly result- ed in paralysis, however, the 1993 Oceti Sakowin resolution would not have materialized to alert Native societies and others that something is wrong-very wrong. That is, the teachers and students of Native studies and other cross-cultural studies who believe they are receiving a factual rendering of Native life and culture with this form of Native literature are victims of a cruel literary hoax.

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THE AS-TOLD-TO LAKOTA AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: WHAT, EXACTLY,

ARE THEY SIMULATING?

Individuals preparing to visit the Lakota homeland or to teach a university-level course in Native or ethnic Studies have probably watched Dances with Wolves, ThunderHeart, Ted Turner's made-for-TV movie Lakota Woman, or a PBS special that mentioned something about Indians. All of these people would have little problem finding further information about a Native personality of her or his interest. After watching The Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas, or Lakota Woman, one might be curious about Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), who played Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans and was the voice characterization of Powhatan; or Mary Crow Dog (Sicangu Lakota), the main character in Lakota Woman. To learn more about Means or Crow Dog, one must only visit a bookstore, which usually has copies of Where Wbitemen Fear to Tread, Russell Means's 544-page autobiography, or Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog's 262-page autobiography or her 274-page autobiographical se- quel, Ohitika Woman. Indeed, any interested person has access to several Lakota autobiographies, the more popular ones being Black Elk Speaks, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Fools Crow, or Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of the Lakota. Presumably, an un- informed person who reads at least one of these autobiographies has a better understanding not only of these Lakota personalities but also an appreciation of Lakota life and culture.

Or so it appears. However, echoing Deloria's critical view of Native literature a

generation ago, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn challenges the notion that such autobiographies fulfill any substantive purpose,'5 literary or otherwise:

If there is to be a significant debate about the intellectual and political concerns of Indian America in the twenty- first century, don't expect it to come from biographers. From the looks of things in so-called modern native scholarship in this discipline, the historic Lincoln Steffens suggestion of the nineteenth century that the scholars in this genre would contribute to the understanding of their own times is sadly off mark. At least as far as Indians are concerned.'6

Stressing that non-Native biographers contribute little to the intellectual and political muscle of Native North America, Cook-Lynn further notes the enduring presence of those writers and the relationship between their works and the academy:



Even as a new generation of native intellectuals is said to be emerging as novelists, artists, university profes- sors, visionaries, and politicians, the biography . .. of the American Indian largely written, named, and defined by non-native scholars remains a staple commodity of university publishing houses in the U.S. and an acclaimed cate- gory in the teaching of Native American Literatures.'7

Her comments suggest that Vizenor's manifest manners of simulation are still at work. Of the seven popular as-told-to Lakota autobiographies mentioned, all were written by non-Natives. One non-Native author in particular, Richard Erdoes, penned more than half of them.'8 Given an ever-growing cadre of post-Indian warriors of simulations throughout Native Country and in the academy, the as-told-to Native autobiography penned by non-Natives represents a bald anachronism.

THE FORMULA: ONE PART NON-NATIVE BIOGRAPHER

Understanding what is wrong with the non-Native biographer requires that we decode manifest manners. Obviously, a significant portion of the "as-told-to" formula involves a non-Native writer who brings all of his or her cultural and racist baggage. Explaining a few of the formula's more salient features readily shows why it is such an anachronism. To start, consider the genesis of the as-told-to Lakota autobiography. Unlike a Native who need offer no explanation for being in his or herown homeland, a non- Native biographer must justify his or her presence. A biographer's story begins by claiming that his or her purpose for being in Native Country is validated or revealed by a "medicine man" or something similar.

Euro-American John Neihardt, who went to the Pine Ridge Reser- vation in 1930-31 and penned Black Elk Speaks, offers a typical justifica- tion of this kind:

When we arrived, Black Elk was standing outside a shelter made of pine boughs. It was noon. When we left, after sunset, Flying Hawk said, "That was kind of funny, the way the old man seemed to know you were coming!" My son remarked that he had the same impression; and when I had known the great old man for some years I was quite prepared to believe that he did know, for he certainly had supernatural powers.'9

Those of us raised on the Northern Plains know that there is nothing mysterious about the arrival of a visitor in a relatively flat and open terrain. The area's expansiveness allows sound to travel largely

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uninterrupted and people to see long distances. Black Elk, upon hear- ing or seeing an approaching vehicle a few miles away, would expect company. Nor does Neihardt take into account the proverbial moc- casin telegraph-word-of-mouth-that travels faster than a speeding bullet throughout Native communities. Thus, Black Elk would know why Neihardt was in the neighborhood. Neihardt also asserts that his arrival had an extraordinary dimension. Black Elk himself revealed the true meaning of Neihardt's trip: "He [Neihardt] has been sent to learn what I know, and I will teach him."20 In 1932, Neihardt published Black Elk Speaks, which contains what he was "taught." Later, other as-told-to biographers would follow Neihardt's lead.

For example, Richard Erdoes, the "coauthor" of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, stated that John Lame Deer, a Sicangu Lakota, wanted somebody to help him write "a book about Indian religion and medicine." Again, the reader is treated to an unveiling of mystical meaning sur- rounding Erdoes's role in this autobiographical story: "When I [John Lame Deer] first met you I knew you were the man I had been waiting for. Your coming was no accident." Or, in Black Elk, William Lyon explains that Wallace Black Elk (Sicangu Lakota) suggested that Lyon "quit teaching and assist him as 'translator.'"

In 1961, after thirty years of obscurity, Black Elk Speaks attained a cultlike status-a status that was reinforced in 1971 when Dick Cavett interviewed Neihardt on national television. Thereafter, non-Natives and Natives alike quoted indiscriminately from Black Elk Speaks and lib- erally borrowed concepts from it. The book achieved such astonishing acceptance as to become the definitive pan-Native treatise of Native religion.

Almost three decades after the popularization of Black Elk Speaks, Julian Rice disclosed, among other things, one embarrassing short- coming of what Neihardt presented as being the teaching of Black Elk:

Until Raymond J. DeMallie edited the complete tran- scripts of John G. Neihardt's 1931 and 1944 interviews with Black Elk, ... Black Elk Speaks was received by most readers as a sacrosanct revelation. DeMallie's presenta- tion and analysis of the manuscripts reveal that Neihardt's poeticizing often involved significant changes of meaning. But even more dramatic changes may have occurred between Black Elk's oral expression in Lakota, its transla- tion into English by his son, Ben, its copying in English by Neihardt's daughter, Hilda, and the interruptions during which translated phrases were queried and revised ... In our attempt to understand Black Elk's words we must admit that the dimension of texture that most makes a text "literature" has been lost. In the absence of a Black Elk



videotape, we are necessarily as limited in our grasp of his original intent as we are in the study of the Bible.2'

Had either of the two post-Indian warriors of simulations, Luther Standing Bear or Charles Eastman (Dakota)-both of whom were Black Elk's con- temporaries and fluent Lakota/Dakota speakers-been the as-told-to biographer instead of Neihardt, Rice's critique would be moot. In other words, having knowledge of the language, Standing Bear or Eastman would most likely have translated Black Elk's words without significant problems of interpretation or misrepresentation. Nonetheless, the as- told-to autobiography genre flourishes even as the twenty-first century has opened.

In view of Rice's uncovering of Neihardt's obvious garbling of Lakota words and meaning, perhaps we should reexamine some of the Lakota concepts more heavily borrowed from Black Elk Speaks, like the sacred hoop. Rather than focusing on its multispiritual dimension, the hoop has now been construed as a four-colored medicine wheel, depicting the red, the black, the yellow, and the white races of the planet coming har- moniously together. This emotionally reassuring popularization has little factual basis in either historical or contemporary U.S. race relations."2

Another troubling flaw of this genre is the predictable storyline that is typically laid over the person's life. Cook-Lynn characterizes this story pattern as having hagiographical literary roots: a "limited, epic- like tragedy followed by glorious insight and expiation."23 According to Cook-Lynn, the Roman Catholic Church's literature about its saints epitomizes this literary form, and the as-told-to Lakota autobiography indeed shares at least two of its common literary features: tragedy and eventual triumph. The placement of this hagiographic grid over a Lakota person's story leads Cook-Lynn to observe, "The 'as told to' stories ... are classic examples of why this discussion is called for at this time."24 In her view, an important part of the discussion involves recognizing how manifest manners, namely the hagiography, are used to frame a Native personality's life story:

By issuing the expected lamentations about being Indian in America. .. . They've made redundant statements of how the white man took over the land and how the Indians themselves, alas, fell to drinking great quantities of booze, committing debaucheries of various kinds, and emerging from such a hapless condition, rhetorically at least, re- deemed and at the edge of self-knowledge.25

Two noted Lakota personalities, Russell Means and Mary Crow Dog, follow this very script in their as-told-to autobiographies. Until their involvement with the American Indian Movement (AIM), both of their

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lives consisted of a series of parties involving substance abuse and a general spiritual aimlessness. While Frank Fools Crow, Nicholas Black Elk, John Lame Deer, and Leonard Crow Dog cannot be accused of spiritual drifting, their as-told-to biographies followed the grid of depicting a tragic Native station.

Cook-Lynn correctly interprets both the biographers' rationales for writing the stories (other than being mysteriously called) and the damaging result of their hagiographic overlay:

In the case of hagiographies about the American Indian, they are always written by white writers, as-told-to mouthpieces who offer their services because, one sup- poses, Indians whose lives need to be told and held up to acclaim are unable to acquire the necessary literary skills to do the writing themselves. The white writers have social commentary as their main intent and this means that the subjects are almost always marginalized or on the edge of their own communities, families, art, or profession.26

Invariably, then, glorifying the more notable Wounded Knee II personalities (Russell Means, Mary and Leonard Crow Dog, Frank Fools Crow, and Wallace Black Elk) involved publishing-packaging-their hagiography-skewed stories for consumption by a public whose reading appetite is not unlike those who purchase supermarket tabloids to engage in journalistic voyeurism of the rich and famous. For many, this comparison with supermarket tabloids may seem unduly harsh, and indeed, they might have a point; after all, unlike the as-told-to Native autobiographies, supermarket tabloids offer crossword puzzles and vocabulary builders to compensate for the lack of social value within their pages.

THE FORMULA: ONE PART NATIVE COLLABORATOR

Given the apparent acquiescence by some Natives, the as-told-to autobiography flourishes, leaving a post-Indian warrior of simulations with the task of trying to rationalize his or her active or tacit participation in this literary cooptation. In many as-told-to Native autobiographies the rationale given supports Cook-Lynn's earlier charge that non- Native biographers offer their services because Native people either lack the literary skill or invoke Native traditions of oral discourse to avoid writing.

For example, Russell Means stated that the only possible way for him to enter into an open dialogue on Marxism was to not write but rather speak and have someone record his words:



The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition and so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroy- ing the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people. So what you read here is not what I've written. It's what I've said and someone else has written down. I will allow this, because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book.27

Other than having implicitly advertised his need for a future biographer, Means conceivably appealed to the white's romantic image of pre-1900 Natives whose oral eloquence of fatalism-as expressed in Joseph's "from where the sun now stands" 1877 speech to Generals Howard and Miles, or in Seattle's it-is-inevitable "web of life" 1854 address to territorial governor Stevens-often melts the non-Native heart. Yet given the proliferation of Native writers since the 1970s,28 why would any Native desire a white biographer to tell his or her story? Arguably, this type of as-told-to autobiography validates a non-Native literary hand (i.e., "real" literature is penned by non-Natives) over an authentic Native literary ability.

Another concern of this genre of literature involves the distortion of a particular Native nation's cultural norms. Supposedly, a non-Native biographer writes down what an informant of that Native community tells her or him without abridgment and with ostensibly innocent in- tentions; yet this result is laden with cultural bias and an embedded white agenda. For instance, a cultural distortion that emerges from the as-told-to Lakota autobiographies involves Lakota women's societal status. Such books reveal that non-Natives are more enamored with Native peoples and less concerned about how white colonialism adversely af- fects Native society. According to Russell Means, for example, the Oceti Sakowin is matrilineal, and what very little he does impart about the tiospaye (extended family) notwithstanding, he fails to elaborate on matrilineality among the Lakota. Nor does his subsequent praising of Lakota womanhood, while descriptive, constitute a substantive or nu- anced explanation of Lakota matrilineality. This treatment feels more white than Lakota. After all, even the highly patriarchal society of the United States can be given to singing extraordinarily high but often hollow praises of "American" womanhood when it is politically, eco- nomically, or racially expedient to do so.

In a similar vein, Mary Crow Dog's first as-told-to autobiography, Lakota Woman,29 treats the reader to an "exclusive" insider's report

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regarding the sexual escapades within the AIM movement, especially her view of Native males' hypocritical behavior (or is it their nature?- she does not distinguish which), plus all the other well-recognized but "tragic" social stereotypes (drinking, fighting, resentment toward the white man, cultural dissonance, and so on) commonly depicted as the exclusive property of Native North America. The popularity of these book-length supermarket tabloids passed off as as-told-to Native autobiographies indicates that other Lakota voices, like those heard in the interview between Danyelle Means and her aunt, Madonna Philips, about Wounded Knee II or Joseph Iron Eye Dudley's memoir covering his childhood during the 1940s and 1950s, are desperately needed and should be supported with as much interest and enthusiasm.

The Philips interview offers an alternate Lakota-female perspective and insight that neither Mary Crow Dog's nor Russell Means's autobiographies provide. For instance, when Danyelle Means asks her aunt Madonna about women's participation in the AIM movement during the Wounded Knee 11 rebellion, the reader is treated to a traditional Lakota perspective that might otherwise be trivialized:

The women were equally involved, integral and respected just as they had been in traditional times. She emphasized that there was never a question of men vs. women or men's roles vs. women's roles but a common cause in which everyone had an equal role. She said, "We didn't have time to think about what was women's work and what was men's work. If there was a meeting, Russ[ell Means] would call us and ask us to come and be there. He wanted quick thinkers, it didn't matter if they were men or women. And when something was being planned we all got together to discuss it."30

Philips' perspective regarding traditional Lakota decision-making, however, never surfaces in Lakota Woman. Indeed, Mary Crow Dog's version of the decision to make a stand at Wounded Knee ignores Philips and has since been taken out of context so much as to render that moment's cultural relevance nearly meaningless.3"

The disparity in views on female participation between Mary Crow Dog and Madonna Philips boils down to woksape, or age-based wisdom. During the Wounded Knee 11 period, Philips was a mother in her thirties, while Mary Crow Dog was just twenty. Lakota norms value the former's life experiences. The valuing of age invariably al- lowed Philips access to Lakota decision-making processes, whereas Mary largely witnessed the processes' outcomes. Thus, for a youth- ful Mary Crow Dog, women as decision makers generally remained invisible, subject to misperception and, hence, misinterpretation when



expressed in a Lakota context. From these as-told-to Lakota autobiographies, not only the general reading audience but also the greater Lakota community is left to puzzle over what Lakota matrilineal practices actually include.

Joseph Iron Eye Dudley's memoir, Cboteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence, chronicles a life that, although not materially or family endowed (his parents were divorced) in the Western sense, discloses a strong presence of Lakota values and norms. Because his grandparents were integral to his upbringing, his memoir provides an intimate view of how tiospaye life functions. Lakota people who read his story may connect emotionally and spiritually with the community events in which he participated. Perhaps the most crucial difference between Dudley's memoir and the more popular as-told-to Lakota autobiographies concerns the tragedies that visit Lakota community life: the former describes how community members actually respond to these tragedies in culturally appropriate ways, while the latter simply catalogue social problems. Indeed, Lakota have warmly praised Dudley's book, with Vine Deloria Jr. calling it "a warm human story of a people who live close to the Earth and each other, learning and living the way we were intended to do."32

in this age of inquiring-minds-want-to-know tabloid mantras, the probability of Native stories being coopted by an "appointed" biographer remains a distinct possibility. Focusing as they do on the superficial-like whether a term such as "matrilineal" best describes Lakota society- these accounts expose their manifest manners in the service of literary dominance: what is regarded as the "authentic Native voice" is little more than white society's superficial fascination with the Other. Indeed, Cook- Lynn's scathing observations about as-told-to Native autobiographies should be borne in mind by those drawn to this genre:

The truth is, the "as-told-to" lives (even that of the pri- mogenitor Nick Black Elk) are the margins of Indian history, not the center of it. The reason for that is they are based in sociology, not the literature of the people. After "a good read" in the Indian-based hagiography milieu, there is little real understanding of the political pathology which is at the heart of American Indian experience. The seeds of continuing crisis in our Indian communities, while laid bare and exposed, are given little in-depth cause-and-effect analysis, thus, no problem-solving model will emerge from these fields of inquiry. The meticulous, heart-rending examination of Indian failure by writers who may or may not know they are from the world of the colonial masters is depressing and distasteful. These scholars are providing almanacs of Indian faux heroes and faux heroines (no pun intended), contrived celebrity registers,

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if you will, which serve to reinvent Indians in some cheap- ened mode.33

Paradoxically, attempting through their literary works to foster a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue about the politico-economic pa- thologies assailing Native Country as a result of colonial occupation, Native intellectuals find it difficult to attract the public's attention,34 particularly when non-Native biographers and their Native collaborators script much more colorful and much less disturbing stories. The very real conflicts that were responsible for launching the Native collaborators' careers as media-spun "star chiefs" in the first place get overshadowed by the sociology of white sensationalism.

These observations about the as-told-to stories are not about a cultural distortion or two nor about whether Native communities should engage in the needless task of stamping out these small fires of cultural distortion. As the Oceti Sakowin resolution illustrates, Native communities must confront mainstream force that Vizenor equates with literary annihilation. Native North America must ponder this matter seriously. As a post-Indian warrior of simulation, Cook-Lynn perhaps speaks most straightforwardly, if not eloquently, on the implications of Native survivance through literature:

The reason to assess the works which claim to be telling the life histories of Indians cannot be said to be just a war of words. It is, in fact, a war for the future of Indian inten- tions. Art and literature and storytelling are at the epicenter of all that an individual or a nation intends to be. And someone more profound than most said that a nation which does not tell its own stories cannot be said to be a nation at all. To think that the reverse of that comment is still true, that at the close of the twentieth century the ascendant power of Indian storytelling still emanates from long-held patterns of colonizing nations, is profoundly disturbing.

To examine and comment publicly upon the origins and the unchanging biographical directions of the Indian story written by whites in America with so-called Indian informants and collaborators is to find out that the conse- quences of this scholarly activity assumes a status quo the norms of whbich are not in the bands of the subject. 35

Despite the incredible odds-due to genocide or ethnocide- against Native stories still existing to be told in the twenty-first century, most Native communities are not without their cultural stories, all of which are still being retold to each succeeding generation. As Dudley's memoir demonstrates, Native peoples cannot ignore the reality that our



stories contain elements essential to our cultural survival. Nor can we ignore the alarms sounded by Warrior, Shanley, Vizenor, Cook-Lynn, and other Natives that the manifest manners of simulations have been intruding into our story space-and it must stop.

While the problem might simply boil down to a question of who holds the pen, the as-told-to Native autobiography calls forth something more compelling, like the question of how the Native community is actually responding as pen-wielding storytellers. If we consciously reject the implicit message that the as-told-to Native autobiography offers, namely, that our ancestors risked so much only to have their descendants relinquish storytelling to manifest manners, then the as- told-to stories will finally be exposed as literary embarrassments rather than as authentic Native voices.

So, what exactly are we "simulating," a First Voice or its distorted echo? I ask, whose words-whose thought and philosophy, experiences and wisdom-do your ears prefer to hear?

NOTES

1 Lakota Summit V Resolution, "Declaration of War against Ex- ploiters of Lakota Spirituality," (Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, June 1993). Although the gather- ing was termed a Lakota summit, the summit included all Dakota/ Lakota/Nakota, the Oceti Sakowin. The Oceti Sakowin is the spiritual, social, and political organization of the people and consists of seven groups (Sissitonwan, Wahpetonwan, Mdewakantonwan, Wahpekute, lhanktonwan, lhanktowanna, and Titonwan), each differentiated mainly by geolinguistics. The first five groups speaking [D]akota reside in the eastern portion of the aboriginal homeland. The last two speaking [N]akota and [L]akota reside in the central and western part our homeland, respectively.

2 See, for example, Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) and Ward Churchill's Indi- ans Are Us? (Monroe, ME: Com- mon Courage Press, 1994).

3 Robert A. Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions

(Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1995), xvi.

4 The other two questions are: (1) what impact can the increasing awareness of and engagement with American Indian writers of earlier periods have upon the way contemporary Native intellectuals develop Indian critical studies? and (2) how does construing the field in terms of intellectual history rather than literary or ge- neric history change the critical landscape?

5 Warrior, Tribal Secrets, xiii.

6 Ibid.

7 See Katheryn Shanley, "The Lived Experience: American Indian Literature after Alcatraz," Akwe: Kon Press 11, nos. 3-4 (1994): 119-27

8 Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), 44.

9 Ibid., 42. The three autobiographies mentioned by Deloria are Sun Chief (a 1942 Hopi autobiography), The Son of Old Man Hat (a 1938 Navajo autobiography), and Black Hawk's 1833 autobiography.

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NOTES

10 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Ha- nover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1994), 4. The use of the term simulation by Vizenor recog- nizes that the difference between an authentic representation (the organic) and a simulated representation (a facsimile of the organic) is characteristic of manifest manners and literature of dominance. Vizenor employsJean Baudrillard's explanation of the difference between feigning an illness and simulating an illness to tease out what we face when confronted by manifest manners: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms." Hence, "feigning or dissimulating leaves the realty principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false,' between 'real' and 'imaginary.' Since the simulator produces 'true' symptoms, is he ill or not?" (13) In other words, "simulations of the other," according to Vizenor, "are instances of the absence of the real."

11 One of Standing Bear's many significant contributions was to write a series of books about his life. These several books are extremely informative not only for the Lakota response to U.S. occupation of our homeland but they contain substantive material about Lakota thought and philosophy. Charles Eastman and Ella Deloria, like Standing Bear, have provided later generations of Lakota with rich scholarly material on survivance.

12 Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 3.

13 Vizenor quoting from Larzer Ziff's Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

14 Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 4.

15 Strictly speaking, a biography and autobiography are two different genres of literature. The as-told-to autobiography rests on an intellectual fault line that separates the biography from the autobiography. Calling an as-told-to autobiography an ethnographical biography appears intellectually disingenuous or worse.

16 Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, "Life and Death in the Mainstream of Ameri- can Indian Biography," Wicazo Sa Review I1, no. 2 (1995): 90.

17 Ibid.

18 John (Fire) Lame Deer and Rich- ard Erdoes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions (New York: Pocket Books, 1972); Mary Crow Dog and Rich- ard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Mary Brave Bird and Richard Er- does, Obitika Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); and Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).

19 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), x.

20 Ibid., xi. One also sees a similar "revelation" in Lame Deer after John Lame Deer, a Sicangu La- kota, "analyzes" Erdoes's life and concludes to Erdoes: "I always wanted somebody to help me write a book about Indian religion and medicine, and when I first met you I knew you were the man I had been waiting for. Your coming was no accident" (264), or, William Lyon's explanation, in Black Elk, that Wallace Black Elk, also a Sicangu Lakota, "suggested" that Lyon "quit teaching and assist him as 'translator'" (xv).

21 Julian Rice, Black Elk's Story: Distinguishing Its Lakota Purpose (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), ix. Also, in



NOTES

a somewhat amusing example of the book's extreme popularity, Julian Rice, in his critique of Black Elk Speaks's various shortcomings, ponders Vine Deloria's unusu- ally high praise of the book. Rice observes that "Vine Deloria, Jr. is more emphatic in his praise than is felt to be usually necessary when he describes it as 'the only religious classic of this century,' and its 'eloquent message'" (15). Perhaps this un-Deloria-like praise, which perplexes Rice, indicates that even Native intellectual iconoclasts, on occasion, may have human susceptibilities in which they too fall victim to popular culture.

22 Indeed, Cook-Lynn notes the commonly accepted byline that when Neihardt "talked of his work with the old churchman [Black Elk also was a catechist] who was said to believe the people's hoop 'broken,' [he] insisted that Nick Black Elk told the story not only of self, but of his people the Oglala and, perhaps, even all of the people of the Sioux Nation. Today, if you are to believe the 'new agers,' he has told a story for all humanity" (92).

23 Cook-Lynn, "Life and Death in the Mainstream of American Indian Biography," 90.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 91.

27 Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 19.

28 That is not to say, however, that Native oral eloquence has ceased. Attend any of the graduation ceremonies of a Native-controlled university and be prepared to be stirred and awed by the Native students as they tell the stories of their academic journeys.

29 See Crow Dog and Erdoes, Lakota Woman.

30 Danyelle Means, "From a Long Line of Strong Women," Turtle Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1994): 30-32.

31 For the general public, Mary Crow Dog's recollection of that one moment distills when two La- kota women, Ellen Moves Camp and Gladys Bissonette, told AIM and its supporters to "go ahead and make your stand at Wounded Knee, if you men won't do it, you can stay here and talk for eternity and we women will do it" (Lakota Woman, 124). Among non-Natives, this moment incorrectly has been portrayed as an in-your-face chid- ing of Native males, or at least of their leadership. Subsequently, non-Natives use the moment to make one irrelevant generaliza- tion after another about gender, Native society, and so forth.

32 Vine DeloriaJr.'s statement is from the book cover of Choteau Creek. Another indication of the popularity of this book was revealed during a May 2004 visit to Sinte Gleska University's bookstore, when I found it included with other course readings.


34 For example, Robert Warrior in Tribal Secrets spells out why this lack of attention persists: "Deloria has received less attention from academics and critics. Although this has something to do with the fact that he is still writing, it also reflects what I take be an unfor- tunate prejudice among scholars against American Indian critical, as opposed to fictional, poetic, oral, or autobiographical, writ- ings" (xv).


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The As-Told-To Native [Auto]biography: Whose Voice Is Speaking?

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