SOURCE: An introduction to Native American Autobiography, edited by Arnold Krupat, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, pp. 3-17.

In the following excerpt from his introduction to his anthology, Krupat reviews the historical trends and the major issues involved in Native American autobiography.

The genre of writing referred to in the West as autobiography had no close parallel in the traditional cultures of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, misnamed "Indians." Like people the world over, the tribes recorded various kinds of personal experience, but the western notion of representing the whole of any one person's life—from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and old age—was, in the most literal way, foreign to the cultures of the present-day United States. The high regard in which the modern West holds egocentric, autonomous individualism—the "auto" part of "autobiography"—found almost no parallel whatever in the communally oriented cultures of...