SOURCE: "Indian Autobiography: Origins, Type, and Function," in For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography, The University of California Press, 1985, pp. 28-53.

In the following essay, Krupat defines Native American autobiography as "original bicultural composite composition"—texts written during the transition from oral to written literature, and produced through the collaboration of members of two distinct cultures—in order to distinguish these works from traditional Western autobiography.

The group of texts I propose to call Indian autobiographies and to treat as a literary genre has been almost entirely ignored by students of American literature—who have, otherwise, been quite interested in the autobiography as literature. This may be because, as already noted, these particular autobiographies were explicitly presented by the whites who wrote them down and published them as historical or ethnographic documents. Perhaps, too, their neglect results from the fact that Indian autobiographies...