American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Recent criticisms of Native American collaborative autobiographies have focused on the ethical implications of colonialism. Hertha D. Wong notes that “as Native Americans and Euro-Americans clashed and negotiated historically, representatives of these two distinct cultures interacted textually within the pages of transitional autobiography.”’ Early collaborative Native American autobiographies, which emerge out of the contact situation of the late nineteenth century, must be viewed in the larger context of cultural control. To many Native Americans this critical period represented a time of adaptation to reservation life along with its threat to cultural identity. With virtually every area of Native American life and self-expression under attack from Euro-American colonizers, the question of who controlled the inscription of American Indian lives is crucial. Although many early ethnographers viewed the collaborative autobiography as a means for ”preserving” Native culture and identity, the strong control exerted by non-Indian collaborators over the process of cultural textualization in many cases amounted to acts of colonialism.