Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography

Hertha Dawn Wong's book about Native American autobiography is a welcome addition to previous books on the subject: O'Brien's Plains Indian Autobiographies (1973), Bataille and Sands's American Indian Women (1984), Krupat's For Those Who Come After (1985), and Brumble's American Indian Autobiography (1988). Sending My Heart Back Across the Years is most notable in that, following suggestions by Brumble, it expands the definition of "Native American autobiography" to include forms of personal narrative in existence before white "as-toldto" writers introduced to Native Americans the European concept of life-writing. Wong insists that preand early-contact stories, pictographs, performances, and even naming practices should be considered as autobiographies. Welcome though it is, Wong's book is narrower in scope than it at first appears to be, or than the title suggests. Wong singles out for extended discussion the work of eleven Native Americans: Zo-Tom (Kiowa), Howling Wolf (Cheyenne), White Bull (Pte San Hunka), Plenty-Coups (Crow), Pretty-Shield (Crow), Sam Blowsnake (Winnebago), Mountain Wolf Woman (Winnebago), Black Elk (Oglala), Ohiyesa/Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Sioux), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna). The first ten of these are from Plains tribes; the last one, some readers will think, ought not to be in the book at all. In any case, because the book is, for all real purposes, about Plains Indian life-stories, the title might perhaps have suggested that fact. Many, many other Native American autobiographers are either mentioned not at all or only in passing: Sun Chief, Geronimo, Nino Cochise, George Webb, Lame Deer, Left Handed, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Helen Sekaquaptewa, James Sewid, and Paula Gunn Allen. Wong might well have ended her book with Momaday, who nicely blends the naming, the oral material, the family history, the tribal history, and the pictorial work that characterized some of the earlier Plains Indian autobiographies. Instead of ending this chronological sweep of Plains life-narratives with Momaday, however, Wong ends with the "autobiographical" work of an eleventh writer, Leslie Marmon Silko. Most readers will be surprised to see Silko included in any list of Native American autobiographers, let alone this list of Plains ones. Her "autobiography," it turns out, is Storyteller-Silko's collected stories and poems, along with some additional written and photographic material, some of it about herself and her family. If Storyteller is, as Wong would have it, "autobiographical," then Wong has so expanded the meaning of the term "Native American autobiography" that it now includes almost anything a Native American writes. While on one level most writers cannot avoid including self-disclosing information in anything they write, to refer to virtually every kind of creative self-expression as "autobiographical" seems to expand the term beyond usefulness. In her charmingly autobiographical preface, Wong discusses her discovery, after she began working on this book, that she is distantly related, through great-