Native American Autobiography: An Anthology

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Native American Autobiography: An Anthology. Arnold Krupat. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xi + 546 pages, 20 illustrations. $17.95.

While the past three decades have seen a burst of creative work and attending literary scholarship in Native American studies, there has been a dearth of work on Native American autobiography. Only a handful of texts exist by a limited number of scholars such as Arnold Krupat, David Brumble, Hertha Wong, Jane Katz, and Gretchen Batille and Kathleen Mullen Sands. The scarcity of such work can be attributed, in part, to the problematic nature of the genre itself.

In his latest contribution to Native American Studies, Arnold Krupar has assembled a useful collection of autobiographical excerpts entitled Native American Autobiography: An Anthology designed for use in schools. Writing for an audience unfamiliar with the issues surrounding Native American autobiography, Krupat lays out a concise discussion of the field and its problems which he has explored in other works, most fully in For Those Who Come After: A Study …