University Times

Granted, the French usually got along better with the American Indians than did the other colonial powers. History is full of stories about French traders and trappers who adopted Indian ways. And consider how well the two peoples worked together in 1755, when General Edward Braddock tried to run the French out of a place called Fort Duquesne.

Still, a study of Native American autobiographies is not something one might expect to find listed as one of the 100 best books of 1994 by Le Monde, France's leading cultural newspaper. Not even David Brumble expected to see his book "American Indian Autobiography" on Le Monde's list.

"I was very surprised. I have no idea why it was chosen," the Pitt English professor says, and then adds with a laugh, "I can only assume it was because of the excellence of the book." Actually, if it was not for the fact that Dana Polan, another member of Pitt's English department, was visiting Paris and saw the book story in Le Monde, Brumble may never have known about the honor. Neither his publisher nor anybody at the newspaper ever bothered to pass on the word. But Brumble is not surprised that the French would name a work about Native Americans as one of the best books of 1994. He says "there is a very strong tradition of interest among French anthropologists in the American Indian." A native of Oregon, Brumble's own interest in Native Americans began when he was a child growing up with Indian friends in that state and Arizona. His family actually adopted two Navajo children, so he has a brother and a sister who are Native American. That childhood interest was sharpened during graduate school in the late 1960s at the University of Nebraska, where his favorite instructor and thesis adviser was a man who had worked with tribes throughout the Midwest. Then he discovered N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain." A Kiowa who established the Native American studies program at Stanford University and now teaches at the University of Arizona, Momaday writes in the fashion of the oral Indian storytellers. His autobiography is made up of numerous vignettes that mix personal history with tribal history and myths. Brumble was immediately fascinated by Momaday's style. But, at the same time, he was puzzled as to why Momaday had chosen to write his autobiography in such a fragmented manner.

"It occurred to me it probably had something to do with the way American Indians tell the stories of their lives," he says. "So, I started reading that stuff and I ended up reading every published autobiographical, first-person narrative by American Indians." In the end, Brumble read well over 600 Indian autobiographies and felt his assumption about Momaday was correct, at least until he met the writer. Then he learned that Momaday had never read any of the old autobiographies. "He was a participant in a tradition that I could only read about," Brumble says. "So it came naturally to him." "American Indian Autobiography" actually is the second stage in Brumble's study of Native American autobiographies. In 1981, he published "An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies," a compilation of the more than 600 autobiographies he has read. Following the bibliography's publication, he began working on "American Indian Autobiography," which was originally published by the University of California Press in 1988.

Even though Le Monde named his book one of the best of 1994, Brumble describes it as only an essay on the subject. He feels there is a great deal more that needs to be done with Indian autobiography, but to get beyond what he has accomplished will require learning the languages, a major stumbling block that few people, including Brumble, are willing to try to hurdle.

Besides the basic stories contained in the autobiographies, Brumble is very interested in the relationship between the Indians and the people who wrote down and edited their stories. Many of those relationships were quite complicated, such as that of Two Leggings, who had his story filtered through two editors.

Born into the Crow tribe about 1847, Two Leggings was a warrior who, in 1888, led what was almost certainly the last Crow war party. In 1919, he met William Wildschut, a Dutch-born businessman and ethnologist, and the two embarked on an autobiographical project that continued until Two Leggings died in 1923.

Eventually, Wildschut collected Two Leggings' story in a 480-page manuscript. He could not find a publisher, however, and the book languished on the shelf until 1962, when Peter Nabokov, a nephew of novelist Vladimir Nabokov, appeared on the scene and re-edited the manuscript, cutting out most of Wildschut's overblown, florid prose. Since the original transcripts of the Two Leggings/Wildschut interviews have been lost, the autobiography of Two Leggings is twice removed from its source. Nevertheless, Brumble believes it still captures what it was like to be a plains' warrior. "It's just a wonderful book," he says. "You have this warrior who wants to be a success in his tribe's terms. He is ferociously determined to become a success. That means leading bigger and bigger war parties and being involved in bigger and bigger raids and winning more and more honors. What he wants is respect and glory, very much in the way that Achilles wanted those types of things." At the other end of the cultural scale, Brumble says, is "Sun Chief" by Don Talayesva, a Hopi Indian born in 1890. "The Hopi are a very different people," Brumble explains. "It is not a warrior culture. So you get a very different sense of the self than from Two Leggings." "Indian Boyhood," published in 1902, and "From the Deep Woods to Civilization," published in 1916, are two other very interesting Indian autobiographies, according to Brumble. They were both written by Charles Eastman and essentially tell the history of the American Indian in a single life.

"What a life!" Brumble says. "He lived the history of the American Indian. He was raised in a preliterate culture and was trained to be a warrior and a buffalo hunter, and then all of a sudden he is snatched out of that life and sent to school and within not very many years he graduates with a degree in medicine from Boston Medical School. His books tell the story of that remarkable life." Although the autobiographies involve Indians from many different tribes and historic periods, Brumble has found one emotion running throughout all of them: a sense of loss.

African-American songs and writings, he points out, often involve gaining entrance to the Promised Land. He says African-Americans see themselves as having been in bondage in the way that the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt, and they see the civil rights movement and the abolition movement as steps on the journey to the Promised Land, getting out of the South and into the North.

Native Americans, on the other hand, believe they lived in the Promised Land before the white man appeared on the scene, making loss and the struggle to return central themes of their stories and traditions. So, even though he lived for another 30 years, Two Leggings abruptly ends his autobiography after his last raid by saying: "Nothing happened after that. We just lived. There were no more war parties, no capturing horses from the Piegans and the Sioux, no buffalo to hunt. There is nothing more to tell." "American Indian Autobiography" contains material that runs from the mid-18th century into the 1980s. Interestingly, the earliest Indian autobiographies don't come from preliterate Indians, but from literate Indians like Samson Occom who wrote his autobiography in 1762 and William Apes who wrote his in 1829. However, those earliest autobiographies were traditional stories of conversion to Christianity. Brumble found that the later autobiographies in a sense contain the earliest material, because they speak of Indian life before the appearance of whites.

Brumble also says that Native Americans today are producing autobiographies at an accelerated rate. Some of the new autobiographies are old works that people are finding in dusty drawers; others are the product of modern Indian novelists and poets.

"For me the main interest of literature is that it allows me to see the world through the eyes of others and American Indian literature allows you to do that very powerfully," explains Brumble. "All of a sudden, you are transported to preliterate, tribal cultures of many different kinds. The autobiographies put you right in the middle of those cultures. They allow you to see what life was like, what a conception of a self was in a preliterate tribal culture. I find that just a wonderful experience." Obviously, so did Le Monde.

–Mike Sajna