“I leave it with the people of the United States to say”: Autobiographical Disruption in the Personal Narratives of Black Hawk and Ely S. Parker

In Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, Jim Chibbo carries on an epistolary dialogue with his pal Hotgun in a humorous, trickster-inspired Creekified English (or Anglicized Creek) vernacular following each chapter. In these conversations Chibbo takes literary critics (including his alter ego, Womack) to task for work that maps non-Indian theories onto indigenous texts in ways that imply that indigenous writing is inferior. Quoting the trickster figure Rabbit, Chibbo responds to a suggestion that it’s impossible to write a “Red book”: “Only if you believe white always swallows up Red. I think Red stays Red, most ever time, even throwed in with white. Especially around white. It stands out more.” In other words, Chibbo privileges indigenous epistemologies even as he places them in sometimes pleasurable, sometimes vexed dialogue with “white” critical practices. In the past decade scholars such as Womack have paid increasing attention to examining tribal literatures, histories, and ethnographies through indigenous lenses. These practices seek to bridge gaps between the kind of critical, often abstract, work we do as indigenous academics and the communities that produce the texts we write about. What Womack and others suggest isn’t an outright rejection of Western research methodologies and any attendant engagement of indigenous voices with the West. Rather, they stress how attention to indigenous narrative strategies enables scholars to tease out what indigenous philosophies and aesthetics might look like when translated into and produced in English, circulated through the print medium, and subjected to the scrutiny of a universalizing humanistic gaze. This scholarship illustrates how “Red stays Red,” even in the face of oppression, historical change, and the emergence of innovative ways of storytelling, not in some static, essentialist way that draws on fixed notions of tradition but in a way that understands “Red” to be vibrantly alive and in dialogue with multiple contemporary contexts