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1 results

  • 16 - Indigenous Lives, Visual Autobiographies

  • from Part III - Native American Renaissance (Post-1960s)
  • Edited by Melanie Benson Taylor, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Native American Literature
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020, pp 287-326

  • Summary

    As part of the ongoing project of decolonization and cultural critique, indigenous artists and writers take on the role of autobiographers, ethnographers, historians, activists, and visionaries, often in the form of visual autobiography. Their storytelling crosses fields of study (art practice, history, anthropology, and literature), media (text, photographs, drawings, paintings, and maps), as well as geographies and cultures. Collectively they bear witness to transgenerational trauma, challenge official settler-colonial myths, share tribal stories and epistemologies as well as personal narratives, and insist on indigenous presence, witness, and continuity. This essay traces indigenous visual self-narrative forms from pre-contact pictography to ledger book art to their adaptation into contemporary modes as well as the indigenization of Western forms such as comics and memoir. Two streams—one arising from and referring to earlier pictography and a second arising from Western literary or artistic traditions, but with indigenous inflections—are discussed.