Native American women's collaborative autobiographies : relational science, ethnographic collaboration, and tribal community

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Book

Native American women's collaborative autobiographies : relational science, ethnographic collaboration, and tribal community / Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez.

Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry, 1955- (author.).

Summary:

Focuses on the collaborative work between native women storytellers and their female ethnographers and/or editors, but the book is also about what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification and meaning. regardless of discipline, academic ethnographers who conducted their field work research during the twentieth century were trained in the accepted scientific methods and theories of the time that prescribed observation, objectivity, and evaluative distance. In contradistinction to such prescribed methods, regarding the ethnographic work conducted among Native Americans, it turns out that the intersubjectively relational work of women (both ethnographers and the Indigenous storytellers with whom they worked) has produced far more reliably factual, historically accurate, and tribally specific Indigenous autobiographies than the more "scientifically objective" approaches of most of the male ethnographers. This volume provides a close lens to the work of a number of women ethnographers and Native American women storytellers to elucidate the effectiveness of their relational methods. Through a combined rhetorical and literary analysis of these ethnographies, we are able to differentiate the products of the women's working relationships. By shifting our focus away from the surface level textual reading that largely approaches the texts as factually informative documents, literary analysis provides access into the deeper levels of the storytelling that lies beneath the surface of the edited texts. Non-Native scholars and editors such as Franc Johnson Newcomb, Ruth Underhill, Nancy Lurie, Julie Cruikshank, and Noël Bennett and Native storytellers and writers such as Grandma Klah, María Chona, Mountain Wolf Woman, Mrs. Angela Sidney, and Tiana Bighorse help us to understand that there are ways by which voices and worlds are more and less disclosed to posterity. The results vary based upon the range of factors surrounding their production, but consistent across each case is the fact that informational accuracy is contingent upon the degree of mutual respect and collaboration in the women's working relationships. And it is in their pioneering intersubjective methodologies that the work of these women deserves far greater attention and approbation.

Record details

ISBN: 9781498510042
ISBN: 1498510043
ISBN: 9781498510066
ISBN: 149851006X
ISBN: 1498510051
ISBN: 9781498510059
Physical Description: ix, 206 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Publisher: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2015]
Copyright: ©2015

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-193) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Acknowledgments -- Introduction: women ethnographers, relational science, and Native American women storytellers -- Franc Johnson Newcomb's Navajo ethnography of Ahson Tsosie in Hosteen Klah -- The interwoven stories of Maria Chona and Ruth M. Underhill: The Autobiography of a Papago Woman -- "I'm going to tell you a story:" Mountain Wolf Woman and transitional ethnographic relations -- The convergence of life and myth as Testimonio in Julie Cruikshank's Life Lived Like a Story -- Mrs. Angela Sidney's stories about the gold rush years and their colonizing effects on the First Nations People of the Yukon -- Indigenous origination in Bighorse the warrior by Tiana Bighorse and Noël Bennett -- Epilogue: the value of women's relational ethnographic practice: epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author.