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Book SynopsisWomen Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers 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 approa
Trade ReviewThis interesting book focuses on the collaborative work between two sets of women: Native American storytellers and the ethnographers/editors with whom they worked in order to record their and their families’ life experiences. . . .Brill de Ramírez offers an account of increasing authorial control and recognition for indigenous women storytellers. . . . Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: Relational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community offers new insights into the various shapes and dynamics of collaborative, experience-centered scholarship. The volume may have particular value for studies of women’s literature not only because the authors and subjects (except for Gus Bighorse) are women but also because Brill de Ramírez frames her subject as ‘women’s relational ethnographic practice’ (p. 173). . . .Brill de Ramírez celebrates biographical and autobiographical literature that emerges from and directs itself toward indigenous families, communities, and storytelling traditions, while also speaking to a broader readership. With its focus on complexities of collaboration, translation, and representation, this book makes a worthwhile contribution to the study of indigenous women’s literature. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez offers a fascinating reading of Native American women's ethnographies that is attentive to, but not limited by, the legacies of colonialism in which they are situated. This is a reading that considers these as the complex texts—and contexts—they are. She does not avoid knotty questions of reliability and "truth"; indeed, she navigates them with a productive wariness. -- Cari Carpenter, West Virginia University
In the tradition of the fine scholarship she has previously done in the field, Dr. Susan Brill de Ramirez’s Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers makes an important contribution to American Indian literary studies. This volume makes a strong argument for the American Indian perspective that no life is lived in isolation, but rather within an interwoven network of human and non-human relationships. American Indian women’s autobiographies, if they are to be true to those from whom they come, must be inclusive of not only the other human voices that are part of our individual stories, including those of our ancestors and nations, but also those voices that emanate from the land itself. -- Kimberly Wieser, University of Oklahoma
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction: Women Ethnographers, Relational Science, and Native American Women Storytellers ? Chapter 2: Franc Johnson Newcomb’s Navajo Ethnography of Ahson Tsosie in Hosteen Klah Chapter 3: The Interwoven Stories of Maria Chona and Ruth M. Underhill: The Autobiography of a Papago Woman Chapter 4: “I’m going to tell you a story”: Mountain Wolf Woman and Transitional Ethnographic Relations Chapter 5: The Convergence of Life and Myth as Testimonio in Julie Cruikshank’s Life Lived Like a Story Chapter 6: Mrs. Angela Sidney’s Stories about the Gold Rush Years and their Colonizing Effects on the First Nations People of the Yukon Chapter 7: 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 Works Cited About the Author
