Literary Ethnography/Anthropology in North America and Australia

Abstract In the early 20th century, ethnographic “as-told-to” narratives published in colonial white settler nations, such as Canada, Australia, and the United States, were written by ethnologists from “data” collected from their “native informants” and presented as the self-authored life histories of Indigenous people. The texts were intended to represent Indigenous peoples in a Eurocentric progressive transition from “barbarism” to “civilization.” Throughout the 20th century, Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary scholars addressed the uncertainties of this autobiographical subject and how the rhetorical “I” left the texts open to the commercial and stereotypical demands for “Indianness.” By controlling and interfering with editorial processes, white settler and ethnographic publications of as-told-to texts instituted colonial forms of “authority” and “authorship,” solidifying a critical nexus between white settler print culture and the development of anthropology as a social scientific epistemology. Anthropological authority was based on these texts in the early part of the 20th century and challenged by Indigenous publications throughout the century. With the rise of new social movements in the 1960s, including Native American LGBT organizations, such as the Gay American Indians and the American Indian Movement, the politics of experience brought these earlier voices to the fore, creating awareness about the counternarratives of Indigenous national and literary sovereignties. In the 1990s and throughout the early 21st century, Indigenous scholars and writers in North America and Australia reclaimed their voices, introducing specific methods and theories that would advance national and literary sovereignties. Issues faced by Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers—such as the appropriation of Indigenous cultural property, knowledge systems, and storytelling; and the attempt to erase or silence original Indigenous sources of anthropological “data”—were addressed by this important work. In addition, the literary sovereignty movement brought about significant changes in anthropological methods regarding the editorial reconstructions of Indigenous life histories.

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