The pages to follow provide overviews of a series of literary historical "periods" in Indian autobiography. Admittedly, attempts to impose an historical structure on literary materials are always somewhat arbitrary. Aesthetic boundaries are notoriously fluid, and in the case of American Indian autobiography (particularly texts produced between the Civil War and the 1960s) clear periodizing distinctions are often hard to come by. Nevertheless, critical fictions of this type remain useful aids to help us organize our perceptions of a body of work. They also set up interesting comparisons and critical questions.
The historical schema offered here draws on the insights of the site author and on the work of a number of major critics in the field of Indian Autobiography (H. David Brumble, Arnold Krupat, Hertha Dawn Wong, etc.) The "periods" and modes discussed include (1) pre-contact autobiography, (2) early missionary writings and conversion narratives, (3) narratives of the Reservation/Assimilation period, (4) narratives of the Era of the Indian New Deal, and (5) narratives produced in the wake of the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s.
On each sub-page readers will find an overview of some of the major features of texts produced during these periods, an attempt to highlight key primary texts, remarks on some of the ways that critics have interpreted these works, and a brief bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These bibliographies are not comprehensive (and are biased towards literary criticism as a discipline), but they do provide a solid foundation for further study.