There has been a tremendous amount of scholarship produced on the "new" Indian writing since the 1960s. Figures such as Momaday, Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Linda Hogan, and numerous others, have been the suject of a wide range of articles and books. The journal Studies in American Indian Literature (SAIL) has provided an important outlet for this type of scholarship, as has the American Indian Quartely. Links to both journals are included on the links page. The University Presses of Nebraska and Oklahoma have huge catalogs in American Indian studies, and many other presses also have fine series (the Native American Indians of the Northeast Series from U Mass Press, for example).
Summarizing recent autobiography scholarship, particular in such a short format, is an impossible task, but a few noteworthy trends can be mentioned. One such trend is the development of linguistics and ethnopoetics as important elements in literary criticism. There is now a greater emphasis by scholars on understanding something about Indian languages and about the performative aspects of autobiographical utterances that were once simply recorded and interpreted with little sense of context.
A second motif appearing in much recent scholarship is a familiar one—the question of authenticity. Certain types of autobiography, the "shamanic texts" in particular, raise serious questions regarding the appropriation and distortion of traditional cultures. Some widely-read authors taken by many as spokespersons for an "Indian" worldview have been exposed as frauds and charletans (Jamake Highwater, for example). The authenticity issue has emerged in other contexts, also, though. Recent writing has focused critical attention on the very meaning of "ethnic" identity. We now speak of "metis" and "hybrid" selves and debate what kind of self emerges from N. Scott Momaday's imaginative incorporation of both his "white" and "Indian" ancestry.
Native American autobiography studies (like autobiography studies in general) has also intersected with feminist theory and criticism in important ways. Some critics have focused on the similarities between traditional Indian self-definition and women's writing defined more generally.
Finally, coinciding with the appearance of more Native voices within the academic community, scholars are increasingly being asked to consider their ethical obligations to those people they "study." What does it mean to dissect an autobiographical act in the context of a classroom? When we study "enthographic" life stories, are we also obligated to consider the real impact of science on indigenous peoples? Issues like the repatriation of remains collected for study begin to intersect with literay analysis at this point.
Recent writing on the history and direction of Native American Studies since the 1960s suggests that the "discipline" has failed to develop a cohesive set of core questions and institutional goals. In literary studies, however, such uncertainty can be quite exciting and productive. There are a wide range of questions being asked about (and through) autobiographical discourse today. Such diversity highlights the number of opportunities for sensitive and interested readers, Indian and non-Indian, to shape an ongoing conversation about the first genre of written Native America literature.