As one might expect, much of the scholarship dealing with New Deal era autobiographies has focused on the conditions of textual production, the methodology of ethnographic collection, and issues of authenticity. Certainly the most widely discussed (and disagreed upon) work of the period is Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1936). Called variously a Native American "Bible" and a distorted product of Anglo-American romanticism, the text has spawned voluminous criticism in a variety of disciplines (literature, anthropology, and religious studies). Raymond DeMallie's scholarly edition of the transcripts Neihardt used in producing his text have allowed for a wide range of interesting reflections on the process and possibilities of cross-cultural collaboration. A plethora of supplementary material on Black Elk's family history, on Lakota culture, and on Catholic missionary work among the Sioux has also generated fresh discussion of the nature of religious conversion and the narratives that record that experience. In this respect, studying a text such as Black Elk Speaks may provide new ways of thinking about earlier spiritual autobiography by American Indians.
While it is clearly "ethnographic" in flavor, Black Elk Speaks may not the purest example of the anthropological autobiography of the New Deal Era. Other works, such as Paul Radin's Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian (1926), Leo Simmons' Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (1942), Walter Dyk's Son of Old Man Hat: A Navajo Autobiography (1938), and Ruth Underhill's Autobiography of a Papago Woman (1936), provide clearer models of this type of life writing, which mines individual experience for cultural data. Admittedly, the value of these texts as examples of "representative" lives (the anthropologists' goal) is often questionable. As Arnold Krupat and others have pointed out, their role as informants willing to share sentitive material with outsiders often marks the subjects of these texts as unusual individuals. Some recent scholarship, as a result, has begun to read these autobiographies for insight into the kinds of hybrid models of self-definition that emerge from cross-cultural encounters. Similarly, these texts have been used as vehicles for critiquing the methodology of modern anthropological science.
Most recently, certain works from the period have come under fire from a new generation of Indian scholars as evidence of the unethical and exploitative relationship between academics and the tribal cultures they study. Ruth Underhill's agressive approach toward her informant, Maria Chona, has been widely discussed, for example. For students of literature, ethnographic autobiography has perhaps been most fruitfully approached from a cultural studies framework, where readers consider how the discourse of science has shaped narrative form and content. Students in an English course on Native American autobiography are less likely to read a work like Autobiography of a Papago Woman than Black Elk Speaks, however. The insistent and overt emphasis on data collection and preservation in the predominantly ethnographic texts does tend to produce a more limited range of reader-responses.