The primarily oral cultures of pre-contact American Indians did not produce autobiographical narratives that follow modern western generic conventions. This does not mean, however, that Indian peoples lacked models of narrative self-expression and self-definition. As part of the ongoing struggle to challenge the stereotypes and enabling fictions of colonial ideology, it is important to recognize this fact. G. W. F. Hegel famously argued that cultures lacking writing also lacked history; much recent scholarship dealing with American Indians has sought to vigorously challenge that type of assumption. Autobiography studies has a great deal to contribute to that conversation.
Until recently, evidence of pre-contact autobiographical forms was overlooked by scholars and general readers because that evidence was typically embedded within other materials—in sketch books used by Indian military prisoners during the late 19th century, in the field notes of ethnographers and anthropologists, in the graphic designs adorning Indian garments and dwellings, and so on. Recognizing the presence of conventional modes of public self-definition (perhaps the most general definition of autobiography) in such places requires us to abandon normative assumptions regarding what a "life story" is supposed to look like. Having done so, Western readers may also find themselves able to rethink their own assumptions about selfhood in fruitful ways. As Anrold Krupat has written in the introduction to his 1994 anthology, Native American Autobiography, studying this material "can put the western concept of the self in perspective by making us see that what we have taken as only natural is, instead, a matter of cultural convention" (4).
Probably the most accurate generalizations to be made regarding pre-contact Indian autobiography would be as follows. These narratives depict incidents in the life of the subject in question, but do not provide the kind of large-scale, comprehensive, chronological stories typical of Western autobiography. You will not find the oral equivalent of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or Rousseau's Confessions, in other words. As Krupat has pointed out, traditional Indian autobiographies also tend to be "public" (performed and ratified by the community) and "occasional" (told for specific purposes). Finally, pre-contact autobiography tends to highlight the ways that individual identity is fully attained and articulated through the community. Plains tribes would valorize the heroic deeds of a particular warrior, for example, but that warrior's identity would only be meaningful within the broader context of tribal culture. "Individualism," as celebrated in Anglo-America, does not appear as an important value in traditional Indian autobiography.