In his 1985 book For Those Who Come After, Arnold Krupat makes a distinction between two major forms of Native American autobiography. An "American Indian Autobiography," Krupat suggests, is a text that comes into being through a process of "original, bicultural, composite, composition" (xxvii). These are works, in other words, produced through collaboration between non-Indian writers/editors and Indian subjects. In contrast, Krupat refers to those texts produced without the presence of a non-Indian mediator as "Autobiographies-by-Indians." Such works may indeed reflect their writers' own biculturalism, but they are to be distinguished from the collaborative, cross-cultural works included in the first category. Whether one chooses to use Krupat's terminology or not, it is clearly important to recognize the presence of, and differences between, these strands of autobiographical writing focused on Indian peoples. The canon of Native American autobiography includes examples of Indian peoples both writing for themselves and speaking through others. During the period from the Civil War through the early decades of the 20th century, each of these forms is particularly well-represented.
It is difficult to offer wholly satisfactory generalizations regarding the autobiographies produced during the Reservation and Allotment Era. In his 1994 anthology, Native American Autobiography, Krupat organizes the texts written between the 1830s and early 1900s in terms of their subjects' resistence to colonialism or their accomodation to the conditions of the "closed frontier." In dealing with an admittedly heterogenous body of work, this schema is probably as good as any. We do find, in fact, that many of the "Indian autobiographies" of this period focus either on (male) warriors who fought white expansion or on (again, male) individuals who resisted pressure to give up a tradtional Indian way of life. In contrast, many of the "autobiographies-by-Indians" were written by mediator figures (of both genders) who self-consciously sought to bridge the gap between cultures during a time of intense assimilationist pressure. In the end, then, while there are many exceptions to the collaborative/resisting versus independent/mediating dichotomy, such a schema does provide a useful orientation for readers just beginning to study the period.