Over the years, much critical ink has been spilled debating the authenticity of the collaborative Indian autobiographies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a trend that shows little sign of abating. It is true that a number of these works were first produced as colorful additions to the mythology of the American West. The life stories of important historical figures such as Geronimo thus entered into the literary marketplace in ways that likely distorted as much as they revealed. It is fair to say that the memory of Little Big Horn and the influence of dime-novel westerns were instrumental in shaping the form and tone of a surprising amount of "Indian" literature during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nevertheless, scholars and readers have also found a great deal of value in collaborative autobiographical texts. If they reveal much about the "white man's" stereotypical expectations about Indian peoples, they can also contain important insights into traditional Indian life and culture. Not surprisingly, though, interpretations of these collaborative texts and discussions of these issues can vary wildly and become quite contentious. Is the assimilationist, Christian perspective of Sarah Winnemucca Parker's Life Among the Piutes (1883) as much that of her white editor, Mrs Horace Mann, as of Winnemucca herself? Kathleen Mullen Sands and Gretchen Bataille suggest as much. Or does Winnemucca's text reveal a Piute worldview and a writer working through the traditional genre of "vindication narrative," as H. David Brumble III maintains? Some scholars, Krupat among them, have argued that the binary divisions that seem to be underlying such debates are themselves untenable. Such critics prefer to read these narratives as examples of a fluid textual "frontier." Whatever the critical perspective, the question of "authenticity" continues to dominate criticism of the collaborative works of this period.
At the same time that the "as-told-to" and collaborative narratives were proliferating, we also find the appearance of a significant number of examples of "Autobiographies-by-Indians." Ironically enough, it was the creation of the Reservations and the boarding-school system after the Civil War that was instrumental in this first Pan-Indian literary "renaissance." While Christian conversion remained a key element of U.S. Indian policy during the Reservation/Allotment period, literacy was no longer so inextricably linked to religious discourse as it had been in the past. The often harshly coercive boarding school experience led Indian writers to explore other issues and facets of colonial contact beyond sin and redemption. At the same time, the schools brought together individuals from different nations and widely dispersed locales. This produced the beginnings of Pan-Indian self-consciousness and political activism in the early decades of the 1900s, as well as new forms literary activity. The first "fiction" (in a Western literacy sence) produced by Indian writers dates from this period.
In addition, the autobiographical writing of the time typically shows a complex and conflicted attempt to balance (1) the desire to preserve and validate elements of traditional Indian life with (2) the need to adapt to the modern world being forced upon Native peoples by the BIA and Federal Allotment policy. The America and the West we see in the independent Indian autobiographies of Charles Eastman, Francis LaFleche, Zitkala-Sa, and others, then, often provides a fascinating counter-point to the myth-making of much popular writing of the time.