Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: Relational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community

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Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers focuses on the collaborative work between Native women storytellers and their female ethnographers and/or editors, but the book is also about what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification and meaning. Regardless of discipline, academic ethnographers who conducted their field work research during the twentieth century were trained in the accepted scientific methods and theories of the time that prescribed observation, objectivity, and evaluative distance. In contradistinction to such prescribed methods, regarding the ethnographic work conducted among Native Americans, it turns out that the intersubjectively relational work of women (both ethnographers and the Indigenous storytellers with whom they worked) has produced far more reliably factual, historically accurate, and tribally specific Indigenous autobiographies than the more scientifically objective approaches of most of the male ethnographers. This volume provides a close lens to the work of a number of women ethnographers and Native American women storytellers to elucidate the effectiveness of their relational methods. Through a combined rhetorical and literary analysis of these ethnographies, we are able to differentiate the products of the womens working relationships. By shifting our focus away from the surface level textual reading that largely approaches the texts as factually informative documents, literary analysis provides access into the deeper levels of the storytelling that lies beneath the surface of the edited texts. Non-Native scholars and editors such as Franc Johnson Newcomb, Ruth Underhill, Nancy Lurie, Julie Cruikshank, and Nol Bennett and Native storytellers and writers such as Grandma Klah, Mara Chona, Mountain Wolf Woman, Mrs. Angela Sidney, and Tiana Bighorse help us to understand that there are ways by which voices and worlds are more and less disclosed for posterity. The results vary based upon the range of factors surrounding their production, but consistent across each case is the fact that informational accuracy is contingent upon the degree of mutual respect and collaboration in the womens working relationships. And it is in their pioneering intersubjective methodologies that the work of these women deserves far greater attention and approbation.

Reviews

This interesting book focuses on the collaborative work between two sets of women: Native American storytellers and the ethnographers/editors with whom they worked in order to record their and their families life experiences. . . .Brill de Ramrez offers an account of increasing authorial control and recognition for indigenous women storytellers. . . . Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: Relational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community offers new insights into the various shapes and dynamics of collaborative, experience-centered scholarship. The volume may have particular value for studies of womens literature not only because the authors and subjects (except for Gus Bighorse) are women but also because Brill de Ramrez frames her subject as womens relational ethnographic practice (p. 173). . . .Brill de Ramrez celebrates biographical and autobiographical literature that emerges from and directs itself toward indigenous families, communities, and storytelling traditions, while also speaking to a broader readership. With its focus on complexities of collaboration, translation, and representation, this book makes a worthwhile contribution to the study of indigenous womens literature. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez offers a fascinating reading of Native American women's ethnographies that is attentive to, but not limited by, the legacies of colonialism in which they are situated. This is a reading that considers these as the complex textsand contextsthey are. She does not avoid knotty questions of reliability and "truth"; indeed, she navigates them with a productive wariness. -- Cari Carpenter, West Virginia University
In the tradition of the fine scholarship she has previously done in the field, Dr. Susan Brill de Ramirezs Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers makes an important contribution to American Indian literary studies. This volume makes a strong argument for the American Indian perspective that no life is lived in isolation, but rather within an interwoven network of human and non-human relationships. American Indian womens autobiographies, if they are to be true to those from whom they come, must be inclusive of not only the other human voices that are part of our individual stories, including those of our ancestors and nations, but also those voices that emanate from the land itself. -- Kimberly Wieser, University of Oklahoma

Author Bio

Susan Berry Brill de Ramrez is Caterpillar Professor of English at Bradley University.