Review of Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography

Authors

Kari Forbes-Boyte, Chadron State College

Date of this Version

1994

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

In Sending My Heart Back Across the Years, Hertha Wong, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, expands the definition of autobiography to include non-Western self-expressions. The author lays to rest the assumption that autobiography is Western by relating how Native Americans have traditionally told their personal narratives through "stories, pictographs, and performances." The purpose of the book is to utilize contemporary autobiographical theory to trace the changes in Native American autobiography from pre-contact forms to contemporary styles. Wong is interested in enlarging the field of autobiographical studies to include non-written forms of narrative as well as non-Western conceptions of self.