Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography

by Annette Angela Portillo

Overview

In Sovereign Stories, Annette Angela Portillo examines Native American women's autobiographical discourses and multiple-voiced life stories that resist generic conventional notions of first-person narrative. She argues that these "sovereign stories" and "blood memories" not only reveal the multilayered histories and identities shared by each author, but demonstrate how their narratives are grounded in ancestral memory and land. These autobiographies recall settler-colonialism, deterritorialization, and genocide as the writers and activist-scholars reclaim their voices across cultural, national, and digital boundaries. Portillo provides close readings of memoirs, life stories, oral histories, blogs, social media sites, and experimental multigenre narratives including those by Delfina Cuero, Ruby Modesto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826359155
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	12/15/2017
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Annette Angela Portillo is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her articles have appeared in several publications, including Western American Literature, College English Association Forum, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 Indigenous Epistemologies

Decolonizing Native American Women's Sovereign Stories and the Embodiment of Shared Knowledges 1

Chapter 2 Delfina Cuero and Anticolonial Native American Historiography

Remapping Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place Naming 21

Chapter 3 "The Land and the People Are Inseparable"

Writing the Oral and Visual in Leslie Marmon Silko's Memoirs Sacred Water and Turquoise Ledge 53

Chapter 4 The Power of Story and Resistance

Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's As-Told-To and Self-Written Autobiographies 91

Chapter 5 Indigenizing the Internet through Cyberactivism, Social Media, and Communo-Blographies

The Zapatistas, Idle No More, and Activist-Bloggers 121

Chapter 6 Not for Innocent Ears

Decolonial Pedagogies and Indigenous-Centered Storytelling Practices in the Classroom 137

Notes 161

Bibliography 185

Index 193

Editorial Reviews

"This interdisciplinary study expands the canon of Western literary and cultural production by including lesser-known works of Native women's autobiography and making a case for reading Indigenous women's cyberactivism as a digital-age extension of Native autobiographical traditions."—Alicia Cox, Western American Literature

"These collective memoirs of American Indian women are powerful reminders of the struggle of those who are often overlooked by historians dealing with Indian issues."—Roundup

"This book is an effort to recover indigenous epistemologies, an intimate embrace of spoken and visual images, silhouettes imprinted in the minds of Native American women over the centuries that are inspiring a new cadre of scholars."—Inés M. Talamantez, coeditor of Teaching Religion and Healing

From the Publisher