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

Description

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. Cover Halftitle Title Copyright Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One. Indigenous Epistemologies: Decolonizing Native American Women’s Sovereign Stories and the Embodiment of Shared Knowledges Chapter Two. Delfina Cuero and Anticolonial Native American Historiography: Remapping Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place Naming Chapter Three. “The Land and the People Are Inseperable”: Writing the Oral and Visual in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Memoirs Sacred Water and Turquoise Ledge Chapter Four. The Power of Story and Resistance: Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s As-Told-To and Self-Written Autobiographies Chapter Five. Indigenizing the Internet through Cyberactivism, Social Media, and Communo-Blographies: The Zapatistas, Idle No More, and Activist-Bloggers Chapter Six. Not for Innocent Ears: Decolonial Pedagogies and Indigenous-Centered Storytelling Practices in the Classroom Notes Bibliography Index