Sending My Heart Back Across the Years

Book excerpt: Using contemporary autobiography theory and literary, historical, and ethnographic approaches, Wong explores the transformation of Native American autobiography from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives through late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century life histories to written contemporary autobiographies. This book expands the definition of autobiography to include non-written forms of personal narrative and non-Western concepts of self, highlighting the incorporation of traditional tribal modes of self-narration with Western forms of autobiography and charting the historical transition from orality to literacy.