REASSERTION OF IDENTITY IN NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
REASSERTION OF IDENTITY IN NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Summary/Abstract: In the modern society, where alienation and powerlessness feature prominently, Native American writers provide in their works ways of dealing with traumatic experiences from the more or less remote past and of reconstructing an identity that resolves the inner struggle most Native Americans face, due to their mixed heritage. Native American women writers’ autobiographies emphasize the need to rely and incorporate traditional Native American identity formation components, namely language and storytelling, the land and its surrounding elements, and cultural tribal heritage into the present, in order to recover lost values and perspectives that would provide healing and continuance. Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Linda Hogan create, in their autobiographies, a self composed of a multitude of voices, emphasizing the connection that exists between humans and the natural world, as well as the cultural knowledge that is transmitted from one generation to another. Apart from this interconnection between people and nature and ancestral heritage, Native American women writers also deal with another major identity formation component without which Native people could not reach a balanced sense of the self: that of language and storytelling. This article discusses ways of reconstructing identity in the autobiographical works by Erdrich, Marmon Silko and Hogan with a view to recovering cultural heritage.

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