This interesting book focuses on the collaborative work between two sets of women: Native American storytellers and the ethnographers/editors with whom they worked in order to record their and their families' life experiences. . . .Brill de Ramirez offers an account of increasing authorial control and recognition for indigenous women storytellers. . . . Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: ... Read moreRelational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community offers new insights into the various shapes and dynamics of collaborative, experience-centered scholarship. The volume may have particular value for studies of women's literature not only because the authors and subjects (except for Gus Bighorse) are women but also because Brill de Ramirez frames her subject as `women's relational ethnographic practice' (p. 173). . . .Brill de Ramirez celebrates biographical and autobiographical literature that emerges from and directs itself toward indigenous families, communities, and storytelling traditions, while also speaking to a broader readership. With its focus on complexities of collaboration, translation, and representation, this book makes a worthwhile contribution to the study of indigenous women's literature.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez offers a fascinating reading of Native American women's ethnographies that is attentive to, but not limited by, the legacies of colonialism in which they are situated. This is a reading that considers these as the complex texts-and contexts-they are. She does not avoid knotty questions of reliability and truth ; indeed, she navigates them with a productive wariness.
Cari Carpenter, West Virginia University In the tradition of the fine scholarship she has previously done in the field, Dr. Susan Brill de Ramirez's Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers makes an important contribution to American Indian literary studies. This volume makes a strong argument for the American Indian perspective that no life is lived in isolation, but rather within an interwoven network of human and non-human relationships. American Indian women's autobiographies, if they are to be true to those from whom they come, must be inclusive of not only the other human voices that are part of our individual stories, including those of our ancestors and nations, but also those voices that emanate from the land itself.
Kimberly Wieser, University of Oklahoma Show Less