Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers focuses on the collaborative work between Native women storytellers and their female ethnographers and/or editors, but the book is also about what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification and meaning. Regardless of discipline, academic ethnographers who conducted their field work research during the twentieth century were trained in the accepted scientific methods and theories of the time that prescribed observation, objectivity, and evaluative distance. In contradistinction to such prescribed methods, regarding the ethnographic work conducted among Native Americans, it turns out that the intersubjectively relational work of women (both ethnographers and the Indigenous storytellers with whom they worked) has produced far more reliably factual, historically accurate, and tribally specific Indigenous autobiographies than the more "scientifically objective" approaches of most of the male ethnographers. This volume provides a close lens to the work of a number of women ethnographers and Native American women storytellers to elucidate the effectiveness of their relational methods. Through a combined rhetorical and literary analysis of these ethnographies, we are able to differentiate the products of the women's working relationships. By shifting our focus away from the surface level textual reading that largely approaches the texts as factually informative documents, literary analysis provides access into the deeper levels of the storytelling that lies beneath the surface of the edited texts. Non-Native scholars and editors such as Franc Johnson Newcomb, Ruth Underhill, Nancy Lurie, Julie Cruikshank, and Noel Bennett and Native storytellers and writers such as Grandma Klah, Maria Chona, Mountain Wolf Woman, Mrs. Angela Sidney, and Tiana Bighorse help us to understand that there are ways by which voices and worlds are more and less disclosed for posterity. The results vary based upon the range of factors surrounding their production, but consistent across each case is the fact that informational accuracy is contingent upon the degree of mutual respect and collaboration in the women's working relationships. And it is in their pioneering intersubjective methodologies that the work of these women deserves far greater attention and approbation.

This book focuses on the collaborative work between Native women storytellers and their female ethnographers and/or editors, but the book is also about what it is that is constitutive of scientific rigor, factual accuracy, cultural authenticity, and storytelling signification and meaning. Regardless of discipline, academic ethnographers who conducted their field work research during the twentieth century were trained in the accepted scientific methods and theories of the time that prescribed observation, objectivity, and evaluative distance. In contradistinction to such prescribed methods, regarding the ethnographic work conducted among Native Americans, it turns out that the intersubjectively relational work of women (both ethnographers and the Indigenous storytellers with whom they worked) has produced far more reliably factual, historically accurate, and tribally specific Indigenous autobiographies than the more "scientifically objective" approaches of most of the male ethnographers. This volume provides a close lens to the work of a number of women ethnographers and Native American women storytellers to elucidate the effectiveness of their relational methods. Through a combined rhetorical and literary analysis of these ethnographies, we are able to differentiate the products of the women's working relationships. By shifting our focus away from the surface level textual reading that largely approaches the texts as factually informative documents, literary analysis provides access into the deeper levels of the storytelling that lies beneath the surface of the edited texts. Non-Native scholars and editors such as Franc Johnson Newcomb, Ruth Underhill, Nancy Lurie, Julie Cruikshank, and Noel Bennett and Native storytellers and writers such as Grandma Klah, Maria Chona, Mountain Wolf Woman, Mrs. Angela Sidney, Mrs. Kitty Smith, Mrs. Annie Ned, and Tiana Bighorse help us to understand that there are ways by which voices and worlds are more and less disclosed for posterity. The results vary based upon the range of factors surrounding their production, but consistent across each case is the fact that informational accuracy is contingent upon the the degree of mutual respect and collaboration in the women's working relationships. And it is in their pioneering intersubjective methodologies that the work of these women deserves far greater attention and approbation.

Simon J. Ortiz is widely regarded as one of the literary giants of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with more than two dozen volumes of poetry, prose fiction, children's literature, and nonfiction work to his credit and his being anthologized around the world. This edited volume is devoted to the depth and range of Ortiz's contribution to contemporary Native American literature and literary scholarship.
Including interviews with Ortiz, short creative nonfiction essays by Native women writers and scholars, and innovative critical discussions by a dozen scholars of Native literatures, the volume shows his role in the development of cultural studies and Native American literatures on a number of fronts, garnering tribal, regional, national, hemispheric, and global levels of awareness and appreciation. The range of scholarship herein sheds light on the larger historical, cultural, and political factors that have shaped Native writing over the last four decades.
This volume reveals the insights and aesthetics of Ortiz's indigenous lens, which provides invaluable contributions to literary studies that turn to the postcolonial, the ecocritical, the globally indigenous and comparative as indigenous geographies of belonging are found to inform an aesthetics of inclusion and authenticity.
Contributors:
Elizabeth Ammons, Tufts University (Boston)
Elizabeth Archuleta (Yaqui), Arizona State University
Esther Belin, Durango, Colorado
Jeff Berglund, Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff)
Kimberly Blaeser (Chippewa), University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
Gregory Cajete (Tewa), University of New Mexico
Sophia Cantave, Boston
David Dunaway, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque)
Roger Dunsmore, University of Montana (retired)
Lawrence Evers, University of Arizona
Gwen Westerman Griffin (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate), Minnesota State University (Mankato)
Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), Honolulu
Geary Hobson (Cherokee, Arkansas Quapaw), University of Oklahoma
David L. Moore, University of Montana
Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo), University of Illinois
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek), University of Oklahoma
Ralph Salisbury, University of Oregon (retired)
Kathryn W. Shanley (Assiniboine), University of Montana
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Tucson
Sean Kicummah Teuton (Cherokee), University of Wisconsin (Madison)
Laura Tohe (DinA(c)), Arizona State University
Robert Warrior (Osage), University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)