SOURCE: "Albert Hensley's Two Autobiographies," in American Quarterly, Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 37, No. 5, Winter, 1985, pp. 702-18.

In the essay that follows, Brumble disputes the common conception of Native American autobiographies as "transparent" rather than consciously literary, and claims that works such as those by Albert Hensley, a, member of the Winnebago tribe, reflect a deliberate narrative coherence.

Peyote, The Divine Cactus, The Vision Sender, Came to the Wisconsin Winnebago in the last decade of the nineteenth century, years that were especially difficult for that Indian tribe. Most Americans were still convinced that America was the great melting pot, and so believed as well that it was the manifest duty of Indians to melt as soon as possible. The official expression of this sentiment was the Dawes Act of 1887, which aimed to break up the tribes and tribal predilections by dividing up the reservations into individual allotments for...