Black Elk And Oishi Junkyo Analysis

How true are the stories that are told in an autobiography? Nancy Mairs would say that each person has their own way of looking at an event. The autobiographies of Black Elk and Oishi Junkyo bring up many questions of truth and subjectivity. These autobiographies show that personal accounts are subjective and language, memory, the motives of the writer/translator, make autobiography that much more subjective. Nancy Mairs writes in her article “Trying Truth” about the struggles of writing an autobiography and dealing with issues of remembering. She says the quote “we are each the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and no one of us can authentically tell another’s story” when she is talking about how she and her husband have different recollections of the same event (91). This quote means that we each have our own way of understanding the things that we do and the events that occur in our life. History is made up of these various accounts and the goal of historical study is to try to find the objective truth among them. Mairs seems to view the understanding of an incident as purely subjective; that there is no objective truth. The subjective nature of experience has many implications for the writings of Black Elk and Oishi Junyo. One of the major implications is the impact of language on
One of the major ways is the fact that it was mediated from Black Elk to John Neihardt. The way this was done was that Black Elk spoke his story in Sioux, his son translated it into English, Neihardt’s daughter transcribed it and then Neihardt wrote it down and formatted it into a book. This was a complicated process and many believe that there had to have been parts of the story that got lost in translation. If autobiography is subjective, how much more is Black Elk’s? Neihardt was very close to Black Elk, so we just have to trust that Neihardt stayed as true as possible to Black Elk’s