“As Long as it Gets Read”: The Lakota As-Told-To Genre, Authenticity, and Mediated Authorship in Mary Brave Bird’s Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman

Abstract: This essay examines Mary Brave Bird’s controversial as-told-to autobiographies Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman and situates them within the rich catalog of Lakota activist literature. Like most texts in the Lakota as-told-to genre, Brave Bird’s books, co-authored with Richard Erdoes, have long been denigrated and dismissed by scholars because of their collaborative roots; many critics challenge their authenticity and the nature of the stories being told. The first section of this essay interrogates the validity of those critics’ complaints, and the latter half counters those complaints by offering an alternative, updated reading of the texts that deploys two reading strategies proposed by Channette Romero: orality and discursive characterization. Through those lenses, we find that Mary Brave Bird’s stories, though they may be mediated to some degree through Richard Erdoes, serve as crucial artifacts of conditions in the American settler state in the twentieth century.