Native American Life Stories and "Authorship": Legal and Ethical Issues

Juridical discourse concerning life stories has been primarily concerned with property and contract issues, and categories such as "ownership" and "authorship." Such legal discourse generally fails to acknowledge the unique nature of Native American life stories, particularly when such stories are written in collaboration with a non-Native editor or transcriber. This essay focuses on one fundamental question with overlapping legal and ethical aspects: how does a non-Native collaborator avoid a colonizing relationship to Native American texts? In suggesting possible answers to this vexing question, I always have on the horizon of my mind s eye two figures-Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher, and Coyote, the trickster. Both remind me of the dangers of paradigms and the difficulty of my task. Levinas reminds me that paradigms are guilty of irresponsibility and tend to destroy Otherness. Coyote reminds me that paradigms are meant to be broken in the name of fluidity and freedom. Keeping their admonitions in mind, I will attempt the delicate task of proposing an answer via the route of the master paradigm that is the law.