The Autobiography of a Meskwaki Woman

This is an edition and translation of an autobiographical account written in the Meskwaki language in 1918 by an anonymous Meskwaki woman. The writer describes how she was brought up and taught useful skills, and she talks frankly about her personal life, which included three marriages. The original manuscript is written in the alphabetic syllabary that the Meskwakis began using in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It is in the National Anthropological Archives of the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. It was originally published, with a few small omissions, by Truman Michelson in 1925. The present edition, while heavily indebted to the earlier work, has been revised on the basis of an examination of the manuscript, and a fresh translation has been prepared based on fieldwork with Meskwaki speakers. In this edition each line of the text is accompanied by an interlinear labeling and analysis of every word, and an appendix lists and analyzes every ending and ending complex. The running translation is italicized to make it possible to easily follow just the English all the way through. Copious textual notes, given separately, annotate details of transcription, pronunciation, and translation, including variant renderings and interpretations of different speakers and sources. The words in this text may be found in A Meskwaki-English and English-Meskwaki Dictionary, by Ives Goddard and Lucy Thomason (Mundart Press, 2014). This provides a practical spelling of the words with no technical symbols except for the long-vowel mark (^). Meskwaki (earlier called Fox) is the heritage language of the Meskwaki Nation (officially named the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa), whose lands are in Tama County, Iowa. This Mundart Press reprint is a photographic facsimile of the original edition that appeared as Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Memoir 18 (Winnipeg, 2006).