Review: Ethnoautobiography

Ethnoautobiography: Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities #

By Jürgen Werner Kremer and River Jackson-Paton Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2018

Kremer, Jürgen Werner, and River Jackson-Paton. 2018. Ethnoautobiography: Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1-5249-6698-0.

Ethnoautobiography is not a monograph in the ordinary sense. It is a college workbook, built for courses like American Multicultural Values or Psychology of Identity, and it announces its method in its title: rather than teach white readers to recognize their privilege through argument, it asks them to write their way into recognition, tracing genealogy, land, ancestral myth, and family shadow across eighteen chapters until "whiteness" stops looking like an identity and starts looking like an amputation from something older. While the book accomplishes a genuine reframing of whiteness pedagogy, moving it from induced guilt to ancestral curiosity, I will argue that it never resolves the tension between its anti-colonial premise and its own borrowed ceremonial frameworks; I will show this by examining 1) the reframing itself, 2) the genre problem, 3) the appropriation question, and 4) the book's fit (or lack of fit) with critical theory proper. Jürgen Kremer, a German-born psychologist working in the Frankfurt School and poststructuralist tradition, and River Jackson-Paton, his collaborator and former student, ground the book in three forewords from Indigenous studies scholars (Leny Mendoza Strobel, Apela Colorado, and Stanley Krippner), each vouching for the project's seriousness before the authors say a word themselves. The core claim, stated plainly in the preface, holds that individualism is not a neutral feature of Western selfhood but "a reflection of colonialism and a colonial mindset," and that the antidote is not shame but what the authors call "radical hope": reconnecting white readers to their own suppressed ancestral lineages so they stop needing to borrow, or envy, the ancestral groundedness of the Indigenous peoples they have displaced.

A genuine reframing of whiteness pedagogy #

The book's real intellectual contribution is this reframing, and I take it seriously on its own terms. Most whiteness studies pedagogy, certainly the strand Kremer and Jackson-Paton respond to, works by confrontation: naming privilege, cataloguing complicity, inducing productive discomfort. Ethnoautobiography argues that this approach stalls out; as Strobel puts it in her foreword, "most of the discourse on White privilege always stopped short of offering students a process on how to decolonize European colonial thinking." Kremer and Jackson-Paton's alternative treats whiteness itself as a kind of ancestral amnesia, a "long body" (borrowing the Haudenosaunee concept Stanley Krippner introduces in his foreword) that has been severed from its own pre-colonial roots (Norwegian, Bavarian, Irish, in the authors' own genealogies) and whose heirs now arrive, in Krippner's phrase, as "beggars at the doors of native ceremonies." The pedagogical bet runs as follows: a white student who has done the work of excavating their own ancestral dispossession (forced conversion, land loss, suppressed language) will approach Indigenous survivance with something closer to kinship than tourism. This diagnostic move differs genuinely from the guilt-and-confession model, and Strobel's report that students found it gave them "a more expansive sense of self" rather than defensive paralysis counts as a real, if anecdotal, point in its favor.

The genre problem #

Where the book runs into trouble is its own form, and this trouble is not a minor stylistic quibble. Each chapter mixes free-verse "riffs" (personal poems by Kremer or Jackson-Paton reflecting on grief, land, and ancestry) with didactic content boxes, reflection prompts, and, in several chapters, dialogues in which the authors converse with personified figures: Raven, Salmon, History, Place, even "Smiley, the dog." The closing chapter stages an entire concluding argument as a conversation between the authors and Raven and Salmon rather than as expository prose. This choice is defensible for a workbook aimed at experiential, embodied learning, and the authors are explicit that they draw on autoethnography (Denzin and Lincoln) and critical Indigenous inquiry (Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith) as their methodological warrant. But the form also means the book's most consequential claims, that individualism is "inherently colonial," that "the human brain did not evolve to impart truth but to impart meaning," that ancestral trauma is carried bodily across generations, arrive as assertions voiced by a poetic chorus rather than as arguments building on evidence or engaging counter-readings. A reader who wants to press on any of these claims has no argument to press against, only a testimony to accept or decline.

The appropriation question the book never fully faces #

The more serious issue is one the book gestures toward without resolving. Kremer and Jackson-Paton build their central practices out of specific, living Indigenous cosmologies: Sami ancestor imagery (Sarahkka, Juoksahkka, Uksahkka), Old Norse mythology (Urdr, Verdandi, Skuld), Haudenosaunee seven-generations thinking, all offered as templates for a general undergraduate audience to adapt to their own, often unrelated, ancestries. The endorsements from Apela Colorado (founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network) and the authors' account of years of relationship-building with Sami and Native teachers do answer the crudest version of the appropriation charge; these are not two academics helping themselves to sacred material without relationship or accountability. But the book's own logic cuts both ways. If the whole argument is that colonization works by uprooting people from their own specific ancestral traditions and replacing them with abstraction, then asking a Filipino-American, an Irish-American, and a German immigrant descendant to each find their way toward Norse and Sami frameworks that are not their own ancestry either sits in some tension with the book's stated anti-colonial premise. The book would have been stronger had it confronted this tension directly rather than treating the presence of Indigenous forewords as sufficient answer to it.

A workbook, not a work of theory #

For a doctoral seminar reading list built around critical theory, the kind of book this is deserves plain naming. Ethnoautobiography comes from Kendall Hunt, a custom textbook press rather than a peer-reviewed university press, and it does not undergo the kind of scholarly vetting that shapes argumentative rigor. It cites Guillory-adjacent decolonial theorists (Denzin, Lincoln; Linda Tuhiwai Smith is notably absent, though her Decolonizing Methodologies would have been a natural interlocutor), but its primary mode sits closer to expressive therapy or community psychology than to critical theory as the term is used elsewhere on this syllabus. In my estimation this mismatch is not a defect so much as a genre fact worth naming: readers coming from Horkheimer, Adorno, or Honneth will find little here in the way of dialectical argument, and readers coming from postcolonial theory proper (Said, Spivak, Tuhiwai Smith) will find the book's engagement with structural, institutional colonialism thin relative to its engagement with personal, psychological colonization. The book targets the individual psyche, not the state or the market, and its theory of change runs entirely through personal narrative transformation rather than through any account of how such transformation might scale into structural change; the lacuna between psyche and structure remains unfilled.

Verdict #

Ethnoautobiography succeeds at what it actually attempts: it offers a genuinely alternative entry point into whiteness pedagogy, one built on ancestral curiosity rather than induced guilt, and the strength of its Indigenous endorsements suggests the relationships underlying the project are substantive rather than extractive. But it asks to be read as a workbook and a spiritual practice more than as a scholarly argument, and its most contestable claims (about individualism, colonization, and inherited trauma) arrive through poetry and personified dialogue rather than defense. Readers looking for rigorous critical theory about decolonization and whiteness will find better resources in Tuhiwai Smith or the postcolonial canon this book barely cites. Readers looking for a genuinely different pedagogical tool for undergraduate identity work, one with real classroom testimony behind it, will find something here worth piloting, so long as they are prepared to sit with the tension between the book's anti-appropriation politics and its own reliance on borrowed ceremonial frameworks; the two remain, throughout, flip sides of the same coin.