American Indian women's autobiographies recount a specific type of life experience that has often been overlooked, one that is equally important in understanding the genre and to develop ways of reading these texts that balance the recovery and recognition of the Native voice and agency contained within them with the processes of creation and the contexts of production that shape them. In this essay, the author considers collaborative autobiographies by two American Indian women, those of Delfina Cuero, a Kumeyaay woman born in 1900 in an "Indian house under an old grove of trees" in Jamacha, near San Diego, California, and of Bonita Nunez, a Poyomkowish or Luiseno of the Rincon band, born twelve years earlier and some forty-eight miles to the north. Coming from often overlooked tribal groups, Cuero and Nunez's texts probe the complex relationship of law and American Indian identity in the twentieth century. As a nonreservation Kumeyaay woman displaced from her traditional lands in the San Diego area to Baja California, Mexico, Cuero was unable to prove her US origin to the satisfaction of immigration officials. Nunez was adopted at birth from what was to become the Rincon Reservation by a wealthy white woman, and was forever separated from her birth family and tribal community. Through historical and political circumstances beyond their control, both women become relegated to the margins of not only history, but also Indian community and Indian identity. The author contends that Cuero and Nunez use life-writing as a tool to interrogate and secure their legal and social identity as Indian women during an era of tremendous social change. The personal narratives of Delfina Cuero and Bonita Nunez are but two examples from a genre that is as diverse and as complex as Indian America. At the same time, these narratives disrupt the expectations that readers and critics have come to assume for American Indian autobiography. Their life experiences depart from the "traditional" story line, and the setting is not the Great Plains or Southwest, but southern California and Mexico. Furthermore, their stories are of daily subsistence and survival in the margins of both Indian and US history. At the same time, their life stories force to confront crucial issues of Indian legal and cultural identity, and their effect on individual lives. (Contains 95 notes.)