This author, a teacher of American Indian and Alaskan Native literature at an all-native school, contends that suppression of Indigenous literary texts is an aspect of colonization, and that reclamation of Indigenous American literature is a critical component of cultural sovereignty. In her classes, she emphasizes the hybrid nature of English-language Indigenous poetry and prose, as well as the sign system of text-images (glyphs and pictographs) used by Indigenous people in the northern and Plains areas of North America. She explains that she has chosen to use Cheyenne texts and images for personal reasons, as that is the region where she lived. One aspect of the study of these ledger images and texts discussed in this paper is the manner in which these texts can inform contemporary writers' history and methods. They are vehicles of continuity, following historic and personal narratives into the present time. Such biographic and autobiographic books create a complex narrative map for contemporary readers. Individual drawings and short sequences coexist in the pages, commenting upon each other, thereby interacting to create a whole work of literature. (Contains 4 notes.)