Sarah Winnemucca Goes to Washington: Rhetoric and Resistance in the Capital City

Abstract

Th e complex, oft en troubled relationship between American Indians and whites has played out numerous times on the national stage of Washington, DC, not only in theaters that have showed performances like Pocahontas, or Th e Settlers of Virginia: A National Drama in 1836 but in the hosting of Native American delegations since the creation of the United States.1 In January 1880 Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca accompanied her father, her brother Natches, an unidentifi ed young relative, and the Washo leader known as Captain Jim to DC (see fi g. 1). She and the others were invited in large part because of a petition she had sent to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz criticizing William Rinehart, the Malheur Reservation agent who would become Winnemucca’s ardent enemy. Th e Northern Paiutes who had been invited to DC by the US government had not been formally elected to represent their nation; Northern Paiute society traditionally consisted of bands, each with a headman, so that little centralized governance existed. Winnemucca’s father had come to be known by whites as Chief Winnemucca, a refl ection more of nonNatives’ attempts to locate authority in a single fi gure rather than an accurate depiction of his stature among Northern Paiutes. At least since Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, known as Truckee, had welcomed white settlers to the area, the family had enjoyed a certain political power in relation to white society. Th e delegation went to the US capital in hopes of restoring Northern Paiutes to the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, where they had initially enjoyed comparatively good treatment by agent Samuel Parrish. In early 1879, however, following the Bannock War, residents of the Malheur Reservation had been forcibly removed to Yakima (now spelled Yakama) Reservation in Washington Territory, a 350mile journey that took a number of lives.