Sarah Winnemucca: [Post]Indian Princess and Voice of the Paiutes

Abstract

As anyone who has made such an effort will know, students of Native American literature looking for critical studies on Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844?-1891) will be unsuccessful in finding more than a handful of articles and short references to her work because very little has been done on this author, first American Indian woman to write an autobiography.(1) The reason for this, I suspect, stems from a discomfort critics have for Indian writers like Winnemucca who seem to be overly assimilated and sympathetic with dominant culture. Students of Native American literature look for ways writers overtly resist dominant culture, and Sarah Winnemucca, initially at least, appears taken in by it and therefore of little value for literary study. As Randall Moon writes of William Apess, another early Native American writer, there a political over Apess because he writes too much like a white person, with no trace of a Native `voice,' and [he is] too Christianized to be recognized as an `authentic' representative of Native America (52). The same political unease exists for Winnemucca, and some of few critics who have written about her reflect that sentiment. For example, one of only comments Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands make about her work that Life Among Piutes is heavily biased by her acculturated and Christianized viewpoint (21). Catherine Fowler observes that there widespread distaste for Winnemucca for similar reasons: light of twentieth century ethnohistoric and ethnographic hindsight ..., Sarah's position on assimilation, perhaps more than any other single factor, has led scholars, and to a certain degree her own people, to diminish her contributions to Native American scholarship (33). In studying Native Americans, or any colonized people, one must use term carefully, since some degree of assimilation essential to cultural and physical survival. On other hand, history of as an official means of repressing Native American languages and cultures well-documented. Thus, term here deceiving: perceptions that label writers such as Winnemucca as assimilationist tend to construct a binary assimilationist/tribal opposition that fails to allow for an ethnocritical reading that would look at Winnemucca's position as one that negotiates what Mary Louise Pratt calls the contact which she defines as social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination--like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across globe today (Imperial Eyes 4). Winnemucca spent most of her life in middle of contact zone acting as a mediator for her people, and in negotiating contact zone, Winnemucca, like other colonized people, often appropriated ideas and conventions from dominant culture in order to gain power and respect from Euro-Americans. Thus, as implied by Fowler and Bataille and Sands, suggests an appropriation of dominant culture at expense of tribal, but Winnemucca learned to adapt to onslaught of westward moving emigrants in order to maintain as much of her Native identity as was possible. While there were aspects of Euro-American culture that she valued over her own--for example, she unflinchingly noted that her happiest years were spent living with whites in comfort of Santa Clara, California, while attending Catholic school, her main interest was survival of her tribe in face of relentless colonization of Paiute homeland (Brumble 65). As evident throughout her autobiography, Life Among Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), in seeking a peaceful coexistence with whites (Fowler 34), Winnemucca was willing to negotiate with people who began settling on Paiute homeland when she was a child. …