Textual Performance and The Western Frontier: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

Abstract

T e x t u a l P e r f o r m a n c e a n d t h e W e s t e r n F r o n t i e r : S a r a h W i n n e m u c c a H o p k i n s ’s L i f e a m o n g t h e P i u t e s : T h e i r W r o n g s a n d C l a i m s D a n i e l l e T i s i n g e r Western American literature of the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century frequently reflects the course ofEuro-American cultural and technological progress from east to west. Literature of contact between Native Americans and White Americans particularly minors a concern about national identity as it becomes linked to national geog­ raphy. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and TranS'Culturation, Mary Louise Pratt explores the “possibilities and perils of writing in what I like to call ‘contact zones,’ social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” later suggesting that her use of the term “con­ tact zone” is frequently “synonymous with ‘colonial frontier’” (4, 6). Frederick Jackson Turner’s emphasis in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) on the importance of the frontier in American cultural development offers an important site for examining the ways in which both Native and White American authors establish relationships as the two races come into contact with each other. The “contact zone” of nineteenth and early twentieth century American lit­ erature is not only one of history, but also one of defining the new nation. It embodies the perceptions of each culture about the other and at the same time emphasizes the contested arena of Indian policy and legislation sunounding land possession. The western frontier, then, becomes the site of not only land acquisition or loss in White and Native texts, but also becomes the site of an American cultural identity that encompasses both racial groups. In many texts written by White authors, Native Americans are placed into a constructed category which suggests their disappearance. Early nineteenth century White travel writers such as Washington Irving, George Catlin, and Francis Parkman described the western prairies as disappearing because of the encroachment of White civiliza­ tion from the East.l Even as late as 1968, in his text The Return of the Vanishing American, historian and scholar Leslie Fiedler notes that 1 7 2 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMMER 2 0 0 2 “[b]ooks with Indians are, as any small boy can tell you ‘Western,’ and the Western we were sure up to a decade ago, had vanished along with the Indian into a region where no ‘serious reader’ ventured” (13). Fiedler’s comment illustrates the connection between Native Americans and the western frontier as well as how they become marginalized; in his 1982 complementary text The Vanishing American, Brian Dippie explains that “[t]he Vanishing American became a habit of thought. . . . The ‘inexorable destiny’ of the Indians, like that of the wilderness with which they shared an almost symbiotic relationship, was to recede before civilization’s advance” (15). Fiedler and Dippie inescapably link Native Americans to the landscape (particularly the western frontier), highlighting the pervasive motif of the “Vanishing American.” Native American authors, however , present accounts of Indians who have neither vanished nor are about to vanish. Native American critic Gerald Vizenor calls these texts nanatives of “survivance,” “the new stories of tribal courage” that convert “thousands of generations [to] the invention of the Indian . . . with humor, new stories, and the simulations of survivance” (4-5)?- Aware that the ability to survive in the changing environment of the American West means changing their worldviews, Native American writers present ways in which Indian and White populations can interact yet remain true to their own cultural heritages. In her autobiography Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (ca. 1844-1891) combines her life story and tribal history with a...