Indian Princess Research Articles

A Western Pocahontas: Myth, Reality, and Memorialization for Spotted Tail’s Daughter, Mni-Akuwin

Abstract In March 1866, the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief Spotted Tail brought the body of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old daughter, Mni-Akuwin, to Fort Laramie. She had died somewhere in the Powder River country. Before she died, she had asked her father to bury her among the Whites at the fort. Her subsequent scaffold burial in the post cemetery was an unusual mix of military display, Christian rites, and Lakota traditions; and the events surrounding it became a dramatic episode in the story of Native-White relations and western settlement. Almost 140 years later she was memorialized at the fort, a National Park Service site, as a symbol of racial reconciliation. The story of Mni-Akuwin has been told and retold many times through the years, often as a romantic tragedy comparable to the story of early Jamestown and the much-celebrated Pocahontas. The two Native women had a surprising amount in common, including what we know and don’t know about them, what has been ascribed to their motives, and how they have been championed as defenders of European colonists and non-Native settlers. Indian princess mythology, with its insistence on innocence, purity, romantic purpose, and tragedy, has been vital to the persistence of this view—a perspective that has often put reconciliation in the service of White supremacy, dispossession, and rejection of Native culture. As the Mni-Akuwin story illustrates, reconciliation can be problematic.

Nizami, Profane Love and the Melancholy Tradition: Uncovering Amor Heroes in the Indian Princess’ Tale in Seven Beauties

Abstract Nizami Ganjavi’s fourth epic poem, Seven Beauties offers a cohesive picture of many variations or ‘colors’ of love and occupies a prominent position in his prolific oeuvre. Although much has been written on mystical love in Nizami’s works, the status of profane love remains somewhat neglected. A concept introduced through the Latin translation of an Arabic medical treatise on love during the medieval period, studies on profane love gave rise to a specific form of melancholy, referred as amor heroes or love-melancholy in various medico-literary texts. As a polymath, it can be speculated that Nizami’s interests in medicine probably extended to this type of amorous sickness. Upon close reading of the famous tale “King of Black”, clear parallels can be discerned between the literary depiction of the love-lorn king and the medical symptoms of love-melancholy. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to elucidate this connection by drawing on the Galenic and Arabic medical texts on love and melancholy, which eventually influenced Nizami and found its reverberations in the tale of the Indian Princess in Seven Beauties.

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

An Indian Princess and a Mormon Sacagawea? Decolonizing Memories of Our Grandmothers

In two extended Latter-day Saint families, individuals have employed a well-worn settler colonial trope of an Indian princess, as well as a Mormon variation on the legend of Sacagawea, to shape memories about Indigenous women as ancestors. Following larger national trends in the United States and Canada, these Mormons have employed selective memories of Indigenous ancestry as autochthonous legitimation of settler colonial occupation of Indigenous lands. Yet, these case studies stand out in contrast to current literature on racial shifting among self-identified Métis, Abenaki, and Algonquin peoples in Canada and non-federally recognized Cherokee in the United States because members of these Mormon families use stories of Indigenous grandmothers to solidify a white rather than an Indigenous identity. Like racial shifters, however, these families imagine their heritage as more autochthonous than American Indians or First Nations. This paradoxical identity formation is rooted in the peculiar narrative of a sacred text, the Book of Mormon, which represents Israelites (portrayed as white) as the original inhabitants of the Americas, attributes dark skin to a curse for wickedness, and makes legitimate land sovereignty contingent on righteous Christian belief and practice. The scripture imagines a future in which its Indigenous descendants become “white [or pure] and delightsome.” Two centuries of intermarriage of white settler men to Indigenous women have been among the various social means employed by Latter-day Saints to turn American Indians white. These images of an Indian princess and a Mormon Sacagawea are based upon harmful and inaccurate stereotypes that perpetuate settler colonialism.

The “evidential paradigm” in Persian Classics: princes from Sarandip and other clue interpreters

The rich history of Persian literature reception in the West includes such a major event as the translation of the Persian narrative into European languages. This has influenced the comprehension of a new epistemological paradigm in the humanities. The story under discussion is the first chapter of Amir Khusrav Dihlavi’s poem “Eight Paradises” (Hašt bihišt, 1299–1301), in which the Indian princess tells the Sassanian king Bahram Gur a tale of three princes from Sarandip (Sri Lanka, Ceylon). As the plot progresses, the princes restore the events of the past according to clues and signs and repeatedly demonstrate their firāsa or ability to guess based on the analysis of evidence. The stages of European reception of this story are well known. All this material is discussed in the methodologically famous work “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1986) by Carlo Ginzburg, who connected the “evidential paradigm” with the Arabic firāsa, a “complex notion which, in general, designated the ability to pass, on the basis of clues, directly from the known to the unknown”; Ginzburg noted that the Sarandip princes were famous exactly for that ability. In this article, the Persian prose sources of the Three princes tale are under discussion, as well as some other sagacity stories from Persian didactic books (adab). Among the detective characters Abū ʻAlī ibn Sīnā gained particular popularity; in some stories, the great philosopher and author of the fundamental canon “The Medicine” acts as a doctor who recognizes a disease by symptoms and at the same time as a detective who restores the course of events from evidence and refutes unfair accusations before a judge.

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

The Powhatans and the English in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake by David J. Voelker

Reviewed by: The Powhatans and the English in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake by David J. Voelker Rebecca M. Lush (bio) The Powhatans and the English in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake david j. voelker Oxford University Press, 2020 102 pp. The Powhatans and the English in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake is a teaching text designed for the undergraduate history classroom, but its selection of primary texts could also work well in an undergraduate early American literature course. Part of the "Debating American History" series from Oxford UP, this textbook reader takes an argument-model approach to historical study to encourage students to think like historians and engage in the methodologies of the field. Rather than taking a coverage model approach, where students are presented with an account of many events over a longer timeline and may accept those events at face value, the argument-model frames the study of history around key questions that invite deeper reflection on the accuracy of sources and source biases. In this volume the key guiding question, which the editor describes as the "big question," is "How were the English able to displace the thriving Powhatan people from their Chesapeake homelands in the seventeenth century?" The volume provides a general overview of historical information to contextualize this question and includes a glossary of Indigenous terminology. It also includes a timeline visualization of the key events that are [End Page 985] mentioned in the subsequent sources. The most useful section is the one titled "Debating the Question," where selections from primary texts are organized with "guiding questions" at the start of each selection and a "drawing conclusions" section at the end. The questions at the start and end of each primary text encourage student-readers to think critically and to see the archival materials as not offering any easy answers regarding how and why events happened. The selection of primary text includes the usual colonial accounts commonly covered in classes and appearing in other teaching anthologies such as Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Hariot, and Christopher Newport. The book also includes visual and material texts such as engravings and Powhatan's Mantle. Importantly, the primary text selection also includes the Mattaponi oral tradition more recently published by Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela L. Daniel "Little Star," giving students more than just colonial perspectives. Following the "Debating the Question" section filled with primary selections are two case studies. The first explores the subset question "Did Pocahontas rescue John Smith from execution?" and features primary sources by Edward-Maria Wingfield and John Smith with guiding questions for the student to note issues of inconsistency and credibility. The structure of case study 1 encourages students to form their own answers to the question. The first case study would also work well for literature courses that are already looking at this issue via various literary and media representations beyond Wingfield and Smith (such as James Nelson Barker's musical play The Indian Princess or even the 1995 Disney feature film). The second case study explores the subset question "What was the strategy behind the 1622 Powhatan surprise attack?" and features two scholarly essays by historians with different perspectives. The second case study is more fitting for a history classroom context than a literature one. However, the idea behind the structure of case study 2 could be used by instructors to select relevant literary scholarship to have students compare scholarly debate. The selections in this second case study also seem like comparatively older scholarly works, which can work well for a comparative approach to show how conversations in the field have changed. The subset section of case study 2 would have been stronger if it also included a more contemporary scholarly example to reflect the growing place of Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. [End Page 986] Overall, The Powhatans and the English in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake is a useful supplemental text to literary study of early America since its argument-based approach complements the methods of the undergraduate literature classroom. The text also provides instructors with ways to think about how to frame classroom material to encourage active student learning and engagement. [End Page 987] Rebecca M. Lush California State University San Marcos...

Americans

Americans

Between Stereotypes and Resistance: The Politics of Identity in Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World

This paper aims at demonstrating that the portraits of contemporary American Indians in his works resist the fossilized and stereotypical images of Indians, and even go beyond the ethnical boundaries set by ‘traditional’ American Indian literature. After sketching out the lines of criticism on seemingly stereotypical characters by some American Indian writers and scholars, this paper examines how the Spokane writer engages with the controversial idea of ‘Indian’ and ‘Indianness’ in his fiction, especially in The Toughest Indian in the World (2000). As this paper proposes, Alexie’s unflinchingly bold representation of new, unexpected Indian characters informs his serious quest for Indian identity. It should be also considered as a literary strategy because they illustrate ways of resisting any easy definitions or colonial labels of contemporary Native people in the US. For example, Etta Joseph in “Dear John Wayne” is subversive in that her story twists a colonial relationship between a white man and an ‘Indian princess.’

Maria Tallchief, (Native) <em>America's Prima Ballerina</em>: Autobiographies of a Postindian Princess

Maria Tallchief, (Native) America's Prima BallerinaAutobiographies of a Postindian Princess Shannon Toll (bio) All the girls showed an aptitude for dancing, and all were charming and well behaved. I, however, seemed to develop a special rapport with Caroline [Kennedy]. She was only eight, but she was fascinated by my background. That I was part American Indian enthralled her. One afternoon, while we were changing into street clothing after class, she stood alongside me and said in a whisper that she had a question. Her eyes were bright and she seemed all excited. "I want to know what it's like being an Indian." "Well Caroline. It's no different from being anything else. It's my heritage and I'm proud of it. You're Irish and French and American. That's your heritage. You should be proud of that." She peered at me directly with her father's shining eyes. "I'd rather be an American Indian, Miss Tallchief." Maria Tallchief with Larry Kaplan, Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina ________ In this passage from her autobiography, Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina, Tallchief shares with her reader a moment between herself and little Caroline Kennedy, a beloved pupil of Tallchief' during the latter's time as a ballet teacher. While Tallchief had retired from her post as principal dancer on the world's most illustrious stages, this conversation between prima ballerina and American "princess" illustrates Tallchief's multifaceted allure as a celebrated dancer and a woman of Osage descent. While she expresses "pride" in her heritage in the passage, it was also a complicating factor in her relationship to her public, as audiences shared little Caroline Kennedy's almost possessive fascination with her [End Page 50] Native identity, a fascination that caused her performances to be filtered through a lens of colonial anxiety and subsequent exoticization. I have chosen this passages from her autobiography to illustrate how Tallchief encountered her publics as a writer, as America's first prima ballerina, and as an Osage woman. In her autobiography, Tallchief narrates her mastery of Western dance, her ascent to the status of prima ballerina, her pivotal role in establishing an American ballet tradition, and, throughout, her connection to her Osage heritage, and in doing so she establishes her identity as a "postindian princess." While the Indian Princess identity looms large in American consciousness, Tallchief both embodied and complicated this trope in her career, eluding colonial definitions of idealized Indigenous femininity. Beginning with the myth of Pocahontas as John Smith's adoring savior, the Indian Princess is the figurehead for the "legacy of painless 'history' in the early stages of European settlement in North America," constantly reenvisioned in various genres but always playing the same part: that of the conduit for "civilization" in the New World (Lyytinen 83). Moreover, casting Native American women as "princesses" also denies them meaningful agency within discourses of power, rendering them passive and submissive in the public consciousness. This article addresses this passivity ascribed to Indigenous women and describes how a woman such as Tallchief, who ostensibly embodied the Indian Princess prima ballerina—particularly through her tutelage and marriage to acclaimed choreographer George Balanchine—was able to exert agency in an unexpected place. Revealing the ways in which she was initially influenced by public perception of her as a Native American dancer and leading to her later identification with her Osage title, "Princess Two Standards," Tallchief's autobiography provides insight into the construction of her public persona as America's first prima ballerina and "postindian princess." The term "postindian princess" constitutes an intersection between two of Gerald Vizenor's foundational concepts: "manifest manners" and the "postindian." Vizenor writes that "manifest manners are the simulations of dominance; the notions and misnomers that are read as authentic and sustained as representations of Native American Indians." They are the "once bankable simulations of the savage as an impediment to developmental civilization, the simulations that audiences would consume in [End Page 51] Western literature and motion pictures, [which] protracted the extermination of tribal cultures" (Vizenor, Manifest Manners 5). This definition accounts for the "Indian Princess" aspect of Tallchief's representation, as her status as a Native woman...

"The Stereotype of the Indian Princess in J. N. Barker's The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage (1808), and The Walt Disney Film Pocahontas (1995)"

"The Stereotype of the Indian Princess in J. N. Barker's The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage (1808), and The Walt Disney Film Pocahontas (1995)"

Pocahontas, Uleleh, and Hononegah: The Archetype of the American Indian Princess

Pocahontas, Uleleh, and Hononegah: The Archetype of the American Indian Princess

Dalit Women Writings: Breaking the stereotypical annotations of “being an untouchable”

Abstract Indian women writers have established a permanent place in the arena of literature, because they have written with a woman’s point of view and have not imitated the established and stereotypical manners of writing. Most of the earlier Indian women autobiographies are written by educated, high-caste and rich women, especially queens and princess. However in their writings they have not glorified their riches instead have written about the social practices committed on women of their times and thus have expressed a genuine female experience.The Autobiography of an Indian Princess (1921) is one of the earliest writings by an Indian woman. Sunetee Devi (1864-1932), a daughter of Brahma follower Keshav Chandra Sen, who became the Maharani of Cooch Behar, lost her husband early in life. The book is a stepping stone in the realm of Indian women autobiographies as it depicts the inner feelings of most of the Indian women of 19th and 20th century. Another remarkable woman autobiography is India Calling (1934) by Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954). It is the autobiography of India’s first woman lawyer, who raged a struggle against the suppression of women. Sorabji belonged to Parsi-Christian family. She was inspired to choose her job by observing the plight of women who visited her mother. Her book depicts the gender discrimination encountered by her not only in India but also in England where she went to study

From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada by Brian Thorn

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada by Brian Thorn Amanda Ricci Brian Thorn, From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2016) Brian Thorn undertakes an ambitious comparative study in From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada. In this, his first book, Thorn compares and contrasts the differing perspectives of women involved in Alberta's Social Credit Party (scp or Socreds), British Columbia's Communist Party of Canada (ccp) as well as that province's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccp) from 1945 to 1960. The comparison is an intriguing one. In their campaigns to build the "New World Order," as Thorn argues, left- and right-wing women relied upon a common maternalist ethic – that is, exalting women's role in the home and the family – in order to advance very different political, public agendas. In short, the ccp and cpc members advocated for a stronger welfare state, appropriating a maternalist language in part as a means to gain respectability in the conservative Cold War era. Conversely, scp women envisioned a return to pre-capitalist, pre-industrial values. Through their activism, however, the latter implicitly suggested that women deserved a larger role in society. The use of maternalism then, was strategic, complex, and often contradictory. Relying on biographies, the first two chapters outline, respectively, left- and right-wing women's views on collectivism and individualism. They introduce the book's "cast of characters," (18) many [End Page 318] of whom appear in later sections. So that the reader has the luxury to flip back and forth between the text and the appendix, the author helpfully includes brief biographies at the end of the book. In the remaining chapters, Thorn offers a series of case studies in order to illustrate women's views on peace and nuclear disarmament (Chapters 3 and 4) as well as juvenile delinquency (Chapter 6). In Chapter 5, he discusses women-only organizations in all three parties, arguing that they led to a stronger voice for women. Here Thorn adopts the term "safe space" (126) in order to explain the function of these gender-segregated spaces. The latter, however, reads anachronistically, even if it is directed towards today's political parties. Whereas the first two pairs of chapters are mirror images of one another, the last two integrate both left- and right-wing women, drawing connections as well as tracing divergences. Thorn pays careful attention to structures relating to class, ethnicity, family, religion, place, and region in shaping women's activism. From Left to Right, however, could have benefited from a greater engagement with critical whiteness studies, the study of the social construction of whiteness as tied to power and privilege. One Social Credit woman in this study, for example, claimed she was "an honorary Indian princess of a Pegein tribe" and had "been given the name Princess Blue Bird." (51) Yet the author provides no further comment or context. Overall, I was left wondering if more could have been said about the cpc, ccp and Socred women's rapport with racialized and Indigenous women beyond some members' clear evocation of a sense of superiority based on Britishness. Nevertheless, the book provides a window onto the ways in which women's politics were informed by highly local as well as familial factors. Herein lie its strengths. More specifically, From Left to Right vividly presents the personal and political trajectories of cpc, ccf, and scp women, arguing that the two were in fact intertwined. In Chapter 1, for example, we meet Mary Crowe from Nelson, BC, a rank-and-file Communist party supporter. Crowe came from a family of Welsh miners who immigrated to Canada when she was a child. Later, she and her husband joined the cpc under the auspices of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Indeed, as Thorn points out, resource-based areas often produced a pro-union, leftist culture, while small towns and rural areas with economies based on farming, such as those in Alberta, fostered a more conservative political climate. Significantly, both Crowe...

A Long Road Behind Us, a Long Road Ahead: Towards an Indigenous Feminist National Inquiry

Since the invasion of North America by white male colonizers, Indigenous women and girls have been constructed as homogenized and dehumanized “Indian princesses” and “savage squaws.” These constructions, albeit false, have real consequences, resulting in disproportionate rates of male violence against Indigenous women and girls in the context of a contemporary for-profit rape culture. In 2015, the Canadian federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into violence against Indigenous women and girls. This article recommends an expressly Indigenous feminist framework in order to comprehensively address the issue of male violence against Indigenous women and girls in a national inquiry.

The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press

The two most important nineteenth-century illustrated weeklies, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly, represented Native American women largely through familiar racial stereotypes. In words and pictures, Indian women were depicted as idealized Indian princesses or as downtrodden squaws. Young, “civilized” Indian women were represented as good mothers, like white women, but other women—“squaws”—were identified by the hardships of their lives, especially at the hands of Indian men. Other Indian women were portrayed as silly or foolish. Over time, some Southwestern Indian women were depicted as craft workers, a category that emphasized their exoticism and cultural “otherness.” Both newspapers followed the ethnocentric prejudices of the era, constructing Native American women as symbolically useful outsiders, alternatively alluring or repulsive, but always contained within the ruling ideology of Euro-American culture.

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA

Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 (review)

Reviewed by: Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 Rebecca M. Lush Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840. By William H. Truettner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 159 pages, $39.95. William Truettner, a senior curator with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents a fascinating look at portraits of North American Indians by white artists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The monograph’s main argument examines the changing relationship between portraits of Indians and political issues surrounding empire and imperialism. In particular, Truettner examines the shift from the “Noble Savage” painting campaign to what the author dubs the “Republican Indian”; thus, the book examines changing political and [End Page 313] imperial conditions from English colonization to the early republic. Truettner argues that “Noble Savage” paintings emphasized the sitter’s ability to navigate white and indigenous culture in a colonial context where Native allies were key to English success against other European colonizers. “Republican Indian” paintings often highlighted the incompatibility of white and Indian cultures in the early United States, eventually marking Native peoples as a vanishing race. The author situates his analysis of a wide array of paintings within the political contexts of the time period, noting the inclusion of important items of material culture such as medallions and peace medals in the creation of a genre of paintings he refers to as “portrait diplomacy” (5). In Noble Savage paintings, Truettner identifies the importance of cross-dressing where the Indian sitter wears clothes and accessories from both indigenous and European cultures and how this cross-dressing enables a fluid political affiliation for patron and sitter. Additionally, the Noble Savage painting campaign often borrows from aristocratic and classical artistic conventions and incorporates iconography that emphasizes the elite status of the Indian sitter who was treated as a diplomat or delegate of his tribe. Truettner argues that the portrait archetype of the Noble Savage, often produced during formal sittings in artists’ studios, was frequently employed in connection to the Mohawks and other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, due in part to the political prestige these tribes held with British colonial officials. The Republican Indian campaign includes paintings of Plains tribes (such as the Osage, Mandan, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Crow) from the first four decades of the nineteenth century when artists increasingly journeyed west to paint Indians, thus lending a more ethnographic approach. Republican Indian portraiture emphasized the sitter’s tribal affiliation and even branched out to include scenes of typical Plains Indian life such as buffalo hunts. One of the most significant contributions of the book is its linking of the British trans-Atlantic world to that of the early national period of the United States. Truettner notes how the shift from colonies to nation ushered in the need for a new perspective on Indians to accommodate the burgeoning imperialistic westward movement of white Americans. The book’s consideration of the vacillating representation of Indians as “savage” and “civil” complements the relatively recent discussion of the racialization of Natives in works from scholars across disciplines, such as historian Joyce Chaplin and literary scholar Gordon Sayre. Despite the fascinating commentary and historical context provided, there are, however, two main drawbacks to the monograph. The first is the scant attention given to representations of Native women. Truettner offers a cursory glance at a handful of fascinating portrayals of Indian women from the Republican Indian campaign and notes that these images have more in common with the Indian Princess mode. A more developed discussion of how the Indian Princess mode connects to the seemingly male-dominated categories of Noble Savage and Republican Indians would have been instructive. Furthermore, the book does not fully articulate the origins of the Noble Savage or Republican [End Page 314] Indian campaigns; situating these formalized portraits within a more detailed discussion of the widely circulated engravings and water colors of North American Indians by white artists from the sixteenth century would have helped create a more comprehensive macronarrative. Truettner discusses two key approaches to rendering Native subjects and has deftly arranged a dizzying number of reproduced portraits into a coherent narrative. Most of the included images are reproduced in full color...

Gender, Literacy, and Sovereignty in Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes

Gender, Literacy, and Sovereignty in Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes Leah Sneider (bio) Arming themselves with “manifest destiny” rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justification for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. However, Native tribes and landed Mexicans continued to stand in the way of not only “civilized progress” but the vast riches that gold and the California soil offered the ever-growing numbers of US citizens. Relationships with the Paiute Nation became key to movement into the area as their lands stood directly in the path of settlers and miners moving toward California through the Sierra Nevada.1 Paiutes were subject to various methods of removal and attempts at assimilating or civilizing the Indian, then became wards of the state through the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871. Daughter to the chief, Sarah Winnemucca witnessed and engaged in her tribe’s struggles to remain in their ancestral lands and maintain sovereignty while attempting to build balanced relationships with their white relatives according to her cultural traditions. Her Life among the Piutes, Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) is the first autobiographical account written by a Native woman and reveals valuable information regarding this history and conflict. However, her autobiography focuses less on her life and more on the trials and tribulations of her tribe’s relationship with the United States. Born around 1844, Winnemucca learned to read and write English while a domestic worker for a white woman after expulsion from a convent school for being Indian. Furthermore, her birth coincided with the politicization [End Page 257] of the women’s rights movement with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848; leaders in the movement would later be vital in supporting Winnemucca. With such a history transpiring around her, Winnemucca learned about cultural and gender differences at a young age. She became a translator and then an activist, using her strong literacy skills as both a lecturer and an author. Her autobiography appeals to readers to stop the government from removing the Paiutes from their land or attempting to control them. While on tour with her stories and lectures, Winnemucca portrayed herself as “a civilized Indian woman” dressed in supposedly traditional costume that seemingly reinforces stereotypes of the “other.”2 However, she would complicate such stereotypes by changing into modern American female attire in the second part of her act. Winnemucca’s performances negotiate “popular discourses of womanhood” and the “Indian princess” by “position[ing] and reposition[ing] herself as both apart from and a part of Euro-American and Paiute discourse.”3 While other scholars focus on similar performances of femininity in her autobiography, I contend that Winnemucca simultaneously performs masculinity and enacts Indigenous feminism through complementary and reciprocal relationships that promote social balance. Combining a variety of others’ definitions and explanations, I define Indigenous feminism as the responsibility for the nurturance and growth of Native communities through storytelling as a communal process and action reflecting personal sovereign power. As Sandy Grande explains, “For indigenous women, the central dominating force is colonization, not patriarchy; and the definitive political project is decolonization, not feminism.”4 Decolonization requires stripping away colonial ideologies that have infected tribal identities and, as Linda Smith elucidates, “left a permanent wound on the societies and communities who occupied the lands named and claimed under imperialism.”5 Indigenous feminism helps to contextualize the history of colonization and opens “a space to plan, to strategize, to take greater control” over the decolonization process.6 More to the point, it advances the process of decolonization through the recovery of Native stories and histories. Writing and reading texts from this perspective is also, I believe, a form of social activism. At the core of my understanding of Indigenous feminism are the principles of complementarity and reciprocity. Complementarity summarizes concepts of social responsibility and sharing; reciprocity involves [End Page 258] the actions or performances necessary to maintain or enact complementarity by recognizing and attempting to respectfully know and/or respond to the “other” in...

In Visions

In Visions Karen Salyer McElmurray (bio) Next to my desk I keep quotes and photographs and my favorite books of visions. Marc Chagall. William Blake. On the wall, a poem about disaster. Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved be at Peace by William Butler Yeats. Next to the computer screen, a poem of hope. The Twenty-First Psalm. On my bookshelves, a much-read Bible from my childhood, with underlined pages in The Book of Revelation. Essay collections. Novels I love. Isabel Allende. Jeanette Winterson. And beside those books are boxes of family photos. There's one of my Aunt Ruby, who saw visions of herself as Jesus, crucified. There's the photo of a house where, I'm told, a great aunt of mine named Stella saw visions and lived most of the years of her life alone. And there are many photographs of my mother. These days, my mother, lives alone like I do, sees couch throws transformed to little girls and the bedroom curtains become groups of boys at night outside her window. And myself? The shadows and wings of my past hover in these rooms, and I write stories, hoping that words will keep me safe. I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, where visions were as real as the black dirt in the garden beside my grandparents' house. Ghosts walked. Broken mirrors resounded with catastrophe. And in my own home, I read stories of saints and revelation, of Golgotha and ascension. The Holy Ghost, in my recently baptized imagination, was somewhere between John Fox's Book of Martyrs and Sunday afternoon reruns of the Mighty Sons of Hercules. One night when I was nine, I believed I heard God's voice between strong gusts of wind and flashes of lightning. Daughter, the voice said, I have need of you. I dreamed of Jesus walking on my subdivision lawn, his robes like wings. I needed stories, needed them desperately. My mother, who suffered from an illness I would, when I was grown, diagnose on my own as obsessive-compulsion, restricted much of my childhood. By day, I sat in a recliner chair in the living room and went outside only when she allowed me to go there, and only then to the confines of a small patio. When the sight of other patios was too tempting and I dared to leave our yard, and she saw the grass clippings between my toes, she'd ask, can't you do anything but make a mess? My mother dressed me, combed me, and bathed me [End Page 16] until I was nearly fourteen years old. I sometimes still dream of her hands, chapped from washing and dusting and tidying the world. I see them sanitizing me in a tub of warm water, water I'd close my eyes and envision as holy, as anything not what it was—a woman bathing a child-not-yet-woman. In my adult understanding of such abuse, I imagine these rituals of cleanliness kept her safe from some terrible, never-named ghosts of her own childhood. But when I was a child, all those years until I left home at fourteen, it was stories I turned to for comfort and to transport me beyond that too-clean world. By day, I read piles of books from the public library. Horse books, dog books, books about the sea. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, D. H. Lawrence. Books too young, books too old, and any book I'd read for hours in the living room recliner where I led my life. By night, stories were my salvation. Each night before she went to bed, my mother, her white gloves heavy with the lotions that soothed her chapped hands, smoothed me, tucked me, scolded me for kicking the sheets. Stories? Maybe they began at those moments, or later, when there were my parent's voices from the next room. I love you like no other woman. Then why, why? As their words collided in the dark, I went places they never imagined. I made up stories. Captivity tales. Adventures on the ocean. Castles in France. I was a hostage, a magician, and an Indian princess. I envisioned places...