Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority
in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and
Claims (1883)
John Carlos Rowe
Abstract
In her role as “the Piute Princess,” both onstage and in local and national political
theaters, Sarah Winnemucca would present herself as the first feminine leader of
the diverse bands of the Northern Paiutes. Sarah Winnemucca’s self-fashioning as
a Paiute leader, language translator, military negotiator, political mediator, stage performer, literary author, and educator is well known, and yet she is rarely acknowledged for the extraordinary diversity of her different roles. Life among the Piutes:
Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) is far more than simply an appeal for political recognition of and economic aid to the Northern Paiutes; the book legitimates Sarah
Winnemucca’s authority to speak both for her tribal community and to U.S. federal
leaders. Yet in fabricating a “nation” from the scattered bands of the Northern Paiutes and in her own role as their hereditary leader, Sarah Winnemucca exemplifies a
central problem of transnationalism and its study in the national period. By constituting her own community as a nation, which might negotiate with the U.S. government and military, she helps legitimate national values, including legal and property
rights that would have devastating consequences for Indigenous people under the
provisions of the Dawes Act (1887).
Key Words: Indigenous studies; nineteenth-century U.S. literature; Northern
Paiutes, Sarah Winnemucca, Life among the Piutes
Our mothers told us that the whites were killing everybody and eating them. So
we were all afraid of them. […] Oh, what a fright we all got one morning to hear
some white people were coming. […] My poor mother was carrying my little sister
on her back, and trying to make me run; but I was so frightened I could not move
my feet, and while my poor mother was trying to get me along my aunt overtook
us, and she said to my mother: “Let us bury our girls, or we shall all be killed and
eaten up.” So they went to work and buried us […] and there we were left all day.
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes 11.
Amerikastudien / American Studies 67.1 (2022): 57-79
57
John Carlos Rowe
Once there lived a giant named Tse’nahaha who killed people by looking at
them. […] A group of Indians were playing the hand game […] and were having
a good time. They had stationed a woman outside to watch for Tse’nahaha.
After a while she heard Tse’nahaha coming. […] The woman tried to warn the
people that the giant was coming, but they did not hear her. […] The woman
became frightened, and jumped into a little pit and pulled a basket over herself. […] When he looked at anyone in the house, that person died at once. […]
Soon they were all dead. […] Then the woman left the pit and went inside […].
She called the baby, and said, “Let’s go away.” She set the house on fire, took
the baby, and went away. […] [A]nother giant, Pu’wihi came along […] picked
up the baby, holding his head between his second and third fingers […]. The
woman was very frightened and tried to hide. She set her digging-stick in
a clump of wild oats and vaulted as far as she could. When the giant came
back […] he did not see her. […] He said, “[…] Now I’ll make a fire and grind up
this baby.” He found a large flat rock, ground up the baby, and ate him. […]
After a while he went to sleep. Then the woman got up and made another
jump toward the east, to the house of her aunt. When the woman came to
her aunt’s house, she was safe. […] The Paiute Indians come from this woman.
“The Woman and the Giants: A Paiute Legend”1
1 Like most Native
American legends drawn
from oral culture, this
legend has numerous
versions. I have used this
version because of its
resonance with Sarah
Winnemucca’s account
of settler colonials as cannibals in Life among the
Piutes. For another, more
scholarly version, see
Jarold 232-35. Jarold notes
that the Northern Paiute
Cannibal giant is named
Nümüzo’ho, combining
the Paviotso word Nümü
(the people, Paiutes) with
zoho (to pound, crush)
(233). In several versions
of these traditional stories, the Cannibal giants
are also represented as
White.
When, on October 27, 2016, brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy were
acquitted of federal conspiracy and weapons charges for their six-week
occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Southeastern
Oregon, little news attention was given to Native American history and
current land claims on this site. The Bundys’ defense of their actions
turned in part on their attorney Marcus R. Mumford’s arguments that
the Bundys were responding to the U.S. government’s “overreach” in
claiming land for the refuge that belonged more properly to local people.
Like their father, Cliven Bundy, who had refused to pay the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) fees to graze his cattle on BLM land near
his ranch outside Mesquite, Nevada, Ammon and Ryan claimed to
challenge the right of the federal government to own land within any
state borders (Sherwood and Johnson). Established on August 18, 1908,
by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is located in the Harney Basin of Southeastern Oregon and consists
primarily of the territory including Malheur, Mud, and Harney lakes,
known for their diversity of waterfowl. The territory set aside for the
refuge coincides largely with that of the Malheur Indian Reservation,
which was established in 1872 by Ulysses S. Grant with the designation
of 1.8 million acres as home for “all the roving and straggling bands in
eastern and southeastern Oregon” (Allen). Surveyed on land used continuously by the ancestors of modern Bannock and Northern Paiutes for
nearly five thousand years, the reservation lasted only until 1882-1883,
when it was decommissioned by President Chester A. Arthur and its
lands returned to the public domain (Soucie 71-76).
Outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, where the
Bundy brothers and five other defendants were tried and acquitted of
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
most charges, a coalition of Native Americans led by representatives of
the Burns Paiute band demonstrated in support of Native land claims
and sacred sites.2 Among the Bundys’ several destructive acts during
their occupation, they used a bulldozer to plow a road directly through a
Paiute burial site. As several leaders of the Native demonstration noted,
the occupation of Malheur brought unexpected attention to Native land
rights and human rights (Siegler). Whereas the Bundys’ militia-style
movement insisted that the U.S. government had no constitutional right
to own “public land,” Native activists pointed out that, as “first peoples,”
their land claims should always have priority on the basis of original
habitation. When President Theodore Roosevelt created the Malheur
National Wildlife Refuge, he assembled the tract of land from public
holdings and private lands that owners were willing to sell to the U.S.
government. Native Americans, especially members of the Burns Paiute
tribe, still contest both the legal rights of the federal government and
those settlers who claimed ownership of land in Harney Basin.
For Western activists intent on turning federal lands over to state and
local authorities for more “beneficial” administration, the issue remains a
conventional fight over federal or states’ rights. The Bundys challenge the
federal government but not the United States, claiming their activism is
profoundly patriotic. Throughout the western United States, arguments
based on states’ rights have been used in recent years to reject federal
wildlife regulations, limitations on extractive industries, such as oil and
gas, and the protection of federally controlled land for parks and conservation. Native American protests generally challenge all of these nationalist land and rights claims, affirming tribal sovereignty that precedes the
settler-colonial nation. The solidarity of Native Americans in response
to the Bundys’ occupation in Oregon and violation of federal laws in
Nevada was certainly based on the self-evidence of their rights to first
possession of Harney Basin, but the major media neglect of their historical claims indicates how difficult it remains for their voices to be heard.
Sarah Winnemucca anticipates these questions of local and federal property rights at the Malheur Reservation and how Indigenous
claims can be recognized in their own terms.3 Cheryl Walker writes that
“Winnemucca positions herself on the border,” referring more to her role
as a mediator between Indigenous and national rights than to her spatial
relation to the geographical boundaries themselves,
advocating accommodation rather than assimilation, preservation of Indian
traditions and language but transformation of the hunter-gatherer culture
into an agricultural one. […] [S]he wanted citizenship for Native Americans and congressional representation, but […] she fiercely defended her
own people and their culture as fundamentally equal (or even superior) to
the whites. (139)
Her efforts to negotiate such rights for the Northern Paiutes should be
understood in the contexts of transnationalism, insofar as she acknowledges the pre-national sovereignty of Indigenous peoples now forced to
Amst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
59
2 The acquittal of Ammon and Ryan Bundy for
the takeover of Malheur
surprised many, especially
Native American activists,
but they are still on trial
in three separate cases
in Nevada, including the
one now underway in Las
Vegas, stemming from
their participation with
their father, Cliven, in
his 2014 confrontation
with the Bureau of Land
Management on his ranch
outside Mesquite, Nevada
(see Bass).
3 I refer throughout
this essay to Sarah
Winnemucca both to
avoid confusion with
her grandfather, “Old
Winnemucca,” and her
father, “Winnemucca the
Younger,” as well as to
avoid the inappropriate
reference by so many
scholars to her as “Sarah.”
Although my choice at
times appears repetitive, I
prefer that risk to the gender bias inherent in referring to historic women by
their first names—a form
of reference rarely used
with historic men. Her
given name in Paviotso
is Thocmetony, meaning
“shell flower,” but she used
her Euro-American name
in her correspondence
and publications.
John Carlos Rowe
live, by the U.S. legal definition, as “domestic dependent nations.” This
troublesome legal phrase from John Marshall’s Supreme Court decision
Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia (1831) suggests that the only way to accommodate Indigenous sovereignty within U.S. law would be to incorporate it within the U.S. nation (Marshall 295). In the following passage
from Marshall’s ruling, the rhetorical contradiction of “nations” that are
both “domestic” and “dependent” makes sense only if we interpret the
phrase as a legal fiction intended to subordinate Indigenous communities to U.S. political and legal rule.4
Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and,
heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy until that right
shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government, yet it may
well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged
boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated
foreign nations. They may, more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. (Marshall 295)
4 Another legal fiction
of this sort, not overturned legally until 1992 in
the Mabo Case, was the
British colonial doctrine
of Terra Nullius, which
declared that the land of
Australia was not owned
by the aboriginal peoples
of the continent, that literally there was “no land”
there until it was enclosed
by British settler colonials
following the “discovery”
of the continent by Captain Cook in 1788, with
the arrival of the so-called
“First Fleet.”
The “perhaps” in the final sentence has had, of course, extraordinarily
ambiguous implications not only for the law but in the very material
circumstances of Native Americans from 1831 to the present.
Far from a utopian idea, transnationalism in Indigenous contexts
often represents another aspect of the myth of the vanishing American: that Indigenous people should become “civilized” by adopting the
modern geopolitical form of the nation. Implicit in the Marshall Court’s
rhetoric is the idea that these legal ambiguities will vanish as Native
Americans subordinate themselves legally to and avail themselves of the
protection of the United States. This assumption of historical “progress”
also inflects the epistemological practices of Euro-Americans in relation
to Indigenous Peoples. Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance is organized in terms of the colonization of languages, memory,
and space by European imperial powers intent on suppressing the ep­i­
ste­mic differences of Indigenous societies in the Western Hemisphere
(v). Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia seems a textbook example of this
sort of epistemological conflict.
Jodi A. Byrd has described this problem as “colonial cacophony”:
In geographical localities of the Americas, where histories of settlers and
arrivants map themselves into and on top of indigenous peoples, understanding colonialism as a cacophony of contradictorily hegemonic and horizontal struggles offers an alternative way of formulating and addressing the
dynamics that continue to affect peoples as they move and are made to move
within empire. (53)
In strictly intellectual terms, it is possible to sort out the different social,
cultural, and epistemological factors dividing two or more competitive
societies. Yet when negotiating agreements and policies affecting such
different communities, power differentials usually determine the results.
Transnationalism has played a key role in recent Indigenous studies,
because it often poses an alternative to nationalist rhetoric and episte60
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
mology. Following Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Jace Weaver conceptualizes The Red Atlantic as a historically and geographically complex
region for Indigenous contributions to modernity. Weaver’s temporal
framework is millennial in scope, beginning in the year 1000, well before European invasions of North America and extending well into the
eras of colonialism and nationalism. Like Gilroy, Weaver imagines a
modern cosmopolitan perspective for otherwise minoritized peoples—
Weaver’s Indigenous Peoples and Gilroy’s African Americans and Afro
British—that functions beyond nation-specific values. For both scholars, modernity encompasses a “double consciousness” that includes both
the imperial violence of the West and the neglected contributions of
colonized and enslaved peoples (Weaver 14; Gilroy 33-34). Drawing on
pre-national African and Indigenous retentions, Gilroy and Weaver argue that minoritized subjects can sometimes speak through and beyond
their nationalist frameworks.
In a similar sense, Robert Warrior has written about the ability of
Native non-fiction writers to employ “intellectual trade routes” to communicate Indigenous experiences to Native and non-Native subjects in
The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (181). Like Gilroy and
Weaver, Warrior recognizes that “under the sign of modernity, some
of these old routes have been forgotten through disuse,” showing how
many Native writings are “palimpsests of earlier forms of intellectualism” (Warrior 183). Whether invoking pre-national Indigenous lifeways
or gesturing toward post-national cosmopolitanism, all these Indigenous scholars imagine transnationalism as a potential alternative to the
inherent colonialism of the Euro-American nation-state.
Yet in the midst of unrelenting and unpredictable colonial violence,
Indigenous subjects rarely have the opportunity to develop, much less
deploy, transnational rhetoric or behavior that challenges the dominant
ideology. It is far more likely that the conflict initiated by settler colonials produces ripple effects among Indigenous communities that require modes of negotiation critical to those communities’ survival. Ned
Blackhawk has analyzed in Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires
in the Early American West the “intricate strategies for survival” of Southwestern tribes, especially in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, noting that “survival often necessitated integration into the region’s evolving settler economies” (10).
As advocates of Indigenous sovereignty and critics of imperial violence, Indigenous scholars prefer the utopian vision of transnationalism, so beautifully exemplified in Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of
America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco,
1560-1945. Brickhouse traces the fascinating history of how the Indigenous Paquiquineo became the Spanish colonial scribe Don Luis de
Velasco, only to lead Jesuit missionaries into the ambush that would
defend his tribal community from colonization. An explicit contribution
to the Red Atlantic, Brickhouse’s history stresses the rhetorical efforts,
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61
John Carlos Rowe
especially in the Spanish archives, of Indigenous subjects like Paquiquineo to “unsettle” colonial projects, such as the failed Spanish colony
of Ajacán (Brickhouse, The Unsettlement 46). Yet, even Paquiquineo’s
success is eventually appropriated by nationalist (especially U.S.) history, reminding us of Ned Blackhawk’s warning that “hybridity, adaptation, and exchange more clearly characterize” the historical experiences
of Indigenous Peoples than “fixed ethnographic categories” (8).
Too often, critics of U.S. settler-colonialism conclude hastily that
the ways Indigenous lives and institutions are influenced by their response to colonial violence is simply assimilation. With the enormous
power differentials that distinguish Indigenous communities and colonial invaders (and their settler-colonial successors), we dismiss such
“assimilation” as inevitable and yet hardly worth our attention. My argument in what follows is that Blackhawk’s “hybridity, adaptation, and
exchange” need not be treated as the inevitable stages of assimilation,
but as complex modes of negotiation that have consequences for both
sides, however unequal, of surviving colonial violence. Blackhawk offers a fascinating account of how the equestrian Utes of the Colorado
Plateau changed historically in their military, economic, and diplomatic negotiations with Spanish, Mormon, and U.S. colonial forces (10).
When considered as historically and socially complex adaptations, the
Ute history written by Blackhawk is in fact a sustained instance of transnational negotiation. To be sure, this history may have strengthened
colonial powers in the region by stabilizing relations with the powerful
Utes, but it also gave geopolitical authority to the Utes. Such history
should interest us, not because it leads inevitably to the overthrow of
colonial power and to the decolonization so often invoked by advocates
of Indigenous sovereignty, but because it offers a more nuanced history
of relations on both (or ideally, all) sides of the frontier.
Blackhawk makes only passing reference to Sarah Winnemucca and
the Northern Paiutes, also caught in colonial violence in the Great Basin, noting that “Winnemucca’s autobiography, Life among the Piutes […]
is anchored in articulations of Indigenous trauma […]” (Blackhawk 272).
He seems to imply that Winnemucca’s activist work, of which Life among
the Piutes is the most significant, merely represents the trauma of colonial violence. My argument in what follows is that Sarah Winnemucca’s
struggle to construct a transnational authority for herself as performer,
translator, political lobbyist, author, and educator was a highly self-conscious effort to represent the Northern Paiutes in a politically and culturally coherent manner. Stereotyped too often as the “Piute Princess,”
Sarah Winnemucca worked in different languages and media to achieve
the only viable sort of transnational authority available at the time for
the loosely knit bands of the Northern Paiutes.
Hence, Sarah Winnemucca’s claim to represent the Northern Paiutes
as a “nation”— whose status would resemble, even if its population and
power did not, that of the United States—had to be fabricated in the
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
various ways it was to prevent her people from being utterly destroyed.
And yet her successful construction of “her people” often followed U.S.
military and federal policies that treated the twenty-three bands as a
single group. This ideological problem is reflected in her book’s odd title.
Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims mimics an idiom of numerous nineteenth-century travel narratives written from the perspective of an informed outsider (consider, for instance, Waters’s Life among
the Mormons [1886]).5 Raised and educated in part in settler-colonial
communities in Santa Cruz, California, and along the Nevada-California border, Sarah Winnemucca could emulate an outsider’s perspective
of her natal community, but by the time she wrote Life among the Piutes,
she had returned to live among her own people. The title grants something like metaphoric sovereignty and unity to the Northern Paiutes
while curiously aligning their nominal leader, Sarah Winnemucca, with
a settler-colonial perspective and values.
In her early stage performances with her father and other family
members, Sarah Winnemucca worked to create authority for the Northern Paiutes that often ended up relying on stereotypes of the romantic
and exotic “Indian.” Reports of early performances in Virginia City, Nevada, in San Francisco, and in Stockton refer to tableaux vivants, exhibiting stereotypical scenes of “Indian” life, such as: “‘The War Council,’
‘Taking a Scalp,’ ‘Grand Scalp Dance,’ and ‘The Coyote Dance’” (Zan­
jani 75). As these titles suggest, the Winnemuccas drew on practices
more typical of Plains Indians, like the Sioux and Cheyenne, rather
than their own tribe, the peaceful Northern Paiutes. In San Francisco,
“they added a lecture on Indians,” including “several scenes showing
Pocahontas saving the life of Capt. John Smith” (76). Such “Romantic
Entertainments,” as they were dubbed in the San Francisco press, relied
on a Western fantasy of the “Indian,” more than on the practices of
Northern Paiute culture (76).
In her more than four hundred public lectures, however, Sarah
Winnemucca refined her extemporaneous account of Northern Paiute
lifeways that would become the core of Life among the Piutes. In 1883,
she was able to quickly compose the book in Boston and publish it in
the same year with the copyediting of Mary T. Peabody Mann and the
publishing contacts of Elizabeth P. Peabody (Zanjani 237-39). The actual publication is interesting in regard to Sarah Winnemucca’s complex authority both as a Northern Paiute leader and representative of her
people to influential Euro-Americans. The Peabody sisters and other
supporters of Native American causes believed that the book should be
published in time for the next session of U.S. Congress. In the interests
of speeding publication, they helped sell subscriptions to support the
book’s publication. Gae Whitney Canfield notes that prominent figures
like John Greenleaf Whittier and Lidian Jackson Emerson, the wife
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, subscribed, and “Elizabeth found five persons who underwrote the expenses of publication for a total of $ 600.”
Amst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
63
5 William Elkanah
Waters was a U.S. Army
surgeon who recounted
his journey to resupply
frontier forts along the
western route that passed
through Salt Lake City.
His nominally innocent
travel narrative, addressed
to audiences curious
about the Mormons,
had been commissioned
by Reverend John Philip
Newman of the Methodist Episcopal Church
of New Orleans, for his
newspaper, The Advocate. Reverend Newman
would visit Salt Lake City
two years later in 1870,
when he debated Orson
Pratt, one of the leaders of
the Church of Latter-Day
Saints, on the subject,
“Does the Bible Sanction
Polygamy?”
John Carlos Rowe
Subscriptions paid for the first six hundred copies, leaving the proceeds
from the book’s publication “free and clear” for Sarah to use to defer her
own expenses while on her eastern tour (206).
The title page of the first edition designates the author, editor, printing, and publication in curious contestation:
Life Among the Piutes:
Their Wrongs and Claims.
BY
SARAH WINNEMUCCA HOPKINS.
EDITED BY
MRS. HORACE MANN,
AND
PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR.
BOSTON:
FOR SALE BY CUPPLES, UPHAM & CO.
283 WASHINGTON STREET;
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, NEW YORK;
AND BY THE AUTHOR.
1883
Both the prominence of Mary Peabody Mann’s role as editor and the
subscription notice, “printed for the author,” suggest a work that is not
quite legitimate in Sarah Winnemucca’s own name. Like Black Hawk’s
Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, Dictated by Himself
or Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An
American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), the authorizing claims are presumed to be defenses of the legitimacy of the Native’s and former slave’s
personal accounts. On the other hand, the declarations on the title page
of Sarah Winnemucca as author and self-publisher affirm her economic
and political authority.
Early in Life among the Piutes, Sarah Winnemucca positions herself
in a tribal genealogy of leadership that will lead directly to her own
authority to represent the Northern Paiutes in her negotiations with
military leaders, such as General Oliver Otis Howard, Senator Henry
Dawes, and Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Chester A. Arthur. In
her adult role as “the Piute Princess,” both onstage and in local and
national political theaters, Sarah Winnemucca would transform herself
into the first female leader of the diverse bands of the Northern Paiutes.
Sarah Winnemucca’s self-fashioning as a Paiute leader, language translator, military negotiator, political mediator, stage performer, literary
author, and educator is well known, and yet she is rarely acknowledged
for the extraordinary diversity of her different roles. Lacking consistent
financial support, relying on the limited power of Euro-American activists like Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, and operating
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
from a home base in one of the most desolate and impoverished regions
of North America, Sarah Winnemucca managed to establish herself as a
national celebrity who was variously vilified for drunkenness, gambling,
and prostitution as well as celebrated for her progressive views of Indigenous relations with the dangers of expanding settler colonialism. Fabricating a “nation” from the scattered bands of the Northern Paiutes and
solidifying her own role as their hereditary leader, Sarah Winnemucca
offers us one of the most remarkable instances of transnational activism
in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth-century Northern Paiutes did not have a clearly
delineated system of chiefs. The Northern Paiutes consisted of twenty-three different bands, each composed of about one hundred to two
hundred people organized by kinship into cooperative hunting and
gathering units, ranging geographically “from the Owens Valley in
California through most of western Nevada and into southern Oregon
and Idaho” (Zanjani 8). Their traditional territory provided relatively
few resources and hence supported a small total population scattered
widely over the region. Sally Zanjani explains that because survival was
sufficiently difficult, the Paiutes had little time for warfare, but instead
devoted themselves to follow seasonally-various food sources: fish, deer,
elk, pinyon nuts, camas, and other roots. Most of the bands were named
for their different diets. Sarah Winnemucca’s band was the Kuyuidikaa (“Cui-ui Eaters”), named for the suckerfish (“Chamistes cujus”) they
caught around the delta where the Truckee River flows into Pyramid
Lake, northwest of Reno. Other bands included Kammidika-a (“Jackrabbit Eaters”), north of Pyramid Lake; Kibidika-a (“Ground-Squirrel
Eaters”), east of Pyramid Lake; Toidika-a (“Cattail Eaters”), south of
Pyramid Lake (Zanjani 8). Rarely did these different bands assemble
together and then only when there was sufficient food to serve them all,
such as during the annual fish spawning in the Truckee River Delta, the
mud hen hunt at the Humboldt Sink, an antelope hunt, or the pinyon
nut harvest in the mountains in a plentiful year.6
Politically, each band relied on “a respected male figure” to serve
as “a headman,” who would consult with the male elders of the band.
Even within the smaller bands, the headman maintained “his authority
only by the force of his personality and his ability to persuade others”;
it was not a hereditary position (Zanjani 9). Responsibilities within the
bands were delegated according to skills, so that authorities other than
the headman might exercise considerable political influence. General
councils were held to make major decisions affecting all the bands, and
in these meetings “the entire band participated in decision making, including women, who sat in the second circle but were permitted to voice
their opinions” (Zanjani 9). There was no “Chief of the Northern Paiutes,” except when U.S. officials demanded one, often resulting in conflict among the twenty-three bands. In those cases when separate bands
chose to disobey the tribal council and join another tribe in hostilities
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65
6 For a good overview
of Northern Paiutes’
traditional lifeways, see
Patapoff.
John Carlos Rowe
against the United States, the United States usually blamed the entire
tribe. Such was the case when several Northern Paiute bands joined the
Bannocks in the Bannock War (1878), resulting in General Oliver Otis
Howard’s punishment of all the Northern Paiutes at the end of the war.
Paiute tribal organization worked rather well for survival in the region with its extreme weather (very hot summers and very cold winters),
but the relative isolation of the Paiutes did not prepare them for contact
with Euro-Americans in the 1820s, when beaver and other fur trappers like Jedediah Smith passed through the Great Basin and Northern
Nevada. In the 1830s, there were some violent encounters, despite the
Northern Paiutes’ customarily peaceful interaction with their neighbors
and strangers. Most of the violence resulted from misunderstandings
based on tribal misrecognition by Whites, such as when the Joseph Reddeford Walker party in 1833 mistook approaching and peaceful Paiutes
for Shoshones, who had harassed the party the day before, opened fire
on the Paiutes, and killed thirty-nine people (Gilbert 17).
Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, Old Winnemucca (“giver of spiritual gifts” in Paviotso), was the headman of the Kuyuidika-a band, located principally on the shores of Pyramid Lake. John Charles Frémont
first visited Pyramid Lake and the Harney Basin in January 1844, when
he described the wintry Great Basin as a “‘country so forbidding that
I was afraid to enter it’” (qtd. in Zanjani 16). According to Zanjani, it
was not until Frémont’s second trip to the region in the fall of 1845 that
he may have had his first meeting with Old Winnemucca, although an
“initial meeting in California is also possible” during Frémont’s initiation of the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, a prelude to the Mexican-American
War (1846-1848) (Zanjani 16-17). Sarah Winnemucca describes the meeting of her grandfather and Frémont in the following way:
My grandfather met him, and they were soon friends. They met just where
the railroad crosses Truckee River, now called Wadsworth, Nevada. Captain Fremont gave my grandfather the name of Captain Truckee, and he
also called the river after him. Truckee is an Indian word, it means “all
right,” or “very well.” A party of twelve of my people went to California
with Captain Fremont. I do not know just how long they were gone. (9)
We are relying, of course, on Sarah Winnemucca’s version of her grandfather’s story of how he met Frémont. Given her bid for tribal leadership,
she was motivated to create family connections with U.S. leaders like
Frémont as well as to suggest the possible naivete of her grandfather in
this encounter. Whether Captain Frémont gave Old Winnemucca the
title of “Captain” in a gesture of respect, suggesting their equality, or
as a patronizing epithet is unclear, as is the actual date when Frémont
named him “Captain Truckee.” The military title might well have been
granted later during Old Winnemucca’s service with Frémont, then a
Lieutenant Colonel, in the Mexican-American War. In any event, her
grandfather’s relation to Frémont and settler-colonial authority appears
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in her text to be that of a subaltern, subject to the greater power of the
U.S. nation.
During the war, Old Winnemucca accompanied Frémont’s military
force of four hundred twenty-eight men in their captures of Santa Barbara (December 24, 1846) and Los Angeles, the capitulation of which
concluded the war in Alta California with the signing of the Treaty of
Cahuenga (January 13, 1847). By the autumn of 1847, Old Winnemucca
had returned to Nevada, not long after Frémont’s refusal to obey President Polk’s order to surrender his title as military governor of California
to Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny resulted in Frémont’s arrest on August 22, 1847, for insubordination and mutiny (Groom 259).
Frémont rewarded Old Winnemucca for his service not only with the
military title of “Captain,” but also with Frémont’s personal letter of
recommendation, which Old Winnemucca referred to as a “rag friend”
and displayed with such enthusiasm and apparent naivete in Life among
the Piutes (28). For Sarah Winnemucca, her grandfather’s treasured letter
serves two purposes throughout the work. It confirms her grandfather’s
illiteracy while affirming her literacy as author of the book. The letter
also confirms the legitimacy of the family’s claim to tribal leadership.
Yet, it is doubtful that Old Winnemucca survived Frémont’s military
campaign in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, as well as the turbulent
political infighting concluding the war, as a naive rural Paiute. Old
Winnemucca’s insistence on the authority of his treasured letter and its
message of good relations between “our white brothers, and white sisters, and their children” and the Paiutes likely had something to do with
the great disparity of power between settler colonials and Indigenous
Peoples he had witnessed during the Mexican-American War (19).
His granddaughter may represent affectionately and sentimentally
her grandfather, but she does so also to render him an unsophisticated
leader who accepts uncritically the good intentions of White settlers.
Far more likely is the conclusion that Old Winnemucca understood the
threat White militarized society posed to his small and peaceable band
of the Kuyuidika-a. In short, there is good reason to think that “Captain
Truckee” readily played the obedient and naive subaltern for the strategic purpose of protecting his band and hence living up to his responsibilities as headman. Sarah Winnemucca begins Life among the Piutes
by insisting, “[m]y grandfather was chief of the entire Piute nation, and
was camped near Humboldt Lake, with a small portion of his tribe,
when a party travelling eastward from California was seen coming” (5).
Old Winnemucca greets this news by announcing, “[m]y white brothers,—my long-looked for white brothers have come at last!” and explains
himself by offering an origin story (5):
In the beginning of the world there were only four, two girls and two boys.
Our forefather and mother were only two, and we are their children. You
all know that a great while ago there was a happy family in this world. One
girl and one boy were dark and the others were white. For a time they got
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John Carlos Rowe
along together without quarrelling, but soon they disagreed, and there was
trouble. […] the father and the mother saw that they must separate their
children; and then our father took the dark boy and girl, and the white
boy and girl […]. He said to them, […] ‘I […] have the power to separate
my dear children, if they are not good to each other.’ So he separated his
children by a word. […] ‘Depart from each other […] go across the mighty
ocean and do not seek each other’s lives.’ So the light girl and boy disappeared by that one word. […] And by-and-by the dark children grew into a
large nation; and we believe it is the one we belong to, and that the nation
that sprung from the white children will some time send some one to meet
us and heal all the old trouble. (6-7)
“How good of him to try and heal the wound, and how vain were his
efforts,” Sarah Winnemucca judges, following his optimistic story about
the arrival of settler colonials by recalling her own childhood memories
of reports that “the whites were killing everybody and eating them” and
her reference to the Donner Party, which “perished in the mountains”
and could have been saved by the Northern Paiutes, “only my people
were afraid of them,” tacitly reminding the reader of the cannibalism
to which the desperate settlers resorted (11, 13). As the epigraphs to this
article suggest, both Old Winnemucca’s origin story and his granddaughter’s childhood memories transcode several Northern Paiute legends about “white giants” who killed by looks and ate babies, but who
were defeated by Northern Paiute subterfuges, several of which Sarah
Winnemucca repeats at the beginning of Life among the Piutes, including live burial (11). Whatever we may conclude from the different stories
told by Old Winnemucca and his granddaughter at the beginning of Life
among the Piutes, they help confirm both of them as Northern Paiute
leaders by virtue of their abilities as storytellers—roles within each band
that could, in fact, be held by a woman.
Sarah Winnemucca concludes chapter four, “Captain Truckee’s
Death,” with her own origin story about her people defeating “a small
tribe of barbarians who lived along the Humboldt River” (73). Distinguished by their “reddish hair,” violence, and cannibalism, these
“people-eaters” cannot be civilized by her people, even after the Paiutes
take these strangers into their own homes to teach them to “not eat
people like coyotes or beasts” (74). During a three-year war, her people
trap the “people-eaters” in a cave and plead with them to change their
ways, but when their antagonists refuse, the Paiutes set the mouth of the
cave on fire and exterminate their enemies. Drawing on her grandfather’s story of an original harmony between eventual antagonists, Sarah
Winnemucca notes that the “people-eaters” “talked the same language,”
even as they are distinguished by their “reddish” hair (74). Perhaps integrating her childhood experience with colonial violence and Northern
Paiute folktales about cannibals who threaten children—the tribe’s future generations—Sarah Winnemucca affirms the “civilization” of her
people and hints at the “barbaric” qualities of the hirsute settler colonials. Whatever we are to make of this origin story, it allegorizes the
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dangers she recognizes in the colonization she has experienced personally. As a storyteller, Sarah Winnemucca also gains authority with her
people by claiming direct contact with tribal origins dedicated to peace
and civilization.
Coming as the story does after Old Winnemucca’s origin narrative
of restored racial harmony with the return of White settlers and after accounts of settler-colonial violence as a sort of cannibalism, Sarah
Winnemucca’s origin story in the chapter announcing Old Winnemucca’s death also serves as a sharp rebuke to U.S. nationalism. In both respects, then, the story exemplifies the transnationalism she practiced in
her activist work. Old Winnemucca’s origin story stresses transcultural
harmony and tacitly counsels cooperation, if not outright assimilation.
His granddaughter’s origin story warns settlers that the Northern Paiutes have successfully fought barbaric cannibals before and will do so
again, if necessary. Her gestures of peace are directed not only at the
exterminated tribe from centuries ago, but also at the settlers threatening to consume every trace of Northern Paiute life. Sarah Winnemucca
warns that, although her people may not appear warlike, if settlers ignore their peace offerings they can and will fight back.
In Old Winnemucca’s absence, his son-in-law, Winnemucca the
Younger, “was readily accepted as headman” (Zanjani 21). Born in 1820
and only in his mid-twenties during his father-in-law’s service with Frémont in California, Winnemucca the Younger (also known as Wobitsawahkah, Bad Face, Chief Winnemucca, Mubetawaka, and Poito) was
both a “man of substance” and “a shaman with the gift of prophecy”
(Zanjani 21). These qualities and his marriage to Old Winnemucca’s
daughter, Tuboitony, may have encouraged the tribe to overlook the fact
that Winnemucca the Younger was not originally a Paiute but a Shoshone, who had joined the tribe through marriage. Although Tuboitony
was likely Winnemucca the Younger’s most influential wife, he also had
two or three other wives among the Paiute band.
In Life among the Piutes, Sarah Winnemucca does not mention her
father’s Shoshone background and exaggerates his role as chief of the
Northern Paiutes, noting that “after my grandfather came home” from
the Mexican-American War “he told my father to take charge of his
people and hold the tribe” (5, 10). Anxious to stress the continuity of
tribal leadership from her grandfather to her father, Sarah Winnemucca
inflates their tribal responsibilities from headmen of the Kuyuidika-a
band to “chiefs” of the Paiute “nation.” Andrew Gale Ontko argues that
Sarah Winnemucca downplays her father’s Shoshone background to
emphasize his peaceful role as a Paiute leader and to avoid settlers’ prejudices against the more warlike Shoshone, whom settlers called “Snake
Indians” (14).
The divisions among Northern Paiute and Shoshone bands were not
clear-cut. In the Paviotso Confederacy formed at the Ochoco Council of 1851, fifty-eight bands of Northern Paiute, Shoshone, and BanAmst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
69
7 Of course, we
should not take an early
twentieth-century EuroAmerican ethnographer’s
judgment as authoritative.
John Carlos Rowe
nock agreed to join forces. As Frederick Webb Hodge points out in
his early twentieth-century ethnography, “[i]t is doubtful whether the
relations existing between the constituent parts should be properly so
termed,” suggesting the fluidity of political and kinship relations among
neighboring tribes in the region (204).7 Tribal boundaries across North
America were profoundly affected by the incursion of settlers, whose
displacement of Indigenous communities forced interactions with their
neighbors in unpredictable ways. In addition, epidemic illnesses spread
by Euro-American contact often resulted in such a reduction of specific
bands that they had to join other bands, sometimes across tribal lines, in
order to survive (Rowe 71-87).
Heads of tribal bands were rendered subalterns to a settler-colonial
system managed almost exclusively on the local level in the late nineteenth century. As Sarah Winnemucca reports, such local control was
administered with almost absolute power by the Indian agent, always
a White male, assigned to either the region or the reservation by the
Department of Interior, which in 1849 had taken over the Bureau of
Indian Affairs from the Department of War (Calloway 219). As Sarah
Winnemucca explains, she and her father, Winnemucca the Younger,
acknowledge the fairness of Agent Samuel Parrish at the Malheur
Agency when they first arrived on the reservation in 1875, just as both
Winnemuccas would recognize immediately the graft and corruption of
Parrish’s replacement, Agent William V. Rinehart (“Reinhard” in Life
among the Piutes) (105-36). Hiring Sarah Winnemucca as his translator,
organizing Paiutes into work crews to build agricultural infrastructure,
distributing the supplies allocated for use by the reservation bands, and
hiring qualified teachers to educate young people, Parrish stood in stark
contrast with Rinehart, who sold the supplies allocated to reservation
bands, hired relatives and friends to fill positions in which they did not
work, and virtually starved the residents of the agency into submission
and repeated exploitation. Yet, both agents of Malheur were appointed
to alienate the Indigenous residents from long-established patterns of
hunting and gathering, to integrate different bands into a single group
under the agent’s governance, and to adapt these “uncivilized” people to
settled agriculture. Indeed, the conflicts faced by both agents at Malheur had much to do with the multiple authorities among the Paiute
bands with whom they dealt.
Before the arrival of Sarah Winnemucca and her father, headmen
Weahwewa, Watta-belly, Ehegante (“Egan”), and the “Dreamer chief ”
Oytes, who “claimed the power to make his enemies sicken and die,”
governed the different Northern Paiute bands at the Malheur Reservation (Zanjani 129). To be sure, in moments of crisis the headmen met
in council to decide a course of action, but consensus was more often
determined by the limited possibilities made available by the reservation’s White agent. Agent Parrish challenged Oytes on his own claim
that he cannot be hurt by bullets, offering to shoot him to prove his
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invincibility, a challenge that effectively renders Oytes submissive for
a time (Winnemucca 115). Parrish’s replacement, Rinehart, simply insisted that Oytes and any other disobedient resident follow the agent’s
rules or leave the reservation and “go and live with the soldiers” (134).
In both cases, however, it was the agent’s authority with which Paiute
headmen had to contend. Given the divided leadership of the eight
hundred Paiutes living at Malheur Agency, it was difficult to mount
unified opposition to such settler-colonial authority. With no legal
or economic authority to challenge the agents, even when they were
proven to be corrupt, Native leaders were reduced to moral appeals or
military rebellion.
To be sure, such pleas for humanity and fairness give special authority to rhetorical language and hence to the task of the translator,
which was Sarah Winnemucca’s job with both agents at Malheur and
with General Oliver Otis Howard during the Bannock War of 1878.
When headmen Ehegante and Oytes protested to Rinehart that he was
stealing the wheat that Paiutes produced on Malheur and was selling it
for his personal profit in direct violation of their agreement with Parrish, Ehegante makes a long speech to Rinehart, requesting of Sarah
Winnemucca, “‘I want you to tell everything I say to this man,’” to
which she responds: “I did as he said” (133). The directness of this exchange should not minimize the complexity of the linguistic performance in which Ehegante and Sarah Winnemucca collaborate. She acts
by translating into English what Ehegante says in Paviotso, a Western
Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. In effect, she has become
an Indigenous version of Captain Truckee’s “rag friend,” that treasured
letter from Frémont, which her grandfather claims “‘can travel like the
wind, and […] go and talk with their fathers and brothers and sisters,
and come back to tell what they are doing, and whether they are well
or sick’” (19).
As a translator and mediator, Sarah Winnemucca also experienced
distrust from both sides of the linguistic and political divide, anticipating subsequent criticism of her as a possible collaborator with the U.S.
Army, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the federal government
in the exploitation of her own people. Although she does not represent
herself in Life among the Piutes as compromised by her role as translator, she is certainly treated that way in Agent Rinehart’s systematic efforts to discredit her authority. In Life among the Piutes, Winnemucca
contends that “our Christian agent discharged me from my office of
translator” after she wrote a petition to Washington, signed by all the
headmen, denouncing Rinehart’s corruption (134).8 Although Zanjani
notes that “no copy of such a document has been uncovered,” Rinehart
waged a campaign against Winnemucca, accusing her of drunkenness,
gambling, and sexual prostitution (139). Like the legends surrounding
Malinal, the Nahua woman who was baptized by the Spanish as “Doña
Marina” and served as translator for Hernán Cortés in his military camAmst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
71
8 Her frequent
reference to Rinehart as
“Christian” was intended
to expose the failure of
President Grant’s Peace
Policy, which between
1868 and 1873 attempted
to solve the problem
of corruption on the
reservations by delegating
the administration of
reservations to specific
Christian denominations.
Rinehart actually replaced
Parrish, because Parrish
was not acceptable to the
new administrators, but it
turned out that Rinehart
was thoroughly corrupt,
as were so many agents
either left in place by
religious administrators
or hired through graft or
nepotism.
9 From her lifetime
to the present, Malinal
has been legendized as
“Malinche,” the witch-like
figure who was also Cortés’s lover and gave birth
to two of the first mixedrace children in Mexico.
Often represented as “la
Chingada,” she is used in
mythic terms to represent
the sexual victimization
of Indigenous peoples by
Spanish imperialism (see
Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations
216-18).
10 Despite her reputation as a nineteenth-century leader for Indigenous
rights, Sarah Winnemucca
still holds an ambivalent
place among her own
people, the Northern
Paiutes, as well as among
other neighboring tribes
(see Zanjani 299-300).
John Carlos Rowe
paign against the Aztec Empire, Sarah Winnemucca’s power as a linguistic and cultural mediator is subverted by way of her gender and the
charges of immorality brought by Rinehart in letters to newspapers, as
well as his correspondence with local and federal government agencies.9
Whereas Spanish colonizers celebrated Doña Marina, U.S. settler colonials criticized Sarah Winnemucca, even influencing Northern Paiute
views of her.10
Rinehart’s efforts to damage Sarah Winnemucca’s reputation demonstrate that she had achieved a certain authority in settler-colonial society. She defended both her character and her right to represent the
Northern Paiutes in letters to military, political, and legal officials. Her
appendix in Life among the Piutes gathers a variety of testimonials to
both her personal honesty and commitment to her people from General
Oliver Otis Howard, other military officers in the Bannock War, and
several BIA officials from the Department of the Interior, concluding
with an editorial from the Boston Transcript condemning “a villanous
[sic] attack (calling in question her private character)” and stressing that
“the means employed to break down her reputation indicate that the
attack comes from persons accustomed to working upon public opinion” (266). Never mentioning Rinehart by name, the testimonials in the
appendix refer often to “scandalous charges against this woman, based
on false affidavits of rascally Indian agents and their paid tools” (267).
Effectively deploying Rinehart’s slander to expose the systemic theft of
Indian supplies and annuities by reservation agents, Sarah Winnemucca
uses a personal scandal to call for the reform of federal Indian policies.
As a Northern Paiute woman, Sarah Winnemucca’s efforts to establish herself as a credible authority for her people and with White
settlers were especially challenging. Women could not serve as leaders
of Northern Paiute bands, even though women were allowed to speak in
tribal councils, giving them more political power than U.S. women had
in the late nineteenth-century public sphere. That Paiute women could
also become shamans and storytellers suggests that Sarah Winnemucca’s
roles as translator, performer, and author have roots in these tribal traditions. Familiar from an early age with the sexual violence White settlers
posed to Indigenous people, Sarah Winnemucca’s writing clearly represents the rape of Native women as one of the main causes of frontier
violence. Tracing the Pyramid Lake War (1860) to the kidnapping and
rape of two twelve-year-old Northern Paiute girls by local traders, the
Williams brothers, who held the girls captive in their cellar, she writes:
“When my people saw their condition, they at once killed both brothers
and set fire to the house. Three days after the news was spread as usual.
‘The bloodthirsty savages had murdered two innocent, hard-working,
industrious, kind-hearted settlers […]’” (71-72).
Cheryl Walker interprets “Sarah Winnemucca’s role as […] an advocate of both-and rather than either-or. She took on both male and female roles, advocated cooperation between red and white, and tried to
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position the Paiute nation as a viable entity in the heart of America”
(151; emphasis in original). In doing so, she attempts to represent the
equivalency of Northern Paiute and Euro-American knowledge, leading her editor, “Mrs. Horace Mann” (Mary Peabody Mann) to comment in an editorial note: “It is not unlikely that when something like a
human communication is established between the Indians and whites,
it may prove a fair exchange, and the knowledge of nature which has
accumulated, for we know not how long, may enrich our early education as much as reading and writing will enrich theirs” (Winnemucca
52n1). Challenging traditional divisions of labor within Northern Paiute
bands, in which women clearly occupied subordinate positions that were
nonetheless more democratic than those allotted to women in nineteenth-century U.S. society, Sarah Winnemucca builds her authority in
part on her descent from such powerful Kuyuidaka-a headmen as her
grandfather and father, claiming for herself the ability to represent a fictive entity, the Northern Paiute nation, gesturing frequently at equivalencies between U.S. and Paiute societies: “We have a republic as well as
you. The council-tent is our Congress, and anybody can speak who has
anything to say, women and all” (53).
In her transnational imaginings of Northern Paiutes and U.S. political representatives sharing political equality exceeding the Marshall
court’s definition of Indigenous societies as “domestic dependent nations,” Sarah Winnemucca fabricates not only her own authority but
also the existence of a confederation of different bands. Although they
shared a common language, Paviotso, and the wide hunting and gathering range stretching from northwestern Nevada into southeastern
Oregon, the twenty-three different bands lacked the sort of economic,
political, and cultural ties that connected late-nineteenth-century U.S.
states to the federal government.11 From the Pyramid Lake War (1860)
to the Bannock War (1878) and its aftermath, Northern Paiute bands behaved quite differently in response to settler-colonial violence. The usually peaceful Kuyuidaka-a band took immediate revenge on the sexual
violence of the Williams brothers, precipitating the three-month Pyramid Lake War, but other bands allied themselves with other tribes, such
as the Bannock and Umatilla. In 1878, Oytes’s and Ehegante’s Northern
Paiute bands joined what the Bannock chief Buffalo Horn proposed as a
large military alliance of “Paiutes, Shoshones, Umatillas, Cayuses, and
many others […] that would drive whites from the region” (Zanjani 148).
Much as Sarah Winnemucca and her father protested that the
Northern Paiutes were not involved in the hostilities of the Bannock
War, other Northern Paiute bands did engage in frontier raids. Of
course, Sarah Winnemucca was right to protest General Oliver Otis
Howard’s punishment of all Northern Paiutes at the end of the war by
force-marching them in the depth of winter from Malheur to Yakama
Agency, three hundred and fifty miles to the north. Not only did many
of the five hundred Northern Paiutes die during this trip, but the surAmst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
73
11 The Bannock and
Shoshone also speak
Paviotso, suggesting yet
another reason why these
three tribes intermarried, allied in times
of mutual threat, and
otherwise worked in close
association.
John Carlos Rowe
vivors encountered considerable hostility from the Yakama people living on the reservation in Washington Territory. Yet, had the Northern
Paiutes remained at the Malheur Reservation following the Bannock
War, it is likely they would have been in considerable danger from angry settlers in southeastern Oregon. Even Sarah Winnemucca urged the
Northern Paiutes to make the long trip on the grounds that settlers in
Oregon might mistake them for Bannock and kill them (Zanjani 185).
She herself barely avoids such violence during the war in her efforts to
negotiate a peaceful conclusion.
The problem of Indigenous authority is evident in Sarah Winnemucca’s political relations with Senator Henry Dawes, author of the eventual
Dawes Act of 1887, wherein federal policies of “allotment and assimilation” replaced the previous policy of treating Native Americans as wards
of the state (Prucha 660-66). In response to a letter Sarah Winnemucca
wrote to Dawes in 1883, the Senator invited “Sarah and [Elizabeth]
Peabody for an overnight visit on 5 October [1883] at his Massachusetts
home” (Zanjani 244). Between 1875 and 1887, several Congressional bills
had been proposed that would allocate reservation lands to individual
property owners, dispose of the remaining “unused” land, and solve at
last the “Indian problem.” Sarah Winnemucca hoped to influence Senator Dawes’s advocacy of Native American ownership by convincing him
that Native American tribal leaders, rather than reservation agents or
the Indian commissioner, would be the best judges of how to allocate
reservation lands: “In general, she argued that the government should
deal directly with the chiefs and that the Indians themselves should
select all agency employees, including, of course, the agents” (Zanjani
243). Senator Dawes did not incorporate these policies into the Dawes
Act, thereby assuring that Native Americans would be systematically
robbed by White reservation agents and local settlers purchasing “unused” reservation lands, and likewise assuring that his own bill would
quickly become a source of great human misery rather than intended
relief. Sarah Winnemucca’s proposals depended on coherent and recognizable tribal leadership: chiefs who would be acknowledged by both the
Office of Indian Affairs and the Native Americans they represented. For
her, “transnationalism” depended on the encounter between two sovereign powers, rather than the transcendence of the national form.
Among the three hundred lectures Sarah Winnemucca delivered
in the East between “the spring of 1883 and midsummer 1884,” most
were “tailored […] to suit the interests of her audience” (Zanjani 244-45).
Zanjani notes how Sarah Winnemucca appealed to “eastern reformers’
interest in woman suffrage” by arguing “on some occasions that if the
agent system must be continued, the agents should be women” (245).
Recognizing the prevailing differences of political power between men
and women in both Euro-American and Northern Paiute societies,
Sarah Winnemucca worked to legitimate her own position as a woman
“chief.” Part of her effort in this regard involves her self-fashioning as
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
the “Piute Princess,” a role she had performed in her earliest stage appearances with her father in California. The royal pretensions of this
role would seem contrary to democratic leadership, but Native Americans since the colonial period had enjoyed mythic status for their presumed regal lineage. One of the oddest legends in U.S. culture is that of
the daughter of Powhatan, Pocahontas (Matoaka), the Pamunkey youth
who “saves” John Smith’s life and becomes the iconographic center of a
fantastic origin story for such U.S. aristocrats as the “First Families of
Virginia” (Mossiker 15-25).
Tapping into this powerful, albeit contradictory, national fantasy,
Sarah Winnemucca also attempted to bolster her own status as Northern Paiute leader. Not only does she stress her right to represent Northern Paiutes by virtue of her descent from her grandfather and her father,
but she also recounts in Life among the Piutes how she and her sister-inlaw, Mattie (married to Sarah’s elder brother, Lee Winnemucca), entered a Bannock encampment during the Bannock War and rescued her
father, brother-in-law, and several other Northern Paiutes held captive
by the Bannocks. Concluding that “I, only an Indian woman, went and
saved my father and his people,” Sarah Winnemucca also claims tribal
leadership in a moment when her father had lost his own power (164).
During this episode, Sarah Winnemucca is in fact following the orders
of General Oliver Otis Howard to make contact with the hostile Bannock in an effort to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the war. Sarah
Winnemucca accomplishes both tasks at the same time, saving her father and other Northern Paiute prisoners while carrying out the orders
of the U.S. Army (164).
What should we conclude today of Sarah Winnemucca’s construction of a leadership role that included collaborations with New England reformers, like the Peabody sisters, Washington policy makers,
like Senator Dawes, and the twenty-three different bands of Northern
Paiutes? In Citizen Indians, Lucy Maddox has argued: “Indian people
had to position themselves on the literal as well as the figurative stages
of American public life, through strategic moves, as a way of both inserting their embodied selves into the national consciousness and establishing their claim to a place on those stages” (5). Although Maddox makes only passing reference to Sarah Winnemucca, her claim fits
Sarah Winnemucca both literally and figuratively. Yet, whether we conclude that Sarah Winnemucca positioned herself by way of accepting
the terms of U.S. culture or trying to change U.S. culture to include
Northern Paiute values, we are still considering her work in the prevailing contexts of U.S. nationalism. When we focus on how she also attempted to change Northern Paiute communities from loosely knit kinship bands with headmen to a coherent tribe with a “chief ” or “princess,”
we gain a better understanding of the dialectical struggle in which she
was engaged. In order for her to represent her people, she had to constitute a “people” (Numa) recognizable to Euro-Americans, especially
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John Carlos Rowe
those wielding political power derived from a capitalist economy based
on individual land ownership. By the same token, she had to contest the
strong authority of other Northern Paiute headmen, including leaders
like Ehegante and Oytes, who were considered enemy combatants by
the U.S. Army in the Bannock War.
That Sarah Winnemucca was aware of this problem of negotiating
leadership on both sides of the frontier is most evident in the Peabody
Institute that she founded in Lovelock, Nevada, and operated between
1885 and 1887. Housed at first in traditional Northern Paiute pole and
rush-mat structures (kahnees) built on the ranch two miles south of
Lovelock that her brother, Natches, was struggling to purchase, the
school taught Northern Paiute children the basic skills of English language literacy and traditional Paiute lifeways (Zanjani 265). Her Boston supporter, Elizabeth Peabody, wrote and published two reports
on the school, hoping to raise much needed funding from private and
government sources: Sarah Winnemucca’s Practical Solution of the Indian
Problem (1886) and The Piutes: Second Report of the Model School of Sarah Winnemucca, 1886-87. Although a few more copies of Life among the
Piutes were sold, the necessary funds were not raised and the school
closed after only two years. As Zanjani concludes, Sarah Winnemucca’s
Peabody Institute conflicted directly with the total assimilation policies
adopted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, such as Richard Henry
Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918) (Zanjani 272). Despite his initial interest in Sarah Winnemucca, Senator Henry Dawes
did not provide federal funding for the Peabody Institute.
Sarah Winnemucca’s brief experiment in education for and by
Northern Paiutes is usually described as a failure, contributing further
to the ways she continues to be used to maintain the stereotype of the
tragic, vanishing Indian. In Sarah Winnemucca’s case, this fantasy is
enhanced by her self-fashioning as the “Piute Princess,” aligning her
with a long list of “noble Natives” sacrificing themselves in the relentless march of Western civilization: Cortés’s Nahua “Doña Marina” (La
Malinche, Malinal, Malintzin) (c. 1496/1501?-c. 1529); the Pamunkey
Pocahontas (Matoaka, Amonute) (1596-1617); the Lemhi Shoshone Sacagawea (Sakakawea, Sacajawea) (d. 1821). All of these mythologized
Native women are also associated with interracial, mestizo sexual relations, explaining in part the ideological necessity of their “tragic” ends,
especially in colonial North America, where the taboo against miscegenation played such a central role in the cultural politics of the nation.
Agent Rinehart knew well what he was doing by spreading gossip about
Sarah Winnemucca as a sexually promiscuous woman who drank and
gambled.
After Chief Winnemucca died in 1882, there was a struggle for leadership among the Northern Paiutes, settlers, and government officials
that remained unresolved for years (Zanjani 234-35). Despite her celebrity and political advocacy for the Northern Paiutes, Sarah Winnemucca
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Sarah Winnemucca’s Transnational Authority in Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)
was never considered a legitimate candidate for tribal leadership, even
of her own band. Despite his admiration for her understanding of the
political complexity of federal-Indian relations, Senator Dawes made no
changes to the Dawes Act in response to her advocacy for greater Native
representation in its administration and did not help find Congressional
funding for her school. Celebrated for her stage performances as the
“Piute Princess,” as a lecturer for Native American rights, as well as for
her authorship of the first book by a Native woman, Sarah Winnemucca
gained only fleeting fame and barely met the expenses of her numerous productions. For these reasons, Sarah Winnemucca is often remembered popularly in the stereotype of the tragic Indian Princess.
However, transnational authority does not inevitably lead to decolonization, and the difficulties facing Sarah Winnemucca ought to be
warnings to those of us intent on the utopian project of undoing U.S.
settler colonialism and its neo-imperialist variations. When we judge
her work to have failed, we may be assuming that only the reinstatement of pre-colonial Indigenous sovereignty as a consequence of decolonization will count as success. Admirable as those goals might be,
they do not assess realistically the complex power differentials facing
Indigenous activists throughout the history of colonial violence. Sarah
Winnemucca figured out how to be recognized and heard as a representative of the Northern Paiutes. In doing so, she took crucial steps toward
the legal, political, cultural, and economic identification of her people.
She also changed the Northern Paiutes by facilitating their recognition
by military and political authorities and thus enabling her people to
claim their part in modern U.S. history, rather than being dismissed as
ethnographic types doomed to disappear.
Settler-colonial violence survives in the Bundys’ rhetorical bluster,
abuse of gun rights, and willful ignorance of the past. Their condemnation by the major media for their violation of federal laws does little to
recognize the rights of the Native Americans they continue to trample
in their loud declarations of patriotism and freedom. Nevertheless, in
her willingness to negotiate from what Henry Reynolds has termed “the
other side of the frontier” and do so in a variety of ways sensitive to both
Northern Paiute and Euro-American values, Sarah Winnemucca demonstrated a genius for transnational cultural understanding that went
far beyond linguistic translation or the subaltern work of the “go-between” (Reynolds 1). Her activism saved numerous individual lives and
strengthened the identity of the Northern Paiutes in the view of federal
and local authorities. Still remembered in equivocal ways by the Northern Paiutes, Sarah Winnemucca nonetheless helped them not merely to
survive, but to develop as a distinct community responding to colonial
violence. In these respects, Sarah Winnemucca recalls the woman in the
Paiute legend who tricks and escapes the giant cannibals, giving new
meaning to the folklore: “Piute Indians come from this woman.”
Amst 67.1 (2022): 57-79
77
John Carlos Rowe
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