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

Andrew S. McClure

As anyone who has made such an effort will know, students of Native American literature looking for critical studies on Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844?-1891) will be unsuccessful in finding more than a handful of articles and short references to her work because very little has been done on this author, the first American Indian woman to write an autobiography.(1) The reason for this, I suspect, stems from a discomfort critics have for Indian writers like Winnemucca who seem to be overly assimilated and sympathetic with the dominant culture. Students of Native American literature look for ways writers overtly resist the dominant culture, and Sarah Winnemucca, initially at least, appears taken in by it and therefore of little value for literary study. As Randall Moon writes of William Apess, another early Native American writer, there is a "political unease over Apess because he writes too much like a white person, with no trace of a Native `voice,' and [he is] too Christianized to be recognized as an `authentic' representative of Native America" (52). The same "political unease" exists for Winnemucca, and some of the few critics who have written about her reflect that sentiment. For example, one of the only comments Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands make about her work is that Life Among the Piutes "is heavily biased by her acculturated and Christianized viewpoint" (21). Catherine Fowler observes that there is widespread distaste for Winnemucca for similar reasons: "In the light of twentieth century ethnohistoric and ethnographic hindsight ..., Sarah's position on assimilation, perhaps more than any other single factor, has led scholars, and to a certain degree her own people, to diminish her contributions to Native American scholarship" (33).

In studying Native Americans, or any colonized people, one must use the term "assimilation" carefully, since some degree of assimilation is essential to cultural and physical survival. On the other hand, the history of "assimilation" as an official means of repressing Native American languages and cultures is well-documented. Thus, the term here is deceiving: perceptions that label writers such as Winnemucca as "assimilationist" tend to construct a binary assimilationist/tribal opposition that fails to allow for an ethnocritical reading that would look at Winnemucca's position as one that negotiates what Mary Louise Pratt calls "the contact zone," which she defines as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination--like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (Imperial Eyes 4). Winnemucca spent most of her life in the middle of the contact zone acting as a mediator for her people, and in negotiating the contact zone, Winnemucca, like other colonized people, often appropriated ideas and conventions from the dominant culture in order to gain power and respect from Euro-Americans. Thus, "assimilation" as implied by Fowler and Bataille and Sands, suggests an appropriation of the dominant culture at the expense of the tribal, but Winnemucca learned to adapt to the onslaught of the westward moving emigrants in order to maintain as much of her Native identity as was possible. While there were aspects of Euro-American culture that she valued over her own--for example, she unflinchingly noted that her happiest years were spent living with whites in the comfort of Santa Clara, California, while attending Catholic school, her main interest was the survival of her tribe in the face of relentless colonization of the Paiute homeland (Brumble 65).

As is evident throughout her autobiography, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), in seeking a "peaceful coexistence" with whites (Fowler 34), Winnemucca was willing to negotiate with the people who began settling on the Paiute homeland when she was a child. Because she became fluent in English and fully proficient with Euro-American customs, she inherited the role of translator, mediator, negotiator, and all-purpose go-between for her people as they lost more and more of their land. In the process of becoming acculturated to Western customs and language, Winnemucca never lost her Paiute identity nor did she devalue or abandon it; in fact, as David Brumble points out, Winnemucca herself never had any trouble with her identity. There is nothing in her book about "a moment when she decided that, really, she preferred the white to the Paiute way. She spent time among whites; she spent time among the Paiutes. In reading her book we may see implicit in some of her experiences features of a cultural identity crisis, but she seems herself not to have thought about her life in this way" (65). With Winnemucca the question of assimilation becomes more complex because she often made direct appeals to the romanticized, invented constructions of Indian identity, even as she dismantled these constructions in her work. Winnemucca was a master at maneuvering between the dominant culture and her Paiute culture in order to preserve as much of her tribal culture as could be saved and to serve as a voice for the Paiutes. Life Among the Piutes is an important autobiography both in terms of giving an account of the complexity of tribal identity as represented through the bi-cultural medium of the autobiography and through its power as a detailed expose of U.S. hypocrisy in dealing with Natives in the nineteenth-century. Her autobiography, loaded as it is with sentimentality and accounts of her repeated failed attempts to successfully negotiate with government and military officials, is a powerful assertion of Winnemucca's Paiute identity, despite outward suggestions that she might have been perceived by other Paiutes as a "white man's Indian" (Fowler 34). In fact, these apparent concessions to Western culture--sentimentality, her diplomacy with whites, and her acculturation--are what make her work subversive and dialogic. Indeed, as we shall see, Winnemucca exploited romanticized constructions--the "Indian Princess"--as a means both to gain an audience and to break down those very constructions by speaking, or writing, as a voice for her tribe.

The Native American writer who appropriates mediums of the dominant culture--autobiography and English--must likewise inherit the complex role of a translator of cultures: Native American autobiographies are the essence of translating cultures. Sarah Winnemucca's process involved constructing herself bi-culturally in a literary form that was traditionally monocultural: she was interested in studying the complexities of her ethnic experience. She interacted and negotiated with a hostile dominant culture which had rigidly narrow conceptions of "Indian," and what an Indian could get away with saying in the confines of the authoritative discourse through which she spoke. Since Sarah Winnemucca was writing in a time when very few Native Americans got into print without the assistance of non-Native translators or editors, she had to carefully anticipate manipulating her work to a specifically non-Native audience, and it is that exterior which perhaps causes some of the discomfort critics have with her. What interests me in this study is the multiple ways Winnemucca constructs a dialogic self that can uphold Native identity and simultaneously adapt to the dominant culture; paradoxically, in the process of articulating a self in the written text, Winnemucca upsets the expectations of some contemporary non-Native readers looking for a distinctive "Indian" voice, because readers will find unexpected Western elements such as romantic sentimentality and a seeming naive acceptance of the ultimately hostile "white brothers"--things that simply do not sound "Indian."

Winnemucca consistently resists falling into invented identities, and that is what makes her, to my mind, such a significant Native voice; the degree to which she adapts and changes to survive is great, and it leads to a self that resists definition and categorization. Winnemucca had to articulate culture in such a way that resists what Gerald Vizenor calls "invent[ed] tribal cultures" created by anthropologists and historians (The People Named the Chippewa 27); the work of Winnemucca exemplifies Vizenor's idea of the "postindian warrior" articulating "the resistance of the tribes to colonial inventions and representations [which] envisioned the ironies of histories, narrative discourse, and cultural diversities" (Manifest Manners 167). Since "Indian" is an "invention" in the manner of the Hollywood Indian, the tobacco store Indian, the Indian "stuck in coins and words like artifacts" (Bowers and Silet 47), Vizenor uses the term "postindian" to denote a Native identity which resists representation: "The postindian is the absence of the invention, and the end of representation in literature; the closure of that evasive melancholy of dominance" (Manifest Manners 11).(2) The writer who recognizes Vizenor's notion of "postindian" resistance also recognizes that, as Kimberly Blaeser puts it, "White America has a stake in keeping Indians in their assigned roles: to safeguard their position of power, they must preserve the status quo" (43). And that means preserving invented notions of "Indian."

The very existence of autobiographies by Native Americans is a movement away from static, invented notions of Indianness. In using this literary genre, the authors are adopting and appropriating the conventions of the dominant culture in order to strengthen their own. As Vizenor writes in Manifest Manners, the appropriation of English and its literary forms is ironic and subversive, and it ultimately leads to a liberation from one-dimensional, stereotyped inventions of ethnic identity:

   The English language has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries,
   racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures,
   manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance to tribal
   communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of paracolonialism has
   been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for many tribal
   people in the postindian world. (105)

Additionally, because the autobiography and individual self-definition independent of the larger tribal identity are alien to Native cultures, when Native figures undertake such a project, it is a significant process in what Pratt calls "transculturation," which is the way in which "subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for" (Imperial Eyes 6). By appropriating the language and literary conventions from the culture of dominance, Native writers are empowering their own culture and voice. Native American autobiography, then, is a powerful means for Indians to negotiate the contact zone.

In addition to a detailed history of her people's contact with Euro-American colonizers, Life Among the Piutes involves a significant amount of ethnography--Winnemucca meticulously describes her "traditional" or pre-contact tribal culture. Through her historical accounts of the changes the tribe underwent in a short period of time, one can infer an emerging portrait of an ethnic self that is in the midst of crisis and change as a result of the culture of dominance. On the question of ethnography, there are some interesting emphases in the writings of prominent ethnographers that parallel Vizenor's idea about the "invented" Indian identities and the problem of representation. Michael Fischer notes that the process of ethnography is always dynamic:

   [E]thnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by
   each individual and that is often something quite puzzling to the
   individual, something over which he or she lacks control. Ethnicity is not
   something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught
   and learned; it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or
   avoided; it is something that institutionalized teaching easily makes
   chauvinist, sterile, and superficial, something that emerges in full--often
   liberating--flower through struggle. (195)

This passage is revealing for the study of Native autobiography. Since ethnicity is "something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation," modern readers of autobiographies are likely to recognize ironies and resistance that earlier readers would not have seen. While "Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed from generation to generation," part of the "struggle" comes from things about the texts that might not conform to the modern reader's expectations of what a representation of Indian identity should consist of, which would explain why critics are sometimes hasty to label writers such as Winnemucca overly assimilated or Christianized. Further, "the search or struggle for a sense of ethnic identity is a (re-) invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and future-oriented" (Fischer 196). Winnemucca recognizes that finding a "sense of ethnic identity" is a process of "(re-) invention" that ultimately resists static classification, much like Vizenor's notion of the "postindian," which is the "absence of representation." Life Among the Piutes can be disturbing and baffling since ethnography in the sense Fischer outlines it is bound to frustrate the reader's set of expectations. Ethnic writings, through their representations of ethnic struggles, "demonstrate the creation of new identities and worlds. Rather than naive efforts at direct representation, they suggest or evoke cultural emergence" (Fischer 202). And in evoking "cultural emergence," they present an identity which will always be elusive; in fact, such an identity remains ethnographically strong as long as it continues to resist representation. Stephen Tyler notes that the pervasive desire of ethnographers is to arrive at an "accurate" cultural representation in their ethnographic writings, but that they "have missed the true import of `discourse,' which is `the other as us,' for the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation" (Tyler 128).

Winnemucca was born when her tribal culture was still strong, having had little or no contact with Euro-Americans, and she spent her early childhood years in a Paiute way of life that disappeared by the time she reached early adulthood. In fact, she did not learn English until she was thirteen or fourteen years old, while living with the Ormsby family in Genoa, Nevada. Since the Northern Paiutes were nomadic, moving from place to place to hunt, fish, and gather food over an enormous land area in much of the Great Basiri, they were particularly vulnerable to white settlement: Their physical environment was very delicate, and white intrusion "on the [Paiutes] was immediately and unremittingly disruptive of the old ways" (Brumble 60-61). From the time of the first white contact, change for the Paiutes was rapid and very destructive to their way of life. Within the space of a few years, they lost some of their best pinenut gathering places to white settlement, rivers were polluted by livestock introduced by the emigrants, and they were more and more frequently under hostile physical attack. When the Paiutes were forced onto reservations at Pyramid Lake, Malheur, and later, Yakima and McDermit, there was not sufficient land area for them to get food in their accustomed manner, so they were at the mercy of the government and corrupt agents to feed and clothe them and to teach them the rudiments of agriculture, which was foreign to their traditional lifestyle. On the reservations, they were frequently faced with starvation due to the negligence of agents such as W.V. Reinhart at Malheur and James H. Wilbur at Yakima, who would sell government-issued rations and provisions intended for the Paiutes to anyone who would pay them (Winnemucca 124-36, 238-44). Given the traditional culture of the Paiutes and the horrifying circumstances the reservation system brought onto her people, one can understand Winnemucca's disdain for that system.

Part of the discomfort contemporary readers may have with Winnemucca (see Bataille and Sands, Fowler, Ruoff) is her support for the Dawes, or General Allotment Act of 1887, which sought to end the reservation system. Before it was put into law, it appeared to be a solution to the abuses her people underwent, and Winnemucca found Senator Henry L. Dawes, the main sponsor of the bill, to be fair and straightforward with her, unlike most of the other politicians she dealt with (Canfield 209).(3) But it was ultimately a tragic piece of legislation for Native Americans. According to Wilcomb E. Washburn, when the Dawes Act was passed, "the Indian land base amounted to 138,000,000 acres. Between 1887 and 1934, about 60 percent of this land passed out of Indian hands." Washburn elaborates as follows:

   The allotted land was to be held in trust for a period of 20 years, after
   which the Indian had unrestricted power to use and sell. Unallotted lands
   on the reservation were designated as surplus and ceded to the government,
   which then sold them to whites, placing the proceeds in trust for the
   tribes concerned. Sixty million acres were lost through the sale of lands
   designated "surplus" by the government after the allotments had been made
   to the Indians. In addition to this tribal land, 27,000,000 acres or two
   thirds of the land allotted to individual Indians, was also lost by sale
   between 1887 and 1934. (145)(4)

The Dawes Act opened the floodgate for white settlement on reservation land. Much of Winnemucca's polemic against the reservation system springs from the series of abuses and misdeeds that resulted as a consequence of that system: After all, why even create reservations such as Malheur, where no Indian would live for years due to the tyranny of the agent, Reinhart? The Dawes Act was supposed to insure individual Indian land holdings--something the reservation system Winnemucca knew did not do; no doubt she did not anticipate the ultimate consequences of the Allotment Act.

As mentioned earlier, Winnemucca's awareness of the audience to whom she wrote is crucial to understanding her work. Other early Native American writers such as William Apess, Samson Occom, and Charles Eastman were either masterful in appropriating Christian discourse or the traditional European form of the story of the development of the self--the autobiography. But Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes does not consistently fall into any definite European literary category. For an "autobiography" it has very little discussion of Winnemucca's personal life, lacking conventions of that genre such as "the formative years" and "turning points"; she is largely "unconcerned about self-definition" (Brumble 63). These categories are key elements in Western autobiographies, and to learn specific details of Winnemucca's personal life, one has to consult sources other than Life Among the Piutes. For example, although she claims adherence to the Methodist church at one point, she gives no account of any conversion to Christianity and frequently expresses outward disdain for Christian mores and hypocrisy, especially when describing the most prominent Christians in her life, the Indian agents. Also, other than mentioning in passing that she had been married, she never documents her troubles with various husbands, which were substantial. Personal details such as these would be essential in most traditional Western autobiographies. As Brumble notes, it is "unlikely that she was familiar with such literature; indeed, aside from the hymns she quotes occasionally, it is unlikely that Winnemucca was much aware of literary influences at all" (62). She even admits to difficulty reading English in Life Among the Piutes. When presented with a letter from an army captain, she notes, "It took me some time to read it, as I was very poor indeed at reading writing; and I assure you, my dear readers, I am not much better now" (82).

Instead of a self-portrait, in Life Among the Piutes Winnemucca sees the self in relation to the larger group, her tribe. Indeed, Sarah Winnemucca fits Arnold Krupat's category of the Native AmErican autobiographer and the "synecdochic self" perfectly. Krupat's idea of the "synecdochic self" involves the observation that the author's definition of self works as a metaphor for a larger, tribal definition, contrasted to the Western tradition of portraying the self for its own end:

   [M]etonymy is concerned with part-part relationships while synecdoche is
   concerned with part-whole relations.... [W]hile modern Western
   autobiography has been essentially metonymic in orientation, Native
   American autobiography has been and continues to be persistently
   synecdochic, and ... the preference for synecdochic models of the self has
   relations to the oral techniques of information transmission typical of
   Native American cultures. (216)

Winnemucca's autobiography is the medium through which the reader sees the consequences of white settlement on the tribe--it is a communal statement about the tribe given through Sarah Winnemucca. As Krupat puts it, the "very title," Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, "proclaims her individual life as comprehensible foremost in relation to the collective experience of her tribe" (Ethnocriticism 229).

Winnemucca's distinctively synecdochic sensibility can be traced to her familiarity with the oral traditions of her tribe, which are always communal. Louis Owens, in Other Destinies, notes the importance of oral stories in creating a definition of community in tribal cultures (9), and Winnemucca writes not only about particular Paiute stories--indeed, her entire text is a series of them--but their importance in defining the community. To give the reader an idea of the sense of community and its relation to oral discourse in her tribe, Winnemucca describes the function of the "chief's tent": "In the evening the head men go there to discuss everything, for the chiefs do not rule like tyrants; they discuss everything with their people, as a father would in his family. Often they sit up all night. They discuss the doings of all, if they need to be advised" (52). At these councils, it is the Paiute tradition to go to great lengths to make sure that everyone--the whole community--understands what was said:

   At the council, one is always appointed to repeat at the time everything
   that is said on both sides, so that there may be no misunderstanding, and
   one person at least is present from every lodge, and after it is over, he
   goes and repeats what is decided upon at the door of the lodge, so all may
   be understood. For there is never any quarrelling in the tribe, only
   friendly counsels.... It is this which makes the tribe so united and
   attached to each other, and makes it so dreadful to be parted. (54)

Winnemucca was raised according to these rigorous notions of creating understanding for the entire community--clearly it is implied that the doings of one person discussed in the council tent are deeply relevant to the larger group, and that aspect of her tribal self is never neglected in her narrative.

Not only is her autobiography written according to the "part-whole" model Krupat describes, but her manner of narrating events, argue LaVonne Ruoff and Brumble, is distinctively oral and non-Western. Although Winnemucca wrote the text of her autobiography in English herself, Brumble categorizes her as falling into the "preliterate tradition" of American Indian autobiography (48).(5) He groups her with two other early figures, White Bull and Two Leggings, mainly because their narratives resist the Western tendency to construct the self in a metonymic manner. As Brumble puts it, "Many of the as-told-to Indian autobiographies include tribal history; indeed, that early Indians should tell about their own lives only after telling the history of their people has suggested to several scholars something essential about Indian habits of mind. It seems to confirm that these early Indians conceived of themselves as tribal beings, that it was unconventional for them to think about themselves apart from their people" (54). One element that distinguishes Winnemucca as a "tribal being" is a Paiute way of telling evident in her text, which differs sharply from the Western way. Brumble notes that the way Paiutes respond to accusations in Winnemucca's narrative contrasts to the white way, with the Paiute response being invariably "autobiographical" or "historical," which means that the speaker will, rather than deny an accusation without giving evidence, as is often the white custom, give a long and detailed account as a reply. Hence the term "historical" (Brumble 67), in order that both sides will understand the entire story, as Winnemucca describes in the above council tent passage. Two examples illustrate this difference. Toward the end of the narrative, when Winnemucca obtains permission from Interior Secretary Schurz to let the Paiutes at Yakima return to Malheur, the agent, Wilbur, resists. Sarah replies to him:

   Mr. Wilbur, you forget that you are a Christian when you talk so to me. You
   have not got the first part of a Christian principle about you, or you
   would leave everything and see that my poor, broken-hearted people get
   home. You know how they are treated by your Christian [Yakima] Indians....
   You are starving my people here, and you are selling the clothes which were
   sent to them, and it is my money in your pocket; that is why you want to
   keep us here, not because you love us. I say, Mr. Wilbur, everybody in
   Yakima City knows what you are doing, and hell is full of just such
   Christians as you are. (239)

Winnemucca claims that Wilbur's reply is simply, "Stop talking, or I will have you locked up" (239), which contrasts with Winnemucca's detailed, narrative accusation. The text indicates that Wilbur gives no reply other than an appeal to force; he does not try to refute her accUsations, which, aimed as they are against a Christian minister, are scathing. His only authority is power, and this type of oral construction typifies the speech of other whites in the book: "The white people in the book ... never respond to charges `autobiographically.' They reply with dismissals, flat denials, and, especially, with assertions of authority" (Brumble 67).

The Paiute speakers always give a thorough history as a means of self-vindication, and this tradition, heavily evident in Winnemucca's book, is a common form of rhetoric with many Native tribes. Ruoff calls the style Winnemucca uses "the quotative style of Northern Paiute narratives," which is evident in the way Winnemucca dramatizes many episodes in the book, both with long monologues of characters and with her own detailed histories (1041). Life Among the Piutes is loaded with examples of "autobiographical self-vindication," and I do not want to make a long list of them. However, I would like to observe in agreement with Brumble that the entire book "may be seen as an extended self-vindication, as an attempt to defend her own reputation and that of her family and her tribe" (68). It constitutes a larger effort to subvert the mentality of people like Wilbur, who would simply like Indians to "stop talking" by giving voice to the Paiutes in a thorough, "historical" form.

As noted earlier, Life Among the Piutes tends to resist the "autobiographical" classification in the Western sense--it lacks what Western readers might consider crucial personal details in favor of a detailed history of her tribe's relation with white settlers in the Paiute homeland. The only places where the book is autobiographical in the Western sense--and extensively so--are found in Winnemucca's efforts to vindicate her own reputation, or to prove that she is worthy of respect because she has done numerous deeds and made sacrifices on behalf of the tribe. Before citing a particular example, it is important to remember that Winnemucca had a reputation among some whites as being morally lax because of her drinking and numerous affairs with men of bad reputation (see Canfield 172-73). Thus, parts of her narrative are overt efforts to vindicate her own reputation as well as that of the tribe. Those efforts can be substantial. Canfield notes, for example, that the appendix at the back of the book, which consists of a series of letters and newspaper stories attesting to her good moral character, is one such effort (204). Another example is in the final chapter, "The Yakima Affair," where Sarah describes going to Washington, D.C., to meet President Hayes and Secretary Schurz. After returning to Lovelock she and her sister had to ride by horse to Yakima with the letter giving the Paiutes liberty from their exile there. In describing the various hardships of that journey, she repeatedly refers to the danger she and her sister faced from ranch-hands and other bandits who might try to violate them. In one instance, after staying with an acquaintance named Crowles, three "Spanish boarders" saw them and gave chase on horseback. Sarah describes it as follows:

   Away we went, and they after us like wild men. We rode on till our horses
   seemed to drop from under us. At last we stopped, and I told sister what to
   do if the whole three of them overtook us. We could not do very much, but
   we must die fighting. If there were only two we were all right,--we would
   kill them; if only one we would see what he would do. (229)

They outran all but one, and he backed down. This illustrates the great lengths Winnemucca goes to in order to prove her womanly virtue--she will fight to the death to guard her honor. It also functions like an oral convention common in traditional tribal narratives: Brumble calls this convention the "coup tale," which narrates particular feats of bravery, usually in direct confrontation with the enemy. Brumble defines the coup tale as follows: "In a wide range of tribes, an Indian could best win honor by striking an enemy. Other feats of bravery could also be counted as coups: shooting the enemy, stealing their horses and scalping" (23). This and other anecdotes in the text, such as her account of the Pyramid Lake War, the Bannock War, and the crisis with the Williams brothers, which amount to Sarah's or members of her tribe's bravery against an enemy, is part of an effort where she "seems mainly concerned to set down her deeds. And ... she is like [earlier, preliterate Native autobiographers White Bull and Two Leggings] in conceiving of herself as something like the sum total of her deeds" (Brumble 65). Winnemucca's defeat of the three pursuers, then, speaks to both the tribal and the non-Native sensibilities in the text: She documents her virtues in a way that addresses white concerns about her reputation on the one hand, and on the other, she proves her bravery as an Indian both by overcoming the hostile pursuers, and by risking her life for the larger good of her tribe, whom she was trying to rescue from captivity at Yakima. Winnemucca's mixing of Western and tribal influences indicates her adeptness at "adapting Paiute oral conventions to the uses of the pen and to the entertainment and persuasion of white audiences" (Brumble 69).

Despite Winnemucca's lack of familiarity with European literary conventions, the source of her knowledge of what might appeal to a Euro-American audience comes from her lectures and her knowledge of romanticized constructions of Indian identity in the nineteenth century. It was a rarity for Indians to speak and write English in an articulate fashion in the nineteenth century. As David Murray notes, during Winnemucca's lifetime, "Actual accounts of Indians speaking rather than orating are rather thin, partly perhaps because of assumptions ... which would lead to untranslated speech being dismissed as grunts ..." (36). Therefore Indians represented in texts for non-Native readers in Winnemucca's time would have been produced in a largely invented fashion--think of Chingachgook or Queequeeg--reinforcing to some degree the perceptions of savagery implicit in the "grunts" of untranslated speech. Representations of Indians, then, had to conform to such expectations: "the texts have been produced for, and shaped by, the cultural expectations of a white readership, but the Indian speech is presented in a dramatic context which has the effect of making it already overdetermined for the white reader. As a result the speakers are `framed,' so that what they are saying is actually less important than the fact and manner of their saying it" (Murray 36). Native writers like Winnemucca, then, would have to use invented forms like this on the outside, even if their intent was to subvert the pre-determined white perceptions of them. A common construction of Indians at that time was that of the "doomed Indian," and Winnemucca surely recognized and exploited that image. Georgi-Findlay points out that Winnemucca successfully used the image attached to her persona of the "Indian Princess" as a means to convey her larger purpose of getting her message across about the hardships of her people: Winnemucca "seems to capitalize on this romantic public image in her lectures and her autobiographical narrative for the purpose of winning her audience's sympathy for her tribe" (Georgi-Findlay 228). Winnemucca saw that there was potential behind that image and exploited it on behalf of her tribe.

Throughout her life Winnemucca was well-known in numerous cities for her "performances," either in the form of lectures or short dramatic plays. Canfield notes that in 1864, Sarah, her sister Elma, her father, and six other Paiutes did a mini-tour of Virginia City and San Francisco, performing a series of "Tableaux Vivants Illustrative of Indian Life" (Canfield 39). These performances would have appealed to that romanticized Native of the "wild west" or the "invented Indian" Vizenor warns of, and it is not surprising that Winnemucca never mentions the "performances" in her autobiography, given the response from reviewers who saw the episodes as nothing more than comedic, reinforcing negative stereotypes and strengthening white racism against her people (Canfield 39-43). I quote briefly from a review of the Winnemuccas's performance at the Metropolitan Theatre in San Francisco to indicate the response it got in the papers:

   The Royal Family were introduced to the audience by a gentleman in black as
   ... Winnemucca, Chief of the Piutes, and his two daughters. Royal Family
   bowed. [...] The gentleman in black then read a lecture on Piutes `and any
   other Indians,' which sounded in its delivery like a school boy's
   production of pale faces, red men, tented plains, warriors with a hundred
   wounds, etc.

      It was intended, however, to be highly eulogistic of the Great Chief....

      The crowning feature of this unique entertainment was the address in the
   Pi-Ute dialect, by Winnemucca, and interpreted by one of his daughters. The
   old fellow came forward to the front of the stage, supported by the two
   daughters ... and with a self possession and assurance that would do honor
   to a Copperhead stump speaker, spoke as follows:

      Rub-a-dub, dub! Ho-daddy, hi-daddy; wo-up, gee-haw Fetch water, fetch
      water, Meninx! ....

   The curtain fell amidst the most rapturous applause from the ladies, and
   the Pi-Ute war whoop from the boys. The aboriginal entertainment was over.
   People like novelty, let them have it. Opera and minstrelsy will pall after
   a season or two, and if we do go now and then to see an aboriginal
   entertainment or a Chinese theatrical troupe, whose business is it? we
   would like to know [sic]. (qtd. in Canfield 39-41)

This performance reinforced all the negative constructions of Indian culture and identity, and the Winnemucca family did not seem to have accomplished much in increasing white awareness of Paiute culture, with the performance appealing as it does to savage constructions of language and the doomed Indian. However, if the "performances" were a series of failed efforts to generate awareness and sympathy for Winnemucca's people, they would surely have given her a sense of what a white audience would want from an Indian "performer," and Winnemucca recognized a degree of ideological power that could be exploited from them, even if its point of origin was a series of romantic and racist stereotypes. It would have been impossible for Native writers like Winnemucca not to appeal to the expectations of a white audience in their discourse. As Murray reminds us, "Anything that was published, [by Indians] at least until the point of widespread Indian literacy, was likely to reflect the tastes of a white audience, and conform to a large extent to what at least some of them thought it was appropriate for an Indian to write. Indian writers are mainly going to materialise, therefore, only when what they say meets a white need, as Christians or chroniclers of their own culture, for instance" (Murray 57). Thus, Winnemucca moved from the staged performances to lectures, but she never tried to shake the label of "Indian Princess." For her lectures, Winnemucca always wore exotic, flamboyant dress that would certainly catch her audience's attention: "She enjoyed creating a dramatic impression, dressed in fringed buckskin and beads, with armlets and bracelets adorning her arms and wrists. She even included the affectation of a gold crown on her head and a wampum bag of velvet, decorated with an embroidered cupid, hanging from her waist" (Canfield 201). This dramatic impression seems to be an effort on Winnemucca's part to ensure that the popular construction of Indian was at least superficially being met for her audience.

Her lectures proved the more effective means for Winnemucca to speak for her people, and her book is based on numerous lectures she gave over a substantial period of time. Her intention in writing the book was to put together a sustained and complete story of her people's relations with whites, something she could not do in a single monologue (Canfield 200-01). Winnemucca was a powerful speaker, and she was effective at moving her audiences emotionally; lecturing, then, even though her outward persona may have appealed to the romantic sensibility of the princess and the doomed-but-noble savage of the tableau vivants, was her most effective means of speaking for her people and gaining sympathy for their condition. Indeed, it was through lectures that she came into contact with Elizabeth Peabody, who made it possible for her to write her autobiography and later provided her with financial support for years after Life Among the Piutes was published (Canfield 206).

Euro-American perceptions of Native Americans tended either to categorize them as Noble Savages or just plain savages, and Winnemucca goes to great length to convince her audience that Paiutes were no more "savage" than anyone else. A letter from Colonel Frederick Lander, after a visit with Winnemucca's father following the Pyramid Lake War, is typical of how the governmental leaders viewed Indians and dealt with them. It also illustrates what sorts of attitudes and assumptions Winnemucca would be up against in working with whites. Apparently Lander was impressed With the elder Winnemucca and wrote to U.S. Commissioner Greenwood: "`I told the Chief that his tribe was more like the whites than the Daggers [sic]. That much of the Pah-Ute territory, especially the mountain-sheep and antelope ranges, the whites would never covet, that their lakes were full of fish which the whites did not want'" (qtd. in Canfield, 28). This letter illustrates a deeply-held assumption that the best Indians were the ones who were "like the whites" and that, insofar as they held lands that the whites did not value, they might be left alone--of course they were never left alone for any reason, ultimately. Thinking like this likely led to a willingness to create reservations such as Pyramid Lake, which is largely useless to the tribe, even though it encompasses a large area of land. Aside from the hostilities emigrants harbored toward Indians in general, Canfield notes that they tended to perceive Paiutes and other tribes of the Great Basin as even baser and less "civilized" than other tribes, calling them the "digger" Indians: "The emigrants, observing the Paiutes in their insubstantial grass shelters and minimal clothing, thought of them as primitive `diggers.' The word `digger' was used in a derogatory way to refer to the natives of the Great Basin and California, because the Indian women often dug with sticks for bulbs and roots" (5). White perceptions such as this would explain Winnemucca's willingness to accept the label of the "Indian princess," which parallels the Noble Savage, despite what Vizenor notes about that simulation: "The tribes have been burdened ever since with the narrative simulations of mother nature and the noble other as the unmeant sources of liberation from urban civilization. Such ecstasies, of course, become the romantic literature of dominance" (Manifest Manners 175). Winnemucca's understanding of this perception also explains why she did not resist being seen as an Indian who was a "noble other" and "like the whites," because that was an image she could exploit for the betterment of her tribe. Thus, her anticipation of audience was substantial--her ability to adapt and create herself in such a way that whites would listen to her was a means for her to assert her tribal identity while she was still alive, and it exemplifies the idea of post-Indians resisting representations from the culture of dominance. Part of the reason for Winnemucca's success as a voice and representative of the Paiutes, then, was that the whites perceived her as a "civilized Indian," an "Indian Princess" who could act like them. She used that persona to try to change attitudes that would construct her people as "digger" Indians.

Besides the labels of "white man's Indian" and "digger" Indian, Winnemucca also had to contend with the notion of the Indian as the Noble Savage--her awareness of this perception is fairly obvious, as seen from her involvement in tableau vivants, her lecturing dress, and her debunking of the ideas of "civilized" and "savage" in Life Among the Piutes. While she would not have been aware of the long literary tradition of the Noble Savage,(6) she recognized the obsession, the compulsion among whites to simultaneously idolize and despise the Native, in a manner that exemplifies elements within Hayden White's discussion of metaphor and language, "The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish" in Tropics of Discourse. In that study, White argues that the Noble Savage is a type of "fetish" as a result of the mistaken tropes European and Euro-American cultures use in defining Natives:

   Application of [a Marxian analogy about the absurdity of the value people
   ascribe to gold] requires only that we recognize the elements of paradox
   present in the use of the concept, the alienation implicit within the
   structure of this usage, and the hidden, or repressed, identification of
   the natives of the New World with natural objects (that is to say, their
   dehumanization) to be used (consumed, transformed, or destroyed) as their
   conquerors (or owners) desired. Nor should we be surprised by the
   idolization of the natives implied in the notion of the Noble Savage.... It
   is significant ... that this idolization of the natives of the New World
   occurs only after the conflict between the Europeans and the natives had
   already been decided and when, therefore, it could no longer hamper the
   exploitation of the latter by the former. (186)

To a large degree what White writes about the Noble Savage here applies to the situation of Winnemucca's people; on the one hand, she saw her people dehumanized at the hands of settlers and Indian agents as the "conquerors" "destroyed" and "consumed" them, yet she could go to big cities and perform and lecture with great success as the Indian Princess even as her people were suffering. In order for a concept like the "Noble Savage" to function in the exploitative fashion White outlines, there must be an assumption on behalf of the conqueror that their culture is superior because it is "civilized," and a Manichean set of oppositions emerges as a result of the tropic ideas of "savage" and "civilized." Winnemucca explores the same possibility White develops that tropes such as the Noble Savage are merely metaphors constructed by one culture to facilitate conquering another, and she adopts the Noble Savage guise in order to subvert it.

In fact, subverting the idea of Noble Savage is a significant part of the agenda in Winnemucca's autobiography. She accomplishes this in two principal ways: By suggesting that her people are "civilized" in ways that are remarkably similar and even superior to Euro-American civilization, and that European notions of Indian savagery and inferiority are completely arbitrary, and indeed false, based on extended accounts of horrifying white savagery against her people. It is for the former reason that Winnemucca writes the detailed ethnography in chapter two of Life Among the Piutes, "Domestic and Social Moralities." In it she gives descriptions of Paiute child-rearing conventions, courtship and kinship customs. In discussing tribal administration, she notes that Paiutes have governmental systems similar to those of her non-Indian readers: "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). There is also a suggestion that despite the similarities, the Paiute nation is "civilized" to a greater degree because the Paiutes do not initiate hostilities against other people: "There is nothing cruel about our people. They never scalped a human being" (54). In the same chapter she explores the issue of savagery and civilization on a verbal level. For example, in her account of Paiute courtship rituals, she writes, "Oh, with what eagerness we girls used to watch every spring for the time when we could meet with our hearts' delight, the young men, whom in civilized life you call beaux" (46). Here, and in numerous other places in the text, Winnemucca uses "civilized" and "savage" to refer to whites and Natives, seeming to reinforce the traditional construction of the two, but then, with the content of her discourse, she unravels those constructions, as she does in this simple passage from "Domestic and Social Moralities" by terming her people "savage" while simultaneously indicating that the "savage" culture resembles very closely what white readers conceive of as "civilized."

Another example of Winnemucca's inversion of this set of binaries is seen in chapter four and in the long fifth chapter, "Reservation of Pyramid and Muddy Lakes," where she documents the troubles the Paiutes had after being allotted the Pyramid Lake reservation. Winnemucca is never heavy-handed in labeling the emigrants; instead she will narrate various events, then there might be a subtle statement referring to the savage/civilized opposition. In chapter five, Winnemucca writes about the "Muddy Lake Massacre," when a company of soldiers led by Captain Wells, having suspected the Paiutes of stealing cattle from whites at Harney Lake, over 300 miles to the north, killed 30 women and children at Muddy Lake (now dry and called Winnemucca Lake); her sister survived the attack and told of how the soldiers threw babies into the fire after they torched the camp (Life Among the Piutes 77-78). In the previous chapter she documents the incident that sparked the Pyramid Lake War, which occurred when two white men--the Williams brothers--abducted two Paiute girls and hid them in their house. When Sarah's brother and some other men found them and saw that they had been badly abused, they killed the white men on the spot. Afterwards, Winnemucca describes the reaction: "Three days after the news was spread as usual. `The bloodthirsty savages had murdered two innocent, hard-working, industrious, kind-hearted settlers;' and word was sent to California for some army soldiers to demand the murderers of the Williamses" (71-72). By using the words of another source, in this case the white-run media, to label the incident, juxtaposing it with her account of what really happened, Winnemucca effectively converts the white construction of Indian savagery to what amounts to white savagery against the "kind-hearted" Natives.

In other passages from her autobiography, Winnemucca is more subtle in handling the constructions of savage Indians. Sarah and her sister spent a number of years living with the Ormsby family at Genoa--she mentions that these were mostly happy years, and describes her white neighbors as friends. She lists all the families she knew while there; then, in a telling passage, she writes:

   All these people were loved by my people; we lived there together, and were
   as happy as could be. There was no stealing, no one lost their cattle or
   horses; my people had not learned to steal. We lived that way in peace for
   another year; our white brothers gave my people guns for their horses in
   the way of trading; yet my people never said, "We want you to give us
   something for our land." (59)

It is passages such as this that would lead critics to label Winnemucca as overly acculturated, as she seems to make her life with these settlers seem idyllic. But she undercuts the descriptions of harmony and well-being with the last sentence, "my people never said, `We want you to give us something for our land.'" Indeed, had the settlers in Genoa and others like them not driven the Paiutes from their land, Sarah would not have been forced to live in their town and would never have gotten to be such friends with the white neighbors. Further, Winnemucca is careful to note that even though she lived happily with the Ormsby family at Genoa, it was Major Ormsby who led the first assault against the Paiutes in the Pyramid Lake War--without investigating details of the matter, simply assuming that the Williamses were innocent victims--after hearing that Sarah's brother and other Paiutes had killed the Williams brothers. Passages like this, then, are typical of Winnemucca's ability to get along with the whites for the sake of the survival of her people while continuing to illustrate the tension that filled their interactions with the emigrants.

Winnemucca's blurring of savage and civilized is evidence of dialogism found throughout her prose: it is loaded with double meanings and what M.M. Bakhtin terms "hybrid constructions," indicating a pervasive tension between the conflicting cultural systems she finds herself in the middle of. Much of this is seen in passages in which Winnemucca refers to Euro-Americans as "white brothers" or "white sisters." Although she uses such phrases throughout her book repeatedly, she exploits the ironies and multiple ideologies and ethnic constructions found in that phrase. The notion that the whites were brothers and sisters of the Paiutes comes from a tribal story, which amounted to a belief that the white people were descended from the same forefathers as the Paiutes, but separated in an ancient familial dispute. The catch to the story that made the Paiutes especially friendly to whites was their belief that the two races would be reconciled after being reunited. Winnemucca's grandfather was convinced that the emigrants were these "white brothers," and continued to espouse that belief even after the Paiutes began losing land to the whites, and the emigrants started killing Paiutes. After first seeing them, he told the tribe, "the white people we saw a few days ago must certainly be our white brothers, and I want to welcome them. I want to love them as I love all of you" (6-7). Although her grandfather's sympathy and naive acceptance of the whites did not remain with the tribe after his death, Winnemucca uses the phrase that originated with the grandfather throughout the book as an ironic way to distance herself from the white settlers and to contrast them with her people. Soon after first contact with the whites, Winnemucca describes what appears to be an encounter with the Donner emigrant party:

   [W]hile we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather
   called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were.
   They set everything we had left on fire....

   This whole band of white people perished in the mountains, for it was too
   late to cross them. We could have saved them, only my people were afraid of
   them. We never knew who they were, or where they came from. So, poor
   things, they must have suffered fearfully, for they all starved there.
   (12-13)

This passage indicates a compelling duality about Winnemucca's writing--while she directly distances herself from the idea that these emigrants were her brothers, calling them "the people my grandfather called our white brothers"--she expresses pity for their starvation, even though it was people like these emigrants that destroyed the Paiute way of life. But this passage illustrates Winnemucca's role of cultural mediator in writing her text for a Euro-American audience: Her anger for the whites is couched by her passing the statement of brotherhood onto her grandfather, but it is outwardly tempered by her expressions of pity. Thus, Winnemucca's repeated use of "our white brothers" is tinged with irony, with its meaning and her intent subverted by the context from which the phrase originated. The way Winnemucca uses the phrase speaks to Bakhtin's theory about hybridized language:

   What we are calling hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by
   its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker,
   but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech
   manners, two styles, two "languages," two semantic and axiological belief
   systems ... there is no formal--compositional and syntactic--boundary
   between these utterances, styles, languages, belief systems; the division
   of voices and languages takes place within the limits of a single syntactic
   whole, often within the limits of a simple sentence. It frequently happens
   that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two
   languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction--and
   consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings.... (304-05)

In that phrase, "our white brothers," Winnemucca shows an awareness of the two cultures, the two races, whose conflict can be traced into her discourse. Thus, when Winnemucca documents a white attack on Paiute fishermen we see the two "belief systems," the "two languages," emerge from the single utterance:

   We remained [at the Humboldt Sink] all winter; the next spring the
   emigrants came as usual, and my father and grandfather and uncles, and many
   more went down on the Humboldt River on fishing excursions. While they were
   thus fishing, their white brothers came upon them and fired on them, and
   killed one of my uncles, and wounded another. Nine more were wounded, and
   five died afterwards. (20)

This passage indicates an awareness and continuance of the tribal source for the phrase "white brother," and its hopeless incongruity with the reality of Paiute contact with whites. Additionally, Winnemucca's repetition of "white brothers" appeals to a Euro-American construction of the friendly-but-defeated Indian Princess, but the double-voicedness of the phrase undercuts that construction. Thus, "white brother" is both the Paiute belief that the races will someday be reunited and Winnemucca's perception of these whites' response to Paiute Natives, which indicates the failure of that ideal and a compulsion to survive incursions like this one at the Humboldt River. Winnemucca's construction of this passage and others like it indicate her subversion of the idea of the friendly-but-naive Indian who sees whites as "brothers," which is represented in her accounts of her grandfather talking for hours about his "white brothers," pathetically wearing the first gift he received from them, the tin dinner-plate around his neck, clinging to the letter from Captain Fremont attesting to his friendly character, his "rag friend."

It is that very same label--the naive, friendly Indian--which Winnemucca maintains as an exterior persona that leads critics to claim that she was excessively acculturated or "Christianized" to merit serious discussion as an American Indian writer. But when one considers how much Winnemucca's work deals with notions of Indianness on multiple levels, it becomes puzzling that anyone would claim that her work is not an important example of Native American literature. While her appropriation of the romanticized exterior persona of the friendly Indian Princess seems to indicate that she was willing to adopt that white label and embody the ideal as the "white man's Indian," there are too many complexities having to do with her ethnic identity, and her interaction with the culture of dominance in her work for it to be so simple. What is particularly compelling about her work is the way she plays with these constructions to elude representation: when we are ready to go along with the idea that she is indeed simply a static "Indian Princess," we read her autobiography and find a text that exhibits a particularly tribal voice even as it embodies sentimentality and an almost naive love for the hostile settlers, and one that systematically deflates the Euro-American constructions of savage and civilized which led to campaigns of violence against her people.

Notes

(1.) The only significant critical studies of Winnemucca are Brumble, who has part of a chapter devoted to her, Georgi-Findlay, and Fowler. There are several historical sources devoted to Winnemucca, specifically, Canfield, Gehm, Richey, and Stewart.

(2.) Kimberly Blaeser, in her recent study of Gerald Vizenor, elaborates on the importance of Native writers contesting "Indian" identity: "For even should the literary sign `Indian' survive, Native cultures can survive in fact only by the power of tribal traditions. Indeed, Vizenor has gone so far as to suggest that if the sign `Indian' does survive, it will be at the expense of Native people themselves, that Native peoples can actually survive only if they dissociate themselves from `Indianness' as it now exists" (39).

(3.) Indeed, as Canfield notes, Dawes arranged for Sarah to visit him and give a lecture in his home (209). Of this visit, Canfield writes, "Aware that the senator could make some of her ideas into law, Sarah spoke with special animation, and Dawes was greatly moved by her speech. He took her into his study and had a long talk with her--promising he would bring her before the Indian committee of which he was chairman" (Canfield 209).

(4.) In addition to Washburn, for more detailed studies of the consequences of the Dawes Act, see Otis and Hoxie.

(5.) It should be noted that Winnemucca had an editor for Life among the Paiutes, Mary Mann. Although Mann edited Sarah's occasionally poor grammar and spelling (see Canfield 203), there is no evidence to suggest that Mann collaborated with Sarah on writing the text (Canfield 200-19).

(6.) For a more in-depth study of how deeply ingrained the image of the Noble Savage is in European and Euro-American culture, see Berkhofer.

Works Cited

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Bataille, Gretchen M. and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.

Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996.

Bowers, Neal, and Charles L.P. Silet. "An Interview with Gerald Vizenor." MELUS 8.1 (1981): 41-49.

Brumble, H. David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California 1v, 1988.

Canfield, Gae Whitney. Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1983.

Fischer, Michael M.J. "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory." Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 194-233.

Fowler, Catherine S. "Sarah Winnemucca." In Margot Liberty, ed. American Indian Intellectuals. St. Paul: West Publishing, 1976. 33-42.

Gehm, Katherine. Sarah Winnemucca: Most Extraordinary Woman of the Paiute Nation. Phoenix: O'Sullivan, Woodside, 1975.

Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte. "The Frontiers of Native American Women's Writing: Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes." In Arnold Krupat, ed. New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Washington: Smithsonian, 1993. 222-52.

Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.

Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Moon, Randall. "William Apess and Writing White." Studies in American Indian Literatures 5.4 (1993): 45-54.

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Otis, D. S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Ed. and introduction by Francis Paul Prucha. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Richey, Elinor. "Sagebrush Princess with a Cause: Sarah Winnemucca." American West 12.6 (November 1975): 30-33+.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne. "Western American Indian Writers, 1854-1960." In Western Literature Association Ed., A Literary History of the American West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1987. 1038-57.

Stewart, Patricia. "Sarah Winnemucca." Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 14 (Winter 1971): 23-33.

Tyler, Stephen A. "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document." Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 122-40.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1994.

--. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. Red Man's Land / White Man's Law: The Past and Present Status of the American Indian (Second Edition). Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994.

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Winnemucca, Sarah. Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. 1883. Ed. Mrs. Horace Mann. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1994.

Andrew McClure has published articles on Gerald Vizenor and James Welch. He now lives and works in San Diego, California.

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