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Sarah Winnemucca: [Post]Indian Princess and Voice of the Paiutes - Critical Essay
MELUS, Summer, 1999 by 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).
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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.
