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