Life Among the Piutes
The Material Performances of Life Among the Piutes
If audiences were allowed to imagine they could access knowledge about Winnemucca through viewing images of her as well as live performances, Life Among the Piutes also offers a certain promise of recognition. Moving between an autobiographical mode, which seems to provide entry to the author’s interiority, and an ethnographic one, which promises knowledge of an exotic and othered culture, Life Among the Piutes seems to be responding to a settler desire for recognition. But, particularly at the level of material text, a tension between the two genres may also disrupt the smooth incorporation of the text into settler systems of knowledge. Not neatly resisting bids for understanding, the text instead jumps between various knowledge systems with an agility that could be read as playfulness—although Life Among the Piutes certainly participates in genres that promise access to both its author and her Indigenous context, we also might imagine that, between these genres, some knowledge is bound to fall through the cracks.In a sense, the two genres activated by Life Among the Piutes may serve to complicate one another in critical ways. Ethnographic material pushes autobiography beyond the bounds of an individual subject, rooting Winnemucca’s personal recollections within a communal context. At the same time, constructing anthropology from a first-person perspective disrupts the typical power dynamics at play within the field. As Audra Simpson has written of Indigenous individuals participating in anthropology, “when the people we speak of speak for themselves, their sovereignty interrupts anthropological portraits of timelessness, procedure, and function that dominate representations of their past and, sometimes, their present” (Simpson 97).
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