Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Sarah Winnemucca
– Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Sarah Winnemucca
This paragraph towards the beginning of Winnemucca’s book– which constitutes “part autobiography, part memoir, part history, and perhaps even part fiction”– entails a rich exception to the sparse representation the institution of marriage generally receives in the text (Sneider, 264). Unlike the similarly autobiographical account Hawaii’s story by Hawaii’s Queen where marriage itself constitutes a central aspect of Queen Liliuokalani’s narrative, the institution does not occupy primacy in Life Among the Piutes. Marital ties do not constitute the basis of relaying relationality and Winnemucca obfuscates her own relationship with the institution by completely omitting the fact of her first marriage; her overall description of the institution is lacking enough for a reader to send Winnemucca a letter “to write me out a description of the way the Indian young men and women do their ‘courting,’ and the marriage ceremony” (109). According to Leah Sneider, this lack of representation is no coincidence. Rather, Winnemucca deliberately restrains from divulging information about her tribe in an act Sneider describes as “cultural withholding” (266). How may we interpret the constricted manner in which Winnemucca chooses to represent the particular institution of marriage in Life Among the Piutes?
A method emerges when we combine Winnemucca’s titular claim, to emphasize the “wrongs” inflicted upon the Piutes, with the way in which marriage emerges in the opening paragraph. In the paragraph above, a brief description of marriage is immediately followed by articulations of motherhood, and paternity, and the tribe’s way of ensuring that the man fulfils his duties to his wife and child. So, Marriage comes to the fore in Winnemucca’s text at this site of kinship. And the violation of kinship constitutes one of the primary “wrongs” done to the Piutes that this narrative foregrounds (Lowrance, 385). Indeed, according to Sneider, the emphasis of settler-colonials’ violation of Piute kinship over the particularities of the traditions around which with kinship is calcified constitutes a textual strategy on Winnemucca’s part. Through this technique, Winnemucca can critique “exploitation and colonization” without exposing parts of her culture that settler-colonials to further imperial intervention (266). Following this interpretation, shared by other NAIS scholars such as Mishuana Goeman, marriage and motherhood in particular and kinship in general emerge as sites for Winnemucca to critique colonialism (21).
Much like in the case of Johnson’s short story, gender relations emerge in Life Among the Piutes as a site where the oppressions of colonialism are particularly evident. Mirroring Johnson, who foregrounds the callous treatment meted out by white men to their Native wives, Winnemucca explicates the domestic arena as one where white men’s violence against Native women emerges most dramatically. The devastating clarity regarding colonialism that a simultaneous consideration of gender and Indigeneity allows for emerges through Winnemucca’s presentation of two of her own kin: her grandfather, and her mother. Winnemucca suggests her mother’s deeper involvement in the domestic sphere than Winnemucca’s grandfather allows her a deeper understanding of the violent heart of colonialism.
The grandfather’s positive disposition is foregrounded right at the beginning of Life Among the Piutes, whose narrative inaugurates with an account of the sighting of white people. Winnemucca’s grandfather, upon this sighting, makes a claim regarding a kinship with white people based on a traditional Piute story (2-3). Therefore, is Winnemucca’s perspective, her grandfather’s primary feeling towards white people is one of love (5). Contrastingly, Winnemucca’s mother views white colonizers as a threat to her daughters and strives to protect the girls’ safety when the settler colonials emerge in the domestic space. Winnemuca’s “mother works to save her home and family and does not trust the white men coming through their camps” (Lowrance, 388), and goes as far as hiding Winnemucca in the earth when white men’s arrival is imminent.
While engagement with white men in the political space somehow does not enable the grandfather to get a true understanding of their deceitful and violent nature, the domestic space acts as one where– through the means of protecting their kin– Native women such as the author’s own mother can come up with a solid critique of colonialism through the realm of gender relations. This is best evidenced in an episode where Winnemucca’s grandfather leaves “her family under the care of two white settlers, Scott and Bonsal” who “would come into camp and ask my mother to give our sister to them. They would come in at night, and we would all scream and cry” (Lowrance, 34). That Winnemuca’s mother’s immediate reaction to the grandfather’s proposition is fear and alertness, and that she does not have to wait for the white men to act to be aware of the violence they intend, displays the domestic sphere as a primary site that evidences the dastardly nature of the settler colonial enterprise.
This foregrounding of colonial aggression in the domestic sphere aligns with the obfuscations of Piute forms of kinship, such as marriage, within Winnemuca’s text. The articulation both these techniques intend, of critiquing colonialism while shielding Native practices, come together in Winnemucca’s representation of colonial violence at the site of Indigenous marriage. In one instance, a Native woman is features in Life Among the Piutes as saying “‘We were married this winter, and I have been with him constantly since we were married. Oh, Good Spirit, come! Oh, come into the hearts of this people. Oh, whisper in their hearts that they may not kill my poor husband!’” (25). Through such dramatic representations, Winnemuca uses marriage to portray kinship as a site where we can most potently witness the violent machinations of settler colonialism.