Early Indigenous LiteraturesMain MenuThe Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian StoriesBy: Kai ChaseIllicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relationssoumya rachel shailendraLegibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's WritingAn exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma CohenLyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettesby Kira TuckerMarriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literatureby Angad SinghNot-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneityby Yasmin YoonReading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century ParatextsTitle Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's ExhibitResistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary ContributorsFeaturing James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren JohnsonSpiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist NarrativesFeaturing texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya MilnerSovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United StatesJulia GilmanWhat Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region?Featuring Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Pokagon, Black Hawk, and Simon Kofe by Sarah Nisenson(Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833)BHR 1-IntroYasmin Yoonf7f231e474bf43796f973cd0ee560919050f7427Lydia Abedeen321b94302eca10e499769fd0179e64cd33bc4cd5Kira Tuckeracf97d948460e98cd439646cc2db7ae17c5ebd9dsarah nisenson7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616aKai Chased7cab5968a3a916efd1a14a48cc4832d5d5514aeSoumya Shailendra86c246fcc4aea83787381bffd2b839885bef5096Bennett Herson-Roeserc8289125445a56c819045a0091daf0402b3e0875Surya Milner077f837f3d662fd5ef9055f8258e5c47bb11f714Julia Gilmanb860a8277eea484f91a1a9e0423cab4b52bae522Lauren Johnson98dac03e7c9c1ad41e1c0a8583704e55802f98baAngad Singhd2b8d1d68ec374981c9e99b7cb400803bc678231Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Charlotte Goddu2d4c020870148128c7824ece179e04cffe180d95Isabel Griffith-Gorgati985a05928a67a856791fffac3dbba8acc85f6f37
Life Among the Piutes Title Page
1media/Title pge_thumb.png2022-12-07T09:53:10-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1416961Winnemucca book 2 ercplain2022-12-07T09:53:10-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T09:53:48-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Life Among the PiutesEmma Cohen2plain2022-12-07T09:54:09-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T09:54:29-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Their Wrongs and ClaimsEmma Cohen2plain2022-12-07T09:54:34-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T09:46:06-08:00Life Among the Piutes3Winnemucca page 2 ercplain2022-12-07T10:13:08-08:00
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).
