Sarah Winnemucca
Sarah Winnemucca
Born in what is now western Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca was a Northern Paiute activist and educator. Working as both a translator and advocate for Indigenous rights, she became known for serving as a guide during the Bannock war of 1878 and acting as a member of a Paiute delegation to Washington, DC (Sorisio 81). Already a mobile figure, when Winnemucca published the autobiographical Life Among the Piutes in 1883, she promoted its circulation through an extensive lecture tour on the east coast of the United States.Lectures and Visual Representation
As with Johnson’s story, then, Winnemucca’s written texts would have been received within a context framed by her embodied performances. This photograph, taken in Baltimore during the same year that Life Among the Piutes was published, was likely circulated as a method of publicity for both her lectures and her text—readers had the option of receiving an autographed portrait of Winnemucca when they purchased her book, her image and the mark of her hand functioning as signals of authenticity (Scherer 192). The image also records a self-presentation that seems to match quite closely the one that Winnemucca crafted for her lectures. An 1883 transcript from Boston described Winnemucca as “dressed in fringed buckskin and beads, with amulets and bracelets adorning her arms and wrists…a gold crown on her head and a wampum bag of velvet, decorated with an embroidered cupid, hanging from her waist,” all of which are present in this studio photograph (Boston Transcript, 3 May 1883, as quoted in Scherer). Noting the divergence of such a costume from traditional Northern Paiute dress, as well as the presence of a posture and loose hairstyle that conform to studio norms of the period, Joanne Scherer suggests that Winnemucca was intentionally participating in an “Indian Princess” trope, generating a fantasy image of Indigenous authenticity that conformed to settler frameworks and absented specific Paiute content (see my description of Johnson for a complete explanation of the Indian Princess trope).For Scherer, Winnemucca’s activation of this stereotype was in direct conflict with her activist work. Insisting that “the Indian Princess image failed Sarah when she stopped being a helpmate (in this case, to white policymakers) and began to assist her people in finding ways to help themselves,” Scherer argues that the accommodationist Indian Princess ultimately contributed to Winnemucca’s loss of credibility and failure to achieve key activist aims (Scherer 196). While I agree with the tension identified by Scherer between the Indian Princess as helpmate and the activist who aims to dismantle settler structures, I don’t know that destabilization moves only in the direction she suggests, with the Princess image undermining that of the activist. If “in her lectures [Winnemucca] tried to meld the two images—Indian Princess in visual appearance and heritage claim, and Indian activist in verbal message of reform and Indian self-determination” (Scherer 196), it seems possible that making claims of self-determination while performing as an Indian Princess would have allowed Winnemucca to destabilize the stereotype from within. Like the Dakhóta intellectuals studied by Pexa who participated in “rusing accommodation” (Pexa 4), Winnemucca may very well have been dramatizing easily consumable images of Indigenous harmlessness in order to covertly transmit a much more radical argument.
To see how this dynamic played out in a material text, see Life Among the Piutes
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