Sarah Winnemucca was resilient through all of these troubles; personal ones of loss and abandonment by husbands, and through those shared by her people against reservations. She enacted her masculine role when she needed, and her feminine role depending on what was necessary for her tribe, in step with the Paiute rejection of independence. This is why it might be helpful to consider her gender fluidly changing as a rhetorical performance.

Sneider illuminates much of this theme, as she does with Indigenous Feminism. Winnemucca could play a man's role: honored the role of a chief in the absence of her father, riding hundreds of miles on horseback to save family in the Bannock War, and traveling alone to the halls of politics filled with men to fight her activist causes. 

Multiple times, she would use her placement at reservations to fight for rations and supplies for her people, and did so as a man's role in her culture. Her means were carefully considered, and she would often also use her feminine role as a "granddaughter of the Piute chief," maybe gaining sympathy from those she had to try and persuade. (letters to the national government about agent behavior, and to the reservation agents like Rinehart themselves for example) She also came close to participating in the warfare that constantly ensued in the West at this time hired at times as a scout.

Her identification in colonial culture as well is heavily founded upon her identity as a granddaughter to Chief Truckee, who mediated so much contact between the Paiutes and whites at the time of contact in the mid-19th century.
 

• Winnemucca expresses her resilence through constant communication with government p. 11 and 12
• Multiple times, Sarah gained an empty the promise of better rations and supplies given to her people by reservation agents, so she would often send letters in demand. p. 10 11
• Sarah rode hundreds of miles to save her father and family in the Bannock War.