Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity

Gender Performance

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.
 

 


The pages of the Winnemucca selection, Chapters 1 and 2, are laid out here for reference. If you need to, you may click any one of them to "turn" to that page at any time. Because, this little note will be in each page of the Winnemucca path!

Title Page, Table of Contents, Page 56, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1112, 1314, 15, 16, 17, 18, 1920, 2122, 2324, 2526, 2728, 29, 30, 3132, 3334, 35, 36, 3738, 3940, 4142, 43, 44, 4546, 4748, 4950, 5152, 5354, 5556, 57

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