Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity Main Menu Selections Visit for Text Selections Themes Recurring Ideas throughout the text Editor Reflections On Embodiment and Materiality A Handy Map Places that Intersect at/within this Work Timeline

Nathan Barnes

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This project is not about us, but there's no way we can remove ourselves from it. I felt a companion in Winnemucca, who would not remove herself from her people when publishing Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. My recovery of her work was done in Carson City, NV, near what used to be tribal lands of the Piautes and tribal lands of the Washoes. My trips across the small town for gas or groceries became informed by her loss. Pyramid Lake was also her home, but this is where her family came into contact with settlers and challenged her to activism since. Her culture operates in the spirit of community, and reciprocity, so far as to prioritize people over individuality? This is not endemic to American culture. We've come to many reckonings on individualism in American history, from the loss of the frontier, to world wars ending American exceptionalism, and eventually some postmodern confusion for us in Gen Z. All of this work was done over a screen, so distant that I always wonder how that might influence your ideas of closeness reading it. But it was done with the genuine intent to recover appropriately and consciously. I'm a white man and can't ever truly understand her experience as a native woman.

I tried to design some of these pages to communicate a safety of understanding. I tried using "ASCII" art with text you'll find on the themes page. In reality, it served to show how much time over the keyboard a book like this takes : ]

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Embodiment places my relationship to Winnemucca and her work living in a time far from her, but a place closer. I only have the understandings of those who knew her, knew of her, and contemplated her activism. My knowledge of her tribe is from the outside, and the representation of it can only be framed in such a way. I invite anyone with deeper connection to her culture and herself to read this as the extended hand that Sarah offered to American culture from her own, and for that reason only. Genuinely.

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Thank you to the Carson City Library for Winnemucca's biographies (by Sally Zanjani and Gae Whitney Canfield). 

This page has paths:

  1. Reflection on Embodiment and Materiality Teresa Contino
  2. Editor Reflections Amy Lueck

This page has tags:

  1. Sarah Winnemucca Introduction Nathan Barnes
  2. A Handy Map Amy Lueck
  3. Timeline Teresa Contino