Sarah Winnemucca Introduction
Both/And Not OR...-------------->
Thocmetony / This is a spelling of Sarah's given name in the Piaute language
This nickname is sometimes used / Princess Sarah
/ Sarah General reference in this book
Tocmetone This is another spelling of Sarah's given name in the Paiute language
Who is Winnemucca: the activist ? !
Here is Sarah Winnemucca, known by this name to colonizer's culture, who comes from the Paiute tribe of Northern Nevada. Her grandfather, known as Chief Truckee, was friendly to settlers that came in 1849 and colonial culture, going so far to fight with General Fremont in the Bear Flag Revolt. Her background within and without of colonial culture greatly informs her experience, and she spent her life in activism fighting for the just treatment of reservations. Her political points culminate in the work intended to represent her tribe that's represented here: Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.
The excerpts represented in this anthology are:
Chapter 1, "The First Meeting of the Piutes and Whites."
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Chapter 2, "Domestic and Social Moralities."
Navigation and Structure of Entry
In order to guide the reading, each thumbnail on the first page, "Chapter 1 and 2" links to a visual of physical pages from the first two chapters of Winnemucca's autobiography "Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims." Click on each for the media page and follow the annotations to understand Winnemucca's rhetorical positionality as a person ,visible outside her activism, enacted in her writing here.
Please, click on the page numbers of each page to view them in full screen, as if you were able to see this copy. Or, continue on a path of general concepts that may illuminate multiple perspectives of Winnemucca's work used here, positioned in a post-structuralist sense. You may not necessarily read through the full two chapters of this edition fully, because the variously included, necessary rhetorical notes on Winnemucca's position here can structure your path.
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*The text is housed in Santa Clara University's Archives and Special Collections, and guides the primary reading of the excerpt.*
Below is the book that's talked about. Since this is technofeminism, there is no more turning the book over and back and forth, to feel it physically. So, this page provides a magnifying glass for you to see it instead. It may look like a box of gray, but click on the image and start scrolling around. This means left and right! Scroll-bars will pop up for you.
You'll see up close the artifact in a way that considers your embodied recovery. You also may click the smaller image to the right for a full-size look if you're done with the magnifying glass.
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims” from Santa Clara University's Special Collections & Archives.
Book Cover
Sarah is positioned, in honor of her value there,
generally at Pyramid Lake on the handy map tool.
Through this representation, this recovery of Sarah hopes to appropriately include her among a diverse set of selected writings and other women.
Holistic Identity
Now, you can continue exploring how Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims exists within and is produced by a contact zone, through the following pages, and represents the effort to exercise discursive rhetorical demands in the imperialist culture of the 1800s American West, to be politically effective and publish a "tribalography." As the structure of Native society starkly differs from in roles of power and communication (see redefinition politics?) this inclusion within the anthology outside of print — and reprinting too —aims to decentralize the text as individually representative of her or Native opportunity in the 1800s and replace it with the acknowledgement of "survivance" (Vizenor) actually experienced by Winnemucca.
The subsequent entry makes the effort to position Sarah, as she is often referred to in scholarly reference, outside a singular rhetorical space, as the author originally existed doubly-conscious of her rhetorical space within and without of the “cage of alien victorian morality” heavily influenced by her place. (Zanjani) (Eves)
The focus begins with these understandings of Winnemucca in totally different rhetorical spaces, affecting her identity, and since print is an unrealistic mode to communicate in native culture, her writing comes represented equally with these concepts, as it was only a rhetorical instrument she could use to empower her people as a translator to white culture—to take her work out of the regular lens of the canon and instead as an artifact of her ability to translate between cultures.
The entry here hopes to put into practice a recognition of gender-fluidity. There is the option to explore her work enacted at various times in differing gender performances (Sneider) depending on cultural role. They reflect the cross-cultural influence of the contact zone and communication strategies through about 50 short pages. As a revisionist historiography (Ryan), the recovery of it in this book, in a non-linear fashion, enables the "open/both/and rapport" (Ryan)
Positionality
At all times, this represents the text's function as translating for us readers in English, like Winnemucca herself.
*It is impossible to represent all identity of native culture with a work, and we fully acknowledge and respect the self-identification and sovereignty of native tribes* The two chapters are chosen, also in a sense, as an introduction to the work as a whole. Please, don't take these words to represent Sarah's identity alone. She would likely much rather have her writing here reproduced for the communal representation of the Piute tribe and the political advancement of support for her brothers and sisters.
Now, for a general path through the entry, begin anywhere you would like in the text below. Starting in "Chapter 1 and 2" by clicking 'Continue' will guide you through all the following linearly and offer opportunity to visit discussions of themes annotated throughout.
~ Handy Reading Tool ~
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 appear at the bottom of the broad themed pages each time you leave the excerpt, as a way to "jump back" in!
Title Page, Table of Contents, Page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57
Sarah Winnemucca Introduction Page
