Early Post About Sarah Winnemucca

After reading Powell’s piece on Sarah Winnemucca, and also just in response to the previous texts we’ve read, I keep going back to thinking about how I have been taught about Native Americans. I grew up here, surrounded by various reservations, and am now wondering how useful the education I got really was. I remember making tipis from cardboard in eighth grade. What in the world did that really do? We learned about them as the “other,” with native women painted as the princesses that Powell discusses. Why weren’t we learning about people like Winnemucca. Granted out little eighth grade brains weren’t really thinking about Native American issues, but I do think that stories like that of Winnemucca could be presented in a way that would be a whole lot more useful than building tipis and further placing Natives into the box of the “other.”

Within Powell’s article, the first thing I found worth noting was when she discusses the idea that natives were viewed as incapable of producing rhetoric with purpose. Any rhetorical moves made within were deemed as an accident: “This belief about rhetorical naiveté of indigenous peoples is too often reflected in critical work that refuses to see early native textual engagements as calculated and negotiated with a specific audience, and a specific goal, in mind” (69). It seems so obvious that Winnemucca had an audience and purpose in mind.

The second thing I found to be important was when Powell discusses Winnemucca’s relationship with white women and white men. She sees white men as being frightening, and white women as “angels.” I have never been one to hop on the extreme feminist bandwagon, but I do wonder how all of this would have gone down had the world been run by women. Would have the power turned them into greedy, heartless takers like men behaved, or would have their nurturing, womanly instincts kicked in and told them it was wrong to take away a people’s culture, starve them, and watch the die of disease. Obviously, the help that Winnemucca received from women was because women are caretakers.

I also found it interesting when Powell brings up the idea that Native Americans were torn between two worlds. This seems odd considering that they didn’t choose to even be associated with the “white civilized” world.

When Powell discusses the questioning of Winnemucca’s morality and the possibility of her lying, I can understand how she could be stuck in situations where she had no choice but to lie. She is attempting to navigate an incredibly difficult relationship. Winnemucca also takes responsibility for the BIA: “Winnemucca clearly configures herself as the responsible parent, able to represent the Paiutes to the people in Washington but unable to stop the BIA from its dishonesty” (82). Imagining the complex situation she was stuck in, how could have she stayed completely honest? Rhetorically speaking, being completely honest and truthful would have left her either sided with the Paiutes or whites, not tactfully standing in between.