Powell: Preconceptions

In our reading of Malea D. Powell’s chapter titled: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Powell examines Winnemucca's autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes, in comparison to other scholarly works published about Winnemucca's life and practices. Powell attempts to analyze Winnemucca’s text with less bias towards Winnemucca’s authenticity or “Indianness.” Powell wants to analyze Winnemucca’s publication, Life, for its rhetorical exigency, rather than it’s authenticity.

Powell questions the motivation behind other scholarly works focused on Winnemucca’s Life. Powell wrote: “While I want to emphasize that studying American Indian autobiography is an important and critical project, I think it is a mistake to try to shove rhetorical performances like Winnemucca’s into definitive categories that do not take into account the possibility that Winnemucca was trying to resist the material effects of colonization,”(pg. 74-75). I think in this statement, Powell wants us to avoid approaching any work with preconceptions. She wants rhetoricians to analyze a text, such as Winnemucca’s autobiography, for its rhetorical exigency and it's rhetorical ability rather than the text’s capacity to support some biased or preconceived notion.

Powell looks at Winnemucca’s urgency to speak and write. Winnemucca’s exigency had to do with her dissonance with certain government officials and the mistreatment and common misunderstandings of her people. Her exigency manifests because of Manifest Destiny, colonization, and the White’s dominating cultural beliefs that were forcefully imposed on American Indians, such as education, law, and entitlement to land. Winnemucca’s distrust in government officials is what prompted her voice as a spokesperson for Native American rights. As Powell notes, “Winnemucca had especially close contact with government officials, particularly Indian agents, who, in her mind, often mistreated the Paiutes for their own selfish gain,” (pg 72). Powell wants to show the reader how Winnemucca really was, rather than enforcing certain Indian stereotypes like illiteracy. 

Powell clearly wants the reader to know that her conclusions to studying Winnemucca’s works are considerably different than what others have discovered and claimed. She is skeptical of the analyses already performed on Winnemucca’s work, and wrote: “It is this desire for ‘something ancient’ that I find suspicious here. Brumble is clearly searching for authenticity, for the “real” Indianness present in published texts by Indians,” (pg76). Powell is critical of Brumble’s work here, because the author attempts to build upon his own preconceived notion, rather than analyzing the text for what it is, and what it can be. Powell wants the reader to recognize Winnemucca’s “rhetorical ability,” rather than criticizing her “Indianness,” or authenticity. 

Overall, I think that Powell’s point is warn the reader of approaching a text with any preconceived notions, because this sort of “single-minded focus” can elude from the true meaning and the real potential of such work. Powell wants the reader to recognize Winnemucca for the rhetorical strategist that she was, rather than sifting through her work, searching for “something ancient,” or choosing some specific standpoint to follow, prior to analyzing the text.