Whose telling.
Where did you grow up? How did you grow up? Many of us have lived in towns, boroughs, counties, or cities with indigenous names. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz writes, “Manhattan is/ a Lenape word.”
I grew up in Winnemucca, Nevada. It’s a tiny mining town two hours northeast of Reno. Although my mother enjoyed Navajo music and was blunt about the fact that white Europeans unfairly settled on native land, I never learned about who “Winnemucca” referred to until I went to graduate school in my twenties.
History is a palimpsestory
"original text" outside, not text,
rather process (a story).
A story partially erased overwritten by nationalist agendas
settler colonialism.
settle: to repose
on others' bones.
re: revisionary history
She verbed me inquisitive-like "What story to vision?"
Winnemucca the town is named after Sarah Winnemucca, or Thocmetony (“Shell Flower”), a Paiute who was born near Humboldt Lake in 1844 (Life Among the Paiutes, 25). She was the granddaughter of Truckee, a man of stature in the tribe who favored reconciliation with the invading whites (mostly because they were obliterating wild game and food was dwindling). I went to college in Reno, Nevada, through which the Truckee river winds. Truckee means “good,” Sarah tells us in her memoir Life Among the Paiutes, and white soldiers started calling her grandfather “Truckee” because he often responded to them with that word. Sarah’s father was the man that “came to be known by whites as Chief Winnemucca, more a reflection of non-Natives’ attempts to locate authority in a single figure than an accurate depiction of his stature among Northern Paiutes the Paiute chief” (The Newspaper Warrior, 35).
To be put in jeopardy but have a nice neoliberal answer:
What is Indigenous People's month?
More questions: Why not all year? Why time, why not space ie land ie give the land back.
Columbus still gets a day? Jeopardy answer: What is bloodlust?
Sarah’s home in Northern Paiute territory was the Nevada section of the Great Basin. She came of age as white settlers, soldiers, and explorers flooded the west in greater and greater numbers. In spite of the Paiute’s peaceful yet disgruntled response to white encroachment, they suffered. The whites brought cholera, war, and settlers decimate the local game population on which the Paiutes depended. When Sarah was thirteen, her grandfather sent her, her mother, sister, and brothers to live with white settlers in the hopes that they would teach her domestic work and how to cook. Sarah also spend time at a convent in San Jose after her grandfather’s death in 1859. She writes that was expelled because racist students and their parents didn’t like having a native woman in their school.
Columbus as a rational man of adventurous spirit is deep american
myth.
His nautical prowess was only surpassed by religious zeal.
Columbus capitalized,
clever con,
on Catholic state expansionism.
Sarah worked as an interpreter as well as a public speaker and performer; when her father made speeches in San Francisco, she would translate them. Although some of her and her father’s early performances capitulated to white tastes for ‘exotic’ Indians (she and her father would dress up in full headdress and buckskins), it’s important to note that this was because they were fighting for survival in a world that offered them few options. A woman who saw Chief Winnemucca and Sarah perform recounts “I asked the Chief why he had taken the white man’s ways to show himself? Then came the story of his people’s poverty, their suffering for food, and the cause of the distress now upon them” (Winnemucca, “Winnemucca and the Suffering Tribe of Pah-Utes — An Appeal to the Public”).
Bro thought he was a prophet on a mission to con
vert all the non-Christians of the world before the apocryphal
coming of Christ.
The first time Sarah put pen to paper was when she wrote an 1870 letter to Indian Commissioner Ely Parker. Her letter detailed Indian agents’ abuse of power in their management of reservations. It iterated what became one of her common claims in Life Among the Paiutes: that if Indians were well treated, they would become “educated” in Western, non-native ways. It’s crucial to keep in mind that as an activist, Sarah was looking for concessions from non-native leaders. Part of this work involved appealing to, or appearing to appeal to, some of the white’s deeply held beliefs. Reading Life Among the Paiutes: their wrongs and claims offers a picture of Indians who wanted to coexist with non-natives rather than be eradicated due to disease, famine, and violence at the hands of invaders.
In January of 1871, Sarah married a military officer named Edward Bartlett. Because Sarah’s heart was a free as her mind, she filed for divorce in 1876 (she fell in love with another man) (Canfield 109). In her newspaper editorials and articles, Sarah was critical of whites while advocating for Indian rights. For example, in the San Francisco Daily Bulletin of February 24, 1875, she recalls the terms of the treaty that settled the Pyramid Lake war of 1860. Sarah describes this treaty to show readers that its terms have been broken. In another 1875 article from the same periodical, Sarah bemoans the disgusting, unhealthy, and inhumane conditions of reservations and emphasizes the dishonesty of Indian agents (the men who managed the reservations).
After Columbus' fourth voyage to the island of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic:
"Please!
My Queen Isabella and King Fergienand (all this junk)
let me continue my prophetic mission to reclaim Israel, the Holy
Land for the Crown (remove the R and the W)!"
One scholar suggests that Sarah Winnemucca met her next husband, Lewis Hopkins, at Camp McDermit in 1881 (Zanjani 228). Sarah wasn’t one to be tied down, however. A few days after her marriage, she told the San Francisco Daily Examiner that she was planning on going east to lecture on the Indian Agencies and the “Indian Question as Viewed from an Indian Stand-point” (Winnemucca, “Indian Agents to Be Denounced”). Winnemucca made her first trip to the eastern part of the United States in 1883, when she traveled to Boston to collaborate with the well-known reformers Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Mann.
Why is not this man remembered as a religious fundamentalist?
He initiated genocide of the indigenous Arawaks
in the Dominican Republic
in the name of go(l)d.
Although Sarah earned fame and the support of many on her lecture circuit, she also wasn’t afraid to live up to a promise she had made in San Fransisco back in 1879. There, she told a crowd that she was committed to unveiling mistreatment of Indians and dishonesty: “I will expose all the rascals. I will save nobody. I will name the paths, the officer, the Agent, and not say I’m afraid to mention his name.” (Winnemucca, “The Piute Princess”). While she was in Boston, Sarah’s negative comments about a Methodist minister alienated the Women’s Association of the Methodist church (Canfield, 201). Her unwillingness to work with the Indian agent W. V. Rinehart publicly embarrassed him, drawing both his ill will and criticism. In a Boston lecture, reprinted as “An Indian Girl’s Appeal” a reporter wrote that “She asked that no one should deny, the support, the moral aid of all who hate oppression. She claimed that her people were robbed systematically by our government and its agents, and in a wild way declared that it was useless to try and Christianize her people, though they were civilized, when wrong and cruelty were practiced so unblushingly upon them.
Re: how history is written
Re: only dark people are jihadists
Re: why is he not remembered as a fundamentalist or a
Christian Crusades-authorized terrorist?
On top of this, 1883 saw the publication of Sarah’s memoir, Life Among the Piutes. Sarah’s voice was prolific, and it couldn’t be stopped.
In Boston, Sarah lived with and traveled with Elizabeth Peabody, giving hundreds of lectures in front of reformist audiences. These women grew close since they lived and lectured together, and Elizabeth allowed her access to influential public figures like John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In spite of this, Elizabeth “often evoked excessively romantic rhetoric when describing Winnemucca and, at times, was unable to come to terms with the realities of Winnemucca’s personal and cultural values” (Newspaper Warrior, 47). Unsurprisingly, Sarah wasn’t afraid to criticize her “white angel mother” when she returned to San Francisco to give lectures (Winnemucca, “Sarah Winnemucca”).
White privilege is knowing your native tongue.
White privilege is to be allowed a history.
White privilege is to be allowed to exist.
Sarah eventually left Boston to lecture in Providence, Rhode Island, Hartford, Connecticut, and later in New York. Her New York lectures coincided with her distribution of a petition to have the Northern Paiutes returned from the Malheur reservation to the Yakima reservation (during the relocation of tribe members from Yakima to Malheur, families had been “ruthlessly” separated) (“Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins” in The Newspaper Warrior). In 1884, Sarah testified to the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, requesting that Fort McDermit be reserved for the North Paiutes. Such an invitation to testify “indicate[d] her growing political capital” and success (50).
These are some questions
What is this history I stand on
who am I
