Sarah Winnemucca Goes to Washington: Rhetoric and Resistance in the Capital City

Sarah Winnemucca Goes to WashingtonRhetoric and Resistance in the Capital City Cari M. Carpenter (bio) The complex, often troubled relationship between American Indians and whites has played out numerous times on the national stage of Washington, DC, not only in theaters that have showed performances like Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia: A National Drama in 1836 but in the hosting of Native American delegations since the creation of the United States.1 In January 1880 Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca accompanied her father, her brother Natches, an unidentified young relative, and the Washo leader known as Captain Jim to DC (see fig. 1). She and the others were invited in large part because of a petition she had sent to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz criticizing William Rinehart, the Malheur Reservation agent who would become Winnemucca’s ardent enemy. The Northern Paiutes who had been invited to DC by the US government had not been formally elected to represent their nation; Northern Paiute society traditionally consisted of bands, each with a headman, so that little centralized governance existed. Winnemucca’s father had come to be known by whites as Chief Winnemucca, a reflection more of non-Natives’ attempts to locate authority in a single figure rather than an accurate depiction of his stature among Northern Paiutes. At least since Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, known as Truckee, had welcomed white settlers to the area, the family had enjoyed a certain political power in relation to white society. The delegation went to the US capital in hopes of restoring Northern Paiutes to the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, where they had initially enjoyed comparatively good treatment by agent Samuel Parrish. In early 1879, however, following the Bannock War, residents of the Malheur Reservation had been forcibly removed to Yakima (now spelled Yakama) Reservation in Washington Territory, a 350-mile journey that took a number of lives. [End Page 87] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Paiute delegation, 1880. From left: Sarah Winnemucca, Chief Winnemucca, Captain Jim, and an unidentified boy. Courtesy of National Archives (75-ip-3-26). This was in no sense the beginning of Sarah Winnemucca’s political career; she first published her critique of the treatment of her people in 1870 in a letter to E. S. Parker of the Board of Indian Commissioners. Throughout the 1870s she was an interpreter for the US army, a teacher at Malheur Reservation, and a lecturer across the western United States. In the 1880s she lectured across the eastern United States and taught at Fort Vancouver and at her own Peabody Institute in Lovelock, Nevada. She had been planning a trip east to meet with sympathetic reformers in Boston when she received the invitation to DC. Once there, Winnemucca and the other members of the delegation met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Secretary Schurz. Although the delegation [End Page 88] was able to secure a promise from Schurz that Northern Paiutes could return to Malheur and receive land allotments, the United States ultimately reneged on this promise, an outcome that Winnemucca found both personally disappointing and professionally damaging. Examining Winnemucca’s two visits to the capital during the late nineteenth century next to the 2005 installation of a commemorative statue of her in the Rotunda (see fig. 2), I consider what each tells us about the relationship between American Indians and the US capital. More specifically, I offer a close study of the transcript of her 1884 testimony to a congressional subcommittee—a document that has received, at best, only passing mention—alongside the statue commemoration. My study uses Winnemucca’s self-narrative, Life Among the Piutes (1883), as well as contemporary newspaper articles, which I argue give us new insight not only into federal efforts to “manage” her but also into her manipulation of her public image.2 Finally, I turn to the 2005 statue commemoration, a contemporary example of efforts to incorporate indigenous people into the United States. In these DC encounters, I argue, we see examples of the federal government’s project to fold Native Americans into the American community in a way that attempts to negate their political distinctiveness. Winnemucca’s delegation...

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