Profiles in Character: Sarah Winnemucca Struggles for Her Paiute People
In 1848, white settlers and those heading to the California Gold Rush were flooding into Northern Nevada, devastating the landscape and taking land on which the Paiute Indian population depended for survival. Thocmetony (who would in time come to call herself “Sarah”) was four. Her father, Winnemucca, a Paiute leader, and her grandfather, Truckee, understood that peaceful relations with whites were essential to save their people from physical and cultural extermination. Their philosophy would guide Sarah’s life.
When she was seven, Truckee took her to California to see the white man’s ways and achievements. At 13, Winnemucca placed her as a household helper for a white family so she could learn English. Her facility with English and understanding of white culture facilitated her growing assertiveness. Sarah had few illusions about the challenges she faced. Nor did she lack physical and moral courage to confront them.
The goal of government policy was assimilation through moving Indians onto reservations, eradicating their culture and making them farmers, using military force to quell resistance. The Paiutes, guided by Winnemucca and Truckee, tried to adjust. Yet many government-chosen reservation agents withheld money for them as well as food and provisions essential to a Paiute population that could no longer safely hunt and gather for themselves. Agents also allowed settlers to confiscate good reservation farmland.
Fighting abuses of the reservation system and the loss of Paiute culture led Sarah to write her first letter of protest, sent to Maj. Henry Douglas, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Nevada. She was only 26. Impressed, he sent it to Washington, D.C., calling her criticisms “appropriate and just.” Nothing changed.
Given her English ability, Sarah gained employment on reservations as an interpreter and with the military as both interpreter and scout. Aiding the army’s suppression of violent tribes was, she felt, essential to protect peaceful Paiutes. She thus walked a tightrope crossing over to the white world on behalf of her people and back to the Paiutes themselves, trying to reassure them she was not a government collaborator. Taking on leadership roles traditionally unavailable to Paiute women, she also bucked up against tribal norms.
In time, she gained respect from some white leaders. When Bannock Indians went to war with the U.S. Army in 1878, they took her father and other Paiutes prisoner. At 34, she volunteered for and led a successful three-day, 220 mile rescue mission that the army would not because they considered it a suicide mission. Major Oliver Howard would later write of her that: “She did our government great service, and if I could tell you a tenth part of all she willingly did to help the white settlers and her own people to live peaceably together I am sure you would think, as I do, that the name of Toc-me-to-ne should have a place beside the name of Pocahontas in the history of our country.”
Yet an unforgiving government policy offered neither relief nor reward. In 1879, her Paiute band was forcibly relocated on a deadly winter trek to the Yakama Reservation in Eastern Washington. Believing only the government in Washington, D.C. could order their return to Nevada, she set off for the nation’s capitol. Her reputation secured a meeting with Interior Secretary Carl Schurz who, after listening to her, wrote a letter ordering the Paiutes’ return to Nevada’s Malheur Reservation. She also met with President Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House.
Returning triumphantly to Yakama, she read Schurz’s letter to her people, but he never honored his promise. Her reputation with her people suffered. Sarah next took up a quest to wrest control of reservations from government agents or at the least appointment of them by Indians. She returned to the East Coast, where there was less animosity among the public, and made her case in part by publishing, in 1883, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, the first book ever written by an Indian woman. She lectured some 300 times and gathered thousands of signatures on petitions. Yet despite a new President (Chester A. Arthur), Interior Secretary and Indian Commissioner, nothing changed.
Returning to Nevada, she took up the last major effort of her life – founding an Indian school off the reservation where children could be educated, not in distant government schools where they were purposely separated from their families and their culture quashed. The school succeeded but then foundered financially when her white husband took off with money needed to sustain it.
Sarah died unexpectedly at 47. She lies somewhere in an unmarked grave. What might seem a life of failures was instead one of an indomitable spirit whose foresight was just ahead of the politics of its time. As chronicled in the powerful biography by Sally Zanjani (Sarah Winnemucca) we now have reservations under Indian control, Indian-run schools, preservation of much of Paiute culture and national recognition of the wrongs about which she wrote.
A statue of Sarah Winnemucca stands in Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol, placed there by the State of Nevada, which honors her dreams and deeds.
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org
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