Panel: Autobiographical Accounts of Native-White Colonial Encounters
Copanelists: Bärbel Höttges and Arianne Margolin
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among the Piutes (1883) is the first autobiography written by a Native American woman. As a granddaughter of a Paiute leader who envisioned a peaceful coexistence of his tribe with encroaching white settlers, she strived to undo cultural clash by acting as an interpreter for her tribe. In her autobiography, Winnemucca continuously undermines nineteenth century stereotypical representations of both Paiutes and Anglo-Americans. To make her case more appealing to white audiences, Winnemucca occasionally adopts the romantic pose of Indian Princess. She frequently subverts the stereotypes of “atrocious savages” and “benevolent civilizers” by contextualizing the causes of many interracial conflicts. Her descriptions of Paiute tribal life, the conflicts with reservation agents, and agreements with American government and military officials display her skillful use of oral traditions, and at the same time show her attempts to negotiate the categories of race and gender with her Anglo-American audience. Ironically, Winnemucca’s autobiography also shows that her role of a cultural mediator in times of Anglo-American expansion made her vulnerable to be perceived as a “white man’s Indian” or a lascivious “squaw.” Thus Winnemucca’s life narrative constitutes a polyphonic account of the multiple consequences of the Anglo-American western expansion.
To appreciate the “cultural work” of Winnemucca’s narrative, it is useful to refer to Pratt’s conceptualization of the cultural space of borderland as a contact zone. As Pratt notes, in “autoethnographic texts” the concepts borrowed from the dominant culture are merged with indigenous modes of expression to produce heterogeneous texts. Winnemucca’s historicizing discourse on vindication of her tribe is a remarkable example of a complex autoethnographic discourse focused on representing the intercultural space of the nineteenth century borderlands. I would like to focus on cross-cultural translation of Winnemucca’s text by drawing comparisons between her polyphonic representation of the American West and multicultural narratives circulating in the Polish borderland spaces such as Wrocław (Breslau before WWII) where I teach.
Elźbieta Klimek-Dominiak is Head of the Gender Research Center and Professor of American Literature in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wroclaw. Her research and publishing interests include Native American autobiography and American women’s travel narratives and journals.