Tiresias Speaks: Sarah Winnemucca's Hybrid Selves and Genres

Because of her role as an interpreter, Winnemucca has often been described as "a tool of the military" who had little control over her words (Fowler, Foreword 4). Critics point to [Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins]'s family's commitment to reconciliation as well as her own support of assimilation as evidence that the Winnemuccas were "White-men's Indians" who betrayed the Paiutes (Fowler, "Sarah Winnemucca" 34). Her support of allotment, which she believed would improve the Paiutes' lives but which ultimately resulted in the wide-scale loss of Indian lands, has further sullied her reputation. Some of her fiercest critics are Paiutes who maintain that the Winnemuccas do not deserve such prominence in the historical records. According to them, the Winnemuccas were considered the leaders of the Paiutes simply because they were the ones, beginning with the amenable "Captain Truckee," who had the most interaction with whites. One such critic is Nellie Shaw Harnar, who claims that while Sarah's father was an influential man among the Paiutes, "he was not considered the chief of the tribe as stated by Dodge in 1859" (104). Lalla Scott's biographical account of the author's mother also suggests the Winnemuccas' traitorous alliance with the whites.(2) Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands extend a similar critique to Life Among the Piutes, faulting the narrative for its "acculturated and Christianized" bias: it is, in other words, too "white" (21). Such a statement suggests a correlation between Winnemucca's racial identity and her narrative, as if her alliances with whites threaten the sanctity of her "Paiute" text. From this perspective, the intermediary or neutral position that [Mary Mann] describes is an illusion: Winnemucca can be loyal only to one side. The claim that Winnemucca sold out is reminiscent of the story of an Aztec woman who was Cortez's advisor, translator, and mistress: a figure known in Chicano culture as "La Chingada, meaning the `fucked one,' or La Vendida, sell-out to the white race" (Moraga 35). Alternative accounts of this Aztec woman indicate that she believed Cortez was the only hope for the Aztecs' survival.(3) In both cases, it is as an interpreter for the colonists' language that the native woman allegedly betrays her people: in translating the others' words, she in effect becomes them.