"I would rather be with my people, but not to live with them as they live" Cultural Liminality and Double Consciousness in Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

Abstract

In Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins recalls the Paiutes' initial contact with Whites, when her Grandfather Truckee introduced the tribe to written language, his "rag-friend." To Grandfather Truckee, the "rag-friend"-a letter of commendation signed by General John Fremont documenting Chief Truckee's service in the war against Mexico--is the means to achieve his dream of community and cooperation with Whites. As Truckee relates, the "rag-friend" "can talk to all our white brothers, and our white sisters, and their children. ... The paper can travel like the wind, and it can go and talk with their fathers and brothers and sisters, and come back to tell what they are doing, and whether they are well or sick."' It represents within his oral community the possibility for open communication that defies time, space, and cultural prejudice. Like the "ragfriend," Hopkins's autobiography intercedes between Whites and Native Americans and portrays her life liminally situated between Paiutes, Bannocks, and encroaching Anglo Americans on the frontiers. Since both of Hopkins's parents were Paiutes, her liminality is not a function of mixed cultural ancestry but of her role in frontier politics. Hopkins worked as a translator and interpreter for military personnel and reservation agents and as a scout for the United States army during the Bannock War. After the war, she traveled to Washington Dc with her father and brother and requested of Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior, that he return Paiutes displaced on the Yakima Reservation to their homeland. In addition, Hopkins lectured on the East Coast to White audiences about federal Indian policies and reservation corruption. Her autobiography was written for political purposes: to inform her White audience about the injustices of the reservation system and to raise money for the impover-