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Chapter 13 - Dispossessions and Repositionings

Sarah Winnemucca’s School as Anti-Colonialist Lesson

from Part IV - Reconfigurations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2022

John Ernest
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Summary

This essay focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s development of a school for the Paiutes that would avoid the assimilationist violence often associated with white-run schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Following her book Life Among the Piutes into this history gives us a way of thinking about Native American literature more broadly, and the histories that led to its emergence, its necessity, in a nation determined to control the voices and destinies of Native Americans across the country. To become educated at Winnemucca’s school is not to “become white.” A combination of Northern Paiute traditions and Elizabeth Peabody’s feminist-minded educational philosophy, the Peabody Institute was a powerful counterpoint to the U.S. boarding schools of the time. Winnemucca’s interpretation of her school is apparent in several features: the centrality of the mother figure; the emphasis on Native American languages, traditions, and cultures; and the role of the Native American woman – the interpreter – as educator. In these terms, the Native American woman determines the direction of her school, a truly anti-colonial move. As Life Among the Piutes and the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and letters teach us, then, there was an alternative to the colonialist boarding school.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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