While regularly recognized as a statesman, an educational reformer, the founder of the University of Berlin, and a scholar in political science, philosophy, and literature, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has not always received as much acknowledgment for his contributions in anthropology or linguistics. When he is paid homage as a student of languages, it is for his role as a philosopher of language rather than as a philologist or linguist. When on other occasions Western academia has remembered Humboldt as a distinct linguist, he has appeared as a scholar of almost all languages except those of Africa or the Americas – and yet it is the very languages of the Western Hemisphere to which Humboldt paid his longest and most intensive attention, as evident by a set of recent publications in German. Chapter 1 offers an introductory discussion for an anglophone audience interested in Humboldt’s contributions to Americanist linguistics.

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.