Among Ghost Dances: Sarah Winnemucca and the Production of Tribal Identity

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life among the Piutes (1883) offers a searing account of the violences of the reservation system and its effects on the lives, territories, and governance of Northern Paiutes from the 1860s to the... [ view full abstract ]

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life among the Piutes (1883) offers a searing account of the violences of the reservation system and its effects on the lives, territories, and governance of Northern Paiutes from the 1860s to the early-1880s. In mounting this critique, the narrative positions Winnemucca as a spokesperson for the Paiute people, due to her chiefly lineage, while insisting on the civilized character of the Paiutes in their distinction from more violent groups (such as the Bannocks) and their attachment to the space(s) of the reservation(s).  However, in the middle of the period covered by Winnemucca’s narrative, the Ghost Dance of 1870 arises out of visions by Wodizwob, a Paiute living on the Walker River reservation, and despite the Ghost Dance’s prominence throughout the region, it, as well as other prominent prophet movements, is nowhere addressed in the narrative.  Prophet movements crossed over the boundaries of supposed tribal identity, challenged the form of the reservation as a federally-orchestrated container for Native peoplehood, and did not obey the hierarchies of leadership implemented through U.S. treaty discourse and administrative procedures.  Reading Life among the Piutes in terms of the Ghost Dance highlights the text’s struggle to coalesce a representative, civilized subjectivity through which to signify cohesive Paiute political identity and landedness while, reciprocally, underlining how that picture of Paiute peoplehood works to displace the alternative possibilities enacted through the geopolitics of Ghost Dancing.