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The American Indian Quarterly 29.1&2 (2005) 310-313



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Siobhan Senier. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. 256 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance is an important contribution to literary studies, feminist scholarship, and American Indian studies. It is innovative in its multigeneric and interdisciplinary approach, analyzing both oral and written narratives by and about American Indian women whose work emerged between 1879 and 1934. By placing female voice and agency at the center of her study, Senier reads the narratives of the white novelist Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), author of Ramona, the "Indian's Uncle Tom's Cabin"; the Paiute autobiographer and orator Sarah Winnemucca (1844–1891); and the Clackamas Chinook storyteller Victoria Howard (1865–1930) in the context of the Era of Assimilation. The author reveals the intricacies of their literary performances during a controversial time in American Indian history that "sought to eradicate indigenous community, land, and ways of life" (9), but created, paradoxically, "new opportunities for women to write and speak publicly" (ix). Moreover, Senier's work appears during a time of significant proliferation of U.S. third-world feminist discourse, as well as intense recovery of Indigenous women writers: reprintings of their work, full-length monographs and critical studies such as Sally Zajani's biography Sarah Winnemucca (2001), Kate Phillips's Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (2003), and Valerie Sherer Mathes's Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (1990) and The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885 (1998).

One of the most celebrated stories Victoria Howard tells to anthropologist Melville Jacobs in 1929 ends abruptly: "Now I remember only that far." This sentence sets the tone for reading Senier's book on American Indian resistance and [End Page 310] assimilation. It not only suggests that the Clackamas woman can speak for her culture—an extensive answer to Gayatri Spivak's famous question, aptly formulated in Senier's third chapter—and that she can produce authoritative cultural work, but it also points to the disempowered position of the female informant's discourse and her resistance to cultural assimilation. In Senier's view, Victoria Howard tells Jacobs the stories he needs to record, but she also functions as an author in her own right, "speaking as, for, and to both Indian and non-Indian cultures" (127). Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, the nineteenth-century "sentimental" bestseller, Ramona, has been examined by critics who saw Jackson as the "crusader for the oppressed" (29) and the "spokeswoman for Indians" (32). Similarly Sarah Winnemucca (Hopkins), public speaker, performer, and author of what may be considered the first Native American autobiography by a woman, Life among the Piutes (1883), has also been "hugely biographized," usually to underline her accomplishments for the United States (116). Victoria Howard, however, has received little critical attention as an author and performer of her stories, and Senier's extensive two chapters on Howard recover her as an Indigenous writer worth studying not only by anthropologists, but also by literary critics and historians. And, if we accept Craig Womack's contention that the oral tradition is always already political (qtd. in Senier, 230n91), Victoria Howard's work may be said to continue, through storytelling, the political activism that animated both Jackson and Winnemucca.

It has been often noted that Jackson's work on behalf of Indians is similar to Harriet Beecher Stowe's on behalf of slaves. If the little lady who started the big war reshaped many Americans' attitudes towards slavery in her "sentimental" Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Senier demonstrates persuasively that the "sentimental protest" in Ramona and other writings by Jackson can challenge the common association of Jackson with Dawes Act discourse, thus presenting an alternative view of how women during the Era of Assimilation thought about their own political agency and storytelling and helping the (dominant) audience "recover alternative histories of national identities" (36). Senier also...

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