“I Nailed Those Lies”: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Print Culture, and Collaboration

Analyzing Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s proprietary authorship of Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) in relation to her negotiation of US print culture reveals that the print cultures Winnemucca encountered in Boston and Nevada, as well as the cross-racial collaborations she formed in those locations, determined her uses of authorship. Although her cross-racial friendship with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody resulted in Winnemucca’s productive proprietary authorship, Life evidences extensive reprinting practices. Juxtaposing Winnemucca’s unacknowledged reprinting of General Oliver O. Howard’s Bannock War Report with her acknowledged reprinting of the Report of Major-General McDowell shows how Winnemucca used reprinting to rewrite the US military’s Bannock War narrative, signal successful cross-racial praxis, and intimate the betrayal she felt when Howard’s refused to defined her in print. This essay challenges Philip H. Round’s representation of proprietary authorship as a more productive tool for American Indian authors than was reprinting and disputes his representation of Peabody as steering Winnemucca into print. Doing so, it argues that increased attention to how individual American Indian authors used print culture, especially attention to extratextual materials such as the previously unexamined newspaper accounts this essay draws upon, will further understanding of nineteenth-century American Indian authorship.