Force and Federalism: Life among the Piautes as American Political Thought

• In Event: Brushing History against the Grain

Abstract

Despite the roots of the United States in settler colonialism, American Political Thought (APT) scholarship has generally given limited attention to American Indian thinkers. This is especially so in the kinds of resources that are geared toward teachers of APT, in the form of anthologies and similar pedagogical tools. This paper forms a component of an effort to build additional resources for those teaching APT courses, via a teaching-oriented monograph on select American Indian writers and an accompanying anthology of primary sources.

The expansion of the United States was generally experienced by Native peoples as a shifting matrix of violence punctuated with odd moments of political stability and alliance. In Life Among the Paiutes (1883) Sarah Winnemucca documented her own experiences of displacement and participation in frontier conflict, where she served as both a translator and a negotiator. Winnemucca’s experience shows the complexities of lines of political authority during colonial processes, as local residents of the Oregon territory, often organized into militias, fell into complex and sometimes violent conflicts with Federal cavalry forces. Winnemucca often turned to the United States cavalry for assistance in her efforts to negotiate the cession of conflict and to allow the escape of her Paiute relatives. At the same time, these Federal forces were both structurally hostile to Native claims and unpredictable, as different officers came and went from positions of command, so that they offered no long-term protection for Paiute political or social lives.

This paper will outline and unpack Winnemucca’s descriptions of these violent encounters and unstable relationships, arguing that they can help us to see more clearly the perpetually uncertain position in which Native political actors existed during American colonial expansion. The paper will consider the strengths and weaknesses of using Winnemucca’s work to teach APT, and outline some of the issues that it might most fruitfully highlight for student audiences.

Author

• Burke Hendrix, University of Oregon