Journal #5: Sarah Winnemucca

"Every night I imagined I could see the thing called President. He had long ears, he had big eyes and long legs, and a head like a bull-frog or something like that. I could not think of anything that could be so inhuman as to do such a thing,—send people across mountains with snow so deep"


Sarah Winnemucca, in her account of her life as a young Native American woman, recalls her thoughts during the Yakima Affair, in which the white man ordered her tribe, the Piutes, to migrate to the Yakima Reservation in Washington. It was the middle of winter, and people would surely get sick and/or die in transit, but they were forced out anyway.
The language and style used in Life Among the Piutes is somewhat simple and conversational. Winnemucca's story is told in a way that would be easy to understand, and in an autobiographical manner. The writings are said to be taken from her lectures, aimed at the American white man, pleading that her people be treated with kindness and compassion. She is attempting to dispel Indian stereotypes and myths about their believed "savagery."

I'm at a bit of a loss for words... When I read about the way the "white man" has treated anyone of a different skin color or origin throughout history, I just shake my head in disbelief. In history books and in pieces of literature such as this, along with the pieces I've read on African American mistreatment throughout the years, I can't help but ask this question: Who the hell did they think they were? Who the hell do they think they are? How did it ever enter their mind to think that they must be better than any man that is different, and what gave them the idea that they could treat any person the way they've mistreated human beings of other races? I just don't get it. How far back does it go, this superiority complex? The white man has done whatever he damn well pleases... How did it start? How did it go on for so long? It makes me angry, and I'm sorry I'd been somewhat oblivious to it in the past.

I think about the way my mother always did so well at teaching my sister and me that we should have compassion for all people and animals... and that we should treat people the way we would like to be treated. We should not tease and ridicule anyone for their misfortunes or obscurities, or for anything. And the lesson stuck. I wonder where the mothers of these white men were, and where the mothers of many men today were, when they were children... Why didn't their mothers teach them the "golden rule" and if they did, why didn't it stick?