November 29, 2024 • 12 mins
Tracy talks about the SYMHC calendar, and the controversial nature of Sarah Winnemucca's life story. She also discusses the different ways people have labeled Sara's autobiography.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We spent all week talking about Sarah Wenamacca.
That was not the plan. I was not expecting this
(00:24):
to be a two part episode, and as a one
part episode, it would have come out many weeks earlier
than it is in fact coming out, because for reasons,
we had multiple consecutive weeks where one episode was already
spoken for and we like to have our two parters
both running together in the same week. And so once
(00:47):
I realized it was a two part episode, it was like, well,
this is not going to come out for several weeks
later than I had planned, which is fine. It just
means that we are recording this behind the scene on
October the twenty ninth, and it is not going to
come out for almost a month, maybe exactly a month.
(01:08):
That time will fly, so time, yeah, time will fly.
We will be away. I think it's exactly it's exactly
a month that this before this will come out. For
a week of that, you and I will be away,
but then we will be back and this episode will
already be recorded well well well in advance, I said
(01:33):
in this episode, I really admire a lot of things
about Sarah Winnemacca, and I also understand how controversial she
can be. Oh yeah. And I also think a lot
of people we have talked about a lot of indigenous
people from the nineteenth century in the United States have
(01:56):
in one way or another, talked about out assimilating with
white culture, believing that was like the only way that
they would be able to survive. And my total outsider's perspective,
I am not indigenous. I definitely am not Northern Payet.
(02:16):
I feel like I have seen more criticism of her
today for some of these things than some of the
other folks that we've talked about, And I think some
of that might be influenced by the fact that she
worked directly with the army, which has not been the
case with other folks that we have talked about. But
some of the stuff she tried to do was really
(02:37):
the opposite of assimilation, like trying to start that school.
And I love the fact that when she was like,
I don't have the money to build a school building,
she was like, all right, we're building basically a brush arbor,
and we will have school in the Brush Arbor, and
that is that will be fine. Her focus there, I
also thought was the idea of having the students speak
(02:59):
to her in their first language and her translating that
into English as a way of learning English, I thought
was really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, she her whole life feels
like she walked that line in a way that is
not easy to really define her role in either world. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:23):
but it's one of the common themes of yeah uh,
which you know, I understand the feelings on both sides
of that equation. Yeah. Yeah. I also, I think I've
said before that like I am hard pressed to say
what I would do in that situation, Like if I
were part of a culture that was being aggressively colonized, Yeah,
(03:48):
what decisions I would make? What I would think was
the best thing to do to try to protect everyone. Yeah,
I have no idea. There's a lot of interesting literary
and sort of ethnography study of her book. We talk
in the episode about how some people describe it as
an autobiography, some as an ethnography. I actually read one
(04:13):
paper that described it as a captivity narrative, and usually
the term captivity narrative is used to describe white people's
accounts of being held captive by an indigenous group. Right,
But this person who had written this paper was talking
about all the common themes about this idea that so
(04:35):
often she and her people were being held captive. Another
thing that jumped out to me is her discussion of
her father's letter that he came back with after the
Mexican American War and how he called it his rag friend,
which that just charmed me. That phrase is good, But
(04:55):
her description of it as a talking paper. The idea
that paper and books and writing talk comes up a
lot in books by people who were not literate at
the time of what they're relating, but they have either
become literate later or they have dictated an autobiography to
(05:17):
somebody else. So it comes up a lot in things
like slave narratives, descriptions of like the talking book that
somebody had an encounter with because until that moment, like
the their conception of language had not been quite the same.
And so the idea that like this piece of paper
containing written language was something that spoke comes up in
(05:38):
a lot of different contexts. Here's what's the most relatable
about Sarah and Amaka To me, And it has nothing
to do with any of this. It's that she had
(06:00):
this narrative of her life and that there are huge
gap years. There's a bunch of gaps. Like for anyone
who's ever been like I am going to consistently journal,
you will be like, whoops, I've the last time I
wrote in this journal was eleven months ago. I'll pick
it back up again, I'll do better this time. And
then and I just kept thinking about us, even though
(06:21):
I know this narrative is written in a different way
and not necessarily as a journal, but I just like
every time we would get to a point where it'd
be like, then there's a gap of about a year
before she did, I was like, oh, this is very
relatable to me. Yeah. Yeah. It also it made the
writing process of this episode a challenge because people who
(06:43):
have really studied her book have cross referenced it with
like other historical sources and have found that it aligns
with things that are documented in other places. But it
was also something that she was writing years or decades
after things had happened, and so sometimes her timeline is
(07:06):
like a little bit off. Sometimes she will say a
specific year and it's not the exact right year, so
the things are happening in the right order, but the
year that she says is not quite the same. And
because my process of writing these episodes is that I
have notes that I take from a lot of different sources,
and I put these notes all into a document and
(07:27):
then I synthesized that into a new original piece of writing,
there were moments where I got so confused because I
would have had a source that was like the actual
verified year that something happened, and then I would have
a piece from her autobiography that said a different year,
and I would have a moment where I was like, wait,
(07:49):
I thought she was in California, Now why is she
in Nevada? And it's just like a year discrepancy between
her writing and some their historical documentation and getting the
stuff to be back in the right order was challenge.
Another challenge was the reservations that were part of this episode.
(08:15):
People called them a lot of different names at the time,
and some of them don't exist anymore. So there would
be times that I was like, I'm not sure which
reservation is being discussed right now. Mysteries mysteries. Yeah, so
the statue of her is at the Capitol in Washington,
(08:40):
d C. I have been to the Capital. I don't
think I have seen it in person, but the way
that it is sculpted, her clothes, her garments are moving
in a way that's really evocative to me. Yeah, I agree. Yeah,
it's also interesting in that the way it looks, it
(09:02):
looks it's like mixed media in terms of like the
way her skin is represented. None of it is like
true color, but it has like that bronzeish cast, whereas
the rest of it looks like a Duller tone, which
is just interesting. It's an interesting choice. Yeah. I will
(09:23):
note she does seem to have had terrible luck with men. Yeah,
to our knowledge, she never had any children, but she
did have several marriages, and they all seem to have
been pretty short lived and not particularly happy. And a
couple of the people who's writing about her I read
(09:44):
speculated about how she wound up in a series of
marriages that were not great. But it's all one hundred
percent speculation. We have zero, right, zero commentary from her
about that, And in some cases, she didn't mention a
marriage at all in her own writing unless I missed it,
(10:07):
even though it chronologically had already happened. She doesn't talk
about her father's death in her book. I went back
to go try to figure that out, because I felt like,
we say that her father died, and then we don't
really say anything further about it. It did happen chronologically
(10:29):
during the period that her book covers, but only barely right,
and if she had tried to talk about it in detail,
it would have kind of derailed the thing that she
was really ending on, which was the situation that the
Northern piety were in right now and what had happened
with the Secretary of the Interior and all of the
unfulfilled promises around that. So it is possible that she
(10:54):
did include something about his death that just didn't stick
in my memory. But when I went back for it,
I was like, no, I really don't see it here. Yeah. Yeah,
So whatever's happening this weekend for folks, I hope it's
going really well for you. I can't remember exactly when
this episode is coming out, except that it's the twenty
(11:15):
ninth of November, which I think will I think today
is the day after Thanksgiving. If people are listening to
this episode on when it comes out, maybe that sounds great.
If so, you know, if this is a holiday you celebrate,
I hope you are just having a great time with
as many leftovers as you want. My gosh, put them
all in the waffle iron, every one of them. Yeah.
(11:39):
So we'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and
something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We spent all week talking about Sarah Wenamacca.
That was not the plan. I was not expecting this
(00:24):
to be a two part episode, and as a one
part episode, it would have come out many weeks earlier
than it is in fact coming out, because for reasons,
we had multiple consecutive weeks where one episode was already
spoken for and we like to have our two parters
both running together in the same week. And so once
(00:47):
I realized it was a two part episode, it was like, well,
this is not going to come out for several weeks
later than I had planned, which is fine. It just
means that we are recording this behind the scene on
October the twenty ninth, and it is not going to
come out for almost a month, maybe exactly a month.
(01:08):
That time will fly, so time, yeah, time will fly.
We will be away. I think it's exactly it's exactly
a month that this before this will come out. For
a week of that, you and I will be away,
but then we will be back and this episode will
already be recorded well well well in advance, I said
(01:33):
in this episode, I really admire a lot of things
about Sarah Winnemacca, and I also understand how controversial she
can be. Oh yeah. And I also think a lot
of people we have talked about a lot of indigenous
people from the nineteenth century in the United States have
(01:56):
in one way or another, talked about out assimilating with
white culture, believing that was like the only way that
they would be able to survive. And my total outsider's perspective,
I am not indigenous. I definitely am not Northern Payet.
(02:16):
I feel like I have seen more criticism of her
today for some of these things than some of the
other folks that we've talked about, And I think some
of that might be influenced by the fact that she
worked directly with the army, which has not been the
case with other folks that we have talked about. But
some of the stuff she tried to do was really
(02:37):
the opposite of assimilation, like trying to start that school.
And I love the fact that when she was like,
I don't have the money to build a school building,
she was like, all right, we're building basically a brush arbor,
and we will have school in the Brush Arbor, and
that is that will be fine. Her focus there, I
also thought was the idea of having the students speak
(02:59):
to her in their first language and her translating that
into English as a way of learning English, I thought
was really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, she her whole life feels
like she walked that line in a way that is
not easy to really define her role in either world. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:23):
but it's one of the common themes of yeah uh,
which you know, I understand the feelings on both sides
of that equation. Yeah. Yeah. I also, I think I've
said before that like I am hard pressed to say
what I would do in that situation, Like if I
were part of a culture that was being aggressively colonized, Yeah,
(03:48):
what decisions I would make? What I would think was
the best thing to do to try to protect everyone. Yeah,
I have no idea. There's a lot of interesting literary
and sort of ethnography study of her book. We talk
in the episode about how some people describe it as
an autobiography, some as an ethnography. I actually read one
(04:13):
paper that described it as a captivity narrative, and usually
the term captivity narrative is used to describe white people's
accounts of being held captive by an indigenous group. Right,
But this person who had written this paper was talking
about all the common themes about this idea that so
(04:35):
often she and her people were being held captive. Another
thing that jumped out to me is her discussion of
her father's letter that he came back with after the
Mexican American War and how he called it his rag friend,
which that just charmed me. That phrase is good, But
(04:55):
her description of it as a talking paper. The idea
that paper and books and writing talk comes up a
lot in books by people who were not literate at
the time of what they're relating, but they have either
become literate later or they have dictated an autobiography to
(05:17):
somebody else. So it comes up a lot in things
like slave narratives, descriptions of like the talking book that
somebody had an encounter with because until that moment, like
the their conception of language had not been quite the same.
And so the idea that like this piece of paper
containing written language was something that spoke comes up in
(05:38):
a lot of different contexts. Here's what's the most relatable
about Sarah and Amaka To me, And it has nothing
to do with any of this. It's that she had
(06:00):
this narrative of her life and that there are huge
gap years. There's a bunch of gaps. Like for anyone
who's ever been like I am going to consistently journal,
you will be like, whoops, I've the last time I
wrote in this journal was eleven months ago. I'll pick
it back up again, I'll do better this time. And
then and I just kept thinking about us, even though
(06:21):
I know this narrative is written in a different way
and not necessarily as a journal, but I just like
every time we would get to a point where it'd
be like, then there's a gap of about a year
before she did, I was like, oh, this is very
relatable to me. Yeah. Yeah. It also it made the
writing process of this episode a challenge because people who
(06:43):
have really studied her book have cross referenced it with
like other historical sources and have found that it aligns
with things that are documented in other places. But it
was also something that she was writing years or decades
after things had happened, and so sometimes her timeline is
(07:06):
like a little bit off. Sometimes she will say a
specific year and it's not the exact right year, so
the things are happening in the right order, but the
year that she says is not quite the same. And
because my process of writing these episodes is that I
have notes that I take from a lot of different sources,
and I put these notes all into a document and
(07:27):
then I synthesized that into a new original piece of writing,
there were moments where I got so confused because I
would have had a source that was like the actual
verified year that something happened, and then I would have
a piece from her autobiography that said a different year,
and I would have a moment where I was like, wait,
(07:49):
I thought she was in California, Now why is she
in Nevada? And it's just like a year discrepancy between
her writing and some their historical documentation and getting the
stuff to be back in the right order was challenge.
Another challenge was the reservations that were part of this episode.
(08:15):
People called them a lot of different names at the time,
and some of them don't exist anymore. So there would
be times that I was like, I'm not sure which
reservation is being discussed right now. Mysteries mysteries. Yeah, so
the statue of her is at the Capitol in Washington,
(08:40):
d C. I have been to the Capital. I don't
think I have seen it in person, but the way
that it is sculpted, her clothes, her garments are moving
in a way that's really evocative to me. Yeah, I agree. Yeah,
it's also interesting in that the way it looks, it
(09:02):
looks it's like mixed media in terms of like the
way her skin is represented. None of it is like
true color, but it has like that bronzeish cast, whereas
the rest of it looks like a Duller tone, which
is just interesting. It's an interesting choice. Yeah. I will
(09:23):
note she does seem to have had terrible luck with men. Yeah,
to our knowledge, she never had any children, but she
did have several marriages, and they all seem to have
been pretty short lived and not particularly happy. And a
couple of the people who's writing about her I read
(09:44):
speculated about how she wound up in a series of
marriages that were not great. But it's all one hundred
percent speculation. We have zero, right, zero commentary from her
about that, And in some cases, she didn't mention a
marriage at all in her own writing unless I missed it,
(10:07):
even though it chronologically had already happened. She doesn't talk
about her father's death in her book. I went back
to go try to figure that out, because I felt like,
we say that her father died, and then we don't
really say anything further about it. It did happen chronologically
(10:29):
during the period that her book covers, but only barely right,
and if she had tried to talk about it in detail,
it would have kind of derailed the thing that she
was really ending on, which was the situation that the
Northern piety were in right now and what had happened
with the Secretary of the Interior and all of the
unfulfilled promises around that. So it is possible that she
(10:54):
did include something about his death that just didn't stick
in my memory. But when I went back for it,
I was like, no, I really don't see it here. Yeah. Yeah,
So whatever's happening this weekend for folks, I hope it's
going really well for you. I can't remember exactly when
this episode is coming out, except that it's the twenty
(11:15):
ninth of November, which I think will I think today
is the day after Thanksgiving. If people are listening to
this episode on when it comes out, maybe that sounds great.
If so, you know, if this is a holiday you celebrate,
I hope you are just having a great time with
as many leftovers as you want. My gosh, put them
all in the waffle iron, every one of them. Yeah.
(11:39):
So we'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and
something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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