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The Newspaper Warrior

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864-1891

Cari M. Carpenter

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 06/2015
Pages: 344
Subject: Social Science
eBook ISBN: 9780803276611

DESCRIPTION

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute) has long been recognized as an important nineteenth-century American Indian activist and writer. Yet her acclaimed performances and speaking tours across the United States, along with the copious newspaper articles that grew out of those tours, have been largely ignored and forgotten.  The Newspaper Warrior presents new material that enhances public memory as the first volume to collect hundreds of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, book reviews, and editorial comments by and about Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. This anthology gathers together her literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children. Editors Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio masterfully assemble these exceptional and long-forgotten articles in a call for a deeper assessment and appreciation of Winnemucca Hopkins’s stature as a Native American author, while also raising important questions about the nature of Native American literature and authorship.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cari M. Carpenter is an associate professor of English at West Virginia University. She is the author of Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians. Carolyn Sorisio is a professor of English at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879.

REVIEWS

“This is literary detective work at its best. Carpenter and Sorisio have described a rich, previously unknown archive that fills in the historical contexts in which we can read Sarah Winnemucca—her tribal and activist networks, the fates of her family members, and the virulent criticism to which she was constantly subjected. This book also establishes Winnemucca as a significant writer beyond her memoir, Life among the Piutes. Carpenter and Sorisio have dramatically advanced our understanding of this intriguing and complicated Native author.”—Siobhan Senier, editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England

“Sarah Winnemucca’s unexplored newspaper articles, and those published regarding her, represent a vital archive of indigenous literary history that will be critical to any scholar working on Winnemucca and nineteenth-century American Indian authors.”—Penelope M. Kelsey, author of Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews

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