Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance : Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard

Between 1879 and 1934, the United States government made a concerted effort to dissolve American Indian tribes by allotting communally held lands and forcing them to adopt Euro-American practices.

Yet women seized a wave of national fascination with American Indians to challenge the national drive to assimilate indigenous peoples.This book focuses on three women of this era -- the white writer and activist Helen Hunt Jackson, whose 1884 bestseller Ramona has been dubbed "the 'Indian' Uncle Tom's Cabin; " the Paiute performer Sarah Winnemucca, whose Life Among the Piutes is believed to be the first Native woman's autobiography; and Victoria Howard, the Clackamas Chinook storyteller, who worked with Melville Jacobs in 1929 to transcribe hundreds of narratives, ethnographic texts, and songs. Senier is the first to offer a reading of the texts of these three women together and her unique presentation of American Indian oral narrative alongside written narrative recovers a discourse of resistance to assimilation in general and allotment in particular in the voices of American Indian and women artists.