Sarah Winnemucca, Thocmetony (Shell Flower)
Sarah Winnemucca, Thocmetony (Shell Flower) (1844–1891) was a Numa (Northern Paiute) writer, activist, lecturer, and teacher. Her memoir, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), is a history of her people during their first forty years of contact with European settlers and is considered the first autobiography written by a Native American woman. During Winnemucca’s lifetime, the Northern Paiute were crowded onto reservations and deprived of much of their land. Winnemucca gained national recognition for advocating for her people’s rights and for striving to maintain peace between them and the white settlers.
Born near Humboldt Lake, Nevada, she was the daughter of Chief Winnemucca of the Paiute nation and the granddaughter of Chief Truckee. Winnemucca demonstrated an early talent for languages, learning English, Spanish, and several Native languages while she was in California. In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Winnemucca began working as an interpreter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Fort McDermit. She went on to advocate for Native American rights, traveling across the United States to raise awareness among Anglo-Americans about her people’s struggles. When the Paiute were interned in a concentration camp at Yakima, Washington, following the Bannock War of 1878, she traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress and the executive branch for their release. She also served U.S. forces as a messenger, interpreter, and guide, and was a teacher for Native Americans held in captivity.
Following the publication of her autobiography in 1883, Winnemucca toured the Eastern United States, giving lectures in New England, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., about her people. She later returned to the West and founded a private school for Native American children in Lovelock, Nevada, to preserve Paiute culture and language. The school, the Peabody Indian School, was named for its benefactor Mary Peabody Mann. In 1993, Winnemucca was inducted posthumously into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and in 1994 into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2005, the state of Nevada contributed a statue of her by sculptor Benjamin Victor to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol.