Thread by @nickwestes

Today is National Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls Awareness Day.

Let's remember the life and legacy of Northern Paiute anti-rape activist Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891). She saw rape and violence against Native women as a tool of conquest. (Thread)

Winnemucca's 1883 autobiography, Life Among the Piutes, describes the early invasion of her homelands and was the first nonfiction book published by a Native woman in the United States. She recounts how policies like the 1862 Homestead Act brought predation and war to her people.

In 1862, Congress passed the first of many Homestead Acts opening millions of acres of Native land in the west for settlement to newly-arrived European immigrants. The trespass of Native women’s bodies coincided with the trespass onto their lands.

Winnemucca devoted two chapters in her book detailing wars fought between Natives and the United States and settler militias specifically to white men raping Native women, which, according to her, was the catalyst for the Pyramid Lake War of 1860 and the Bannock War of 1878.

Hiding them from marauding white cattlemen, Winnemucca’s mother and aunt once buried her and her cousin, both young girls. Submerged in the soil, a nightmarish metaphor, it was their land and their bodies the invaders had come for. As the land was taken so too were their sisters.

Winnemucca’s proposed remedy, to protect Native property and life, was citizenship and peaceful coexistence. “If the Indians were protected…instead of the whites,” she wrote, “there would be no Indian wars.”

She promoted the 1887 Dawes Bill, believing private property ownership would halt the taking of Native lands. The opposite happened: settlers devoured 270 million acres of “surplus” Native lands. Today, her people’s lands are still trampled and fought over.

In 2016, when Cliven Bundy’s sons, Ryan and Ammon Bundy, led an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Reserve in Oregon, they weren’t interested in the Northern Paiute’s prior claims to the land. Part of the federal reserve was once the homelands of Winnemucca’s people.

The trespass of white ranchers onto Native territory and the terror they inflicted on Native women culminated in the Bannock War and the forced removal of Northern Paiutes in 1879, which opened their reservation for settlement.

Sarah Winnemucca nevertheless remains an ancestor to #MMIWG activists today who connect the trespass of Native women and girls' bodies with the trespass of Indigenous land. I document some of this history here: versobooks.com/blogs/4227-you…