SOURCE: "Indian Women's Personal Narrative: Voices Past and Present," in American Women 's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, pp. 268-94.

In the following excerpt, Sands examines the intent and technique of Winnemucca 's Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.

One of the earliest written autobiographies by an American Indian is Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins' Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, published in 1883. As the title suggests, this autobiography is not only a personal narrative, but also a cultural history of the Northern Paiute tribe from early contact with whites to the 1880s, and a plea for an end to unjust treatment of her people.

Thocmentony (translated Shell Flower), as she was named when she was born, probably in 1844, in the vicinity of Humboldt Lake in present-day northern Nevada, was the granddaughter of Truckee "who had been...