SOURCE: "The Frontiers of Native American Women's Writing: Sarah Winnemucca's Life among the Piutes, " in New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, edited by Arnold Krupat, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993, pp. 222-52.

In the following excerpt, Georgi-Findlay explores Winnemucca 's Life among the Piutes as it presents the role of gender in Indian-white relations.

The study of the history, literature, and popular mythology of American westward expansion and the frontier West has, during the past decades, undergone some crucial reconsideration, if not revision, through the inclusion of two new angles of vision: the focus on the tribal people dispossessed by the westward movement and, more recently, on the largely ignored and for a long time invisible participation of women in this move west. These two relatively new fields of study, it would appear, do not have much in common with each other—except, of course, for their combined efforts...