Behind the Scenes Minis: Unplanned Sarah Week

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We spent all week talking about Sarah Wenamacca. That was not the plan. I was not expecting this to be a two part episode, and as a one part episode, it would have come out many weeks earlier than it is in fact coming out, because for reasons, we had multiple consecutive weeks where one episode was already spoken for and we like to have our two parters both running together in the same week. And so once I realized it was a two part episode, it was like, well, this is not going to come out for several weeks later than I had planned, which is fine. It just means that we are recording this behind the scene on October the twenty ninth, and it is not going to come out for almost a month, maybe exactly a month. That time will fly, so time, yeah, time will fly. We will be away. I think it's exactly it's exactly a month that this before this will come out. For a week of that, you and I will be away, but then we will be back and this episode will already be recorded well well well in advance, I said in this episode, I really admire a lot of things about Sarah Winnemacca, and I also understand how controversial she can be. Oh yeah. And I also think a lot of people we have talked about a lot of indigenous people from the nineteenth century in the United States have in one way or another, talked about out assimilating with white culture, believing that was like the only way that they would be able to survive. And my total outsider's perspective, I am not indigenous. I definitely am not Northern Payet. I feel like I have seen more criticism of her today for some of these things than some of the other folks that we've talked about, And I think some of that might be influenced by the fact that she worked directly with the army, which has not been the case with other folks that we have talked about. But some of the stuff she tried to do was really the opposite of assimilation, like trying to start that school. And I love the fact that when she was like, I don't have the money to build a school building, she was like, all right, we're building basically a brush arbor, and we will have school in the Brush Arbor, and that is that will be fine. Her focus there, I also thought was the idea of having the students speak to her in their first language and her translating that into English as a way of learning English, I thought was really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, she her whole life feels like she walked that line in a way that is not easy to really define her role in either world. Yeah. Yeah, but it's one of the common themes of yeah uh, which you know, I understand the feelings on both sides of that equation. Yeah. Yeah. I also, I think I've said before that like I am hard pressed to say what I would do in that situation, Like if I were part of a culture that was being aggressively colonized, Yeah, what decisions I would make? What I would think was the best thing to do to try to protect everyone. Yeah, I have no idea. There's a lot of interesting literary and sort of ethnography study of her book. We talk in the episode about how some people describe it as an autobiography, some as an ethnography. I actually read one paper that described it as a captivity narrative, and usually the term captivity narrative is used to describe white people's accounts of being held captive by an indigenous group. Right, But this person who had written this paper was talking about all the common themes about this idea that so often she and her people were being held captive. Another thing that jumped out to me is her discussion of her father's letter that he came back with after the Mexican American War and how he called it his rag friend, which that just charmed me. That phrase is good, But her description of it as a talking paper. The idea that paper and books and writing talk comes up a lot in books by people who were not literate at the time of what they're relating, but they have either become literate later or they have dictated an autobiography to somebody else. So it comes up a lot in things like slave narratives, descriptions of like the talking book that somebody had an encounter with because until that moment, like the their conception of language had not been quite the same. And so the idea that like this piece of paper containing written language was something that spoke comes up in a lot of different contexts. Here's what's the most relatable about Sarah and Amaka To me, And it has nothing to do with any of this. It's that she had this narrative of her life and that there are huge gap years. There's a bunch of gaps. Like for anyone who's ever been like I am going to consistently journal, you will be like, whoops, I've the last time I wrote in this journal was eleven months ago. I'll pick it back up again, I'll do better this time. And then and I just kept thinking about us, even though I know this narrative is written in a different way and not necessarily as a journal, but I just like every time we would get to a point where it'd be like, then there's a gap of about a year before she did, I was like, oh, this is very relatable to me. Yeah. Yeah. It also it made the writing process of this episode a challenge because people who have really studied her book have cross referenced it with like other historical sources and have found that it aligns with things that are documented in other places. But it was also something that she was writing years or decades after things had happened, and so sometimes her timeline is like a little bit off. Sometimes she will say a specific year and it's not the exact right year, so the things are happening in the right order, but the year that she says is not quite the same. And because my process of writing these episodes is that I have notes that I take from a lot of different sources, and I put these notes all into a document and then I synthesized that into a new original piece of writing, there were moments where I got so confused because I would have had a source that was like the actual verified year that something happened, and then I would have a piece from her autobiography that said a different year, and I would have a moment where I was like, wait, I thought she was in California, Now why is she in Nevada? And it's just like a year discrepancy between her writing and some their historical documentation and getting the stuff to be back in the right order was challenge. Another challenge was the reservations that were part of this episode. People called them a lot of different names at the time, and some of them don't exist anymore. So there would be times that I was like, I'm not sure which reservation is being discussed right now. Mysteries mysteries. Yeah, so the statue of her is at the Capitol in Washington, d C. I have been to the Capital. I don't think I have seen it in person, but the way that it is sculpted, her clothes, her garments are moving in a way that's really evocative to me. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's also interesting in that the way it looks, it looks it's like mixed media in terms of like the way her skin is represented. None of it is like true color, but it has like that bronzeish cast, whereas the rest of it looks like a Duller tone, which is just interesting. It's an interesting choice. Yeah. I will note she does seem to have had terrible luck with men. Yeah, to our knowledge, she never had any children, but she did have several marriages, and they all seem to have been pretty short lived and not particularly happy. And a couple of the people who's writing about her I read speculated about how she wound up in a series of marriages that were not great. But it's all one hundred percent speculation. We have zero, right, zero commentary from her about that, And in some cases, she didn't mention a marriage at all in her own writing unless I missed it, even though it chronologically had already happened. She doesn't talk about her father's death in her book. I went back to go try to figure that out, because I felt like, we say that her father died, and then we don't really say anything further about it. It did happen chronologically during the period that her book covers, but only barely right, and if she had tried to talk about it in detail, it would have kind of derailed the thing that she was really ending on, which was the situation that the Northern piety were in right now and what had happened with the Secretary of the Interior and all of the unfulfilled promises around that. So it is possible that she did include something about his death that just didn't stick in my memory. But when I went back for it, I was like, no, I really don't see it here. Yeah. Yeah, So whatever's happening this weekend for folks, I hope it's going really well for you. I can't remember exactly when this episode is coming out, except that it's the twenty ninth of November, which I think will I think today is the day after Thanksgiving. If people are listening to this episode on when it comes out, maybe that sounds great. If so, you know, if this is a holiday you celebrate, I hope you are just having a great time with as many leftovers as you want. My gosh, put them all in the waffle iron, every one of them. Yeah. So we'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.