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

In the excerpt below, Sands argues for the importance of Native American women's narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins' Life among the Piutes (1883).

American Indian women are essential to America's record of historical development. Where would America be without Pocahontas' timely rescue of John Smith? What would have become of the Lewis and Clark expedition without the loyal guidance of Sacagawea? Yet from the beginning of colonization, Native American women have been accorded recognition only as symbols of a primitive nobility which contributed to the progress of the American enterprise. And even that symbology is ambivalent; the reverse of the Indian "princess" is the "squaw," an object of sexual abuse and...