Life Among The Piutes Analysis

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Becoming a literary masterpiece is one_________. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins auto biography, originally published in 1883, Life Among the Piutes, details her tribe’s tradition and history along with the tribe’s first encounter with white setters and how her tribe was systematically targeted and removed. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins was a native princess who dedicated her life to improving the social condition of her people. H.J. Landry is a scholar and professor who has discussed the main criteria for a work to be considered a literary masterpiece. The criteria for a literary work to be considered a masterpiece is: it must educate the reader, alters the reader's perception, and changes society or its mindset in some way. Winnemucca does all this and more by displaying the showing what actually happens to the, more intelligent than previously …show more content…

In Life Among the Piutes, sarah winnemucca hopkins describes what happens when soldiers came to their reservation based off what white settlers tell the government. The most shocking instance of this happened when Winnemucca encountered a group of soldier who told her the white settlers accused the natives of stealing cattle, “the soldiers rode up to their [meaning the Piute’s] encampment and fired into it, and killed almost all the people that were there… after the soldiers had killed but all bur some little children and babies… the soldiers took them too… and set the camp on fire and threw them into the flames to see them burned alive”(78). This is an abhorrent act that is unthinkable in a functioning society. The natives had done nothing but want to hold some shred of land from the settlers who had taken everything from them and are exterminated like vermin. This was something that stayed hidden from many white settlers because of its barbarism and by exposing it Winnemucca truly educates the reader, past and present, on how natives are

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