Winema: The Warning Nobody Listened To

Her name was Winema. The settlers called her Tobey Riddle. She was Modoc, a cousin of Captain Jack, and she spoke both Modoc and English, which is why the United States peace commission hired her as their interpreter for the negotiations in April of eighteen seventy-three.

She was not neutral.

Winema was married to a white settler named Frank Riddle and had navigated the boundary between the Modoc community and the settler population for years. She knew Captain Jack. She knew, in the days before the April meeting, that internal Modoc debate had gone badly, and that some leaders believed killing the peace commissioners would break the Army's will.

She warned the commissioners. According to the accounts of Frank Riddle and others present, she told them that Captain Jack had been pressured toward violence, that the negotiation was dangerous, that they should not proceed. Frank Riddle's written account is the primary documentation of this warning. Winema's own voice is absent from the existing record in the way that women interpreters' voices consistently are.

The commissioners did not listen. General Edward Canby and peace commissioner Eleazar Thomas proceeded to the negotiation tent on April eleventh. They were killed.

After the war, Congress awarded Winema a pension. In the eighteen eighties she toured with a theatrical company performing a dramatization of the Modoc War.

She was the person in that negotiation who understood everything happening, spoke both languages, issued the correct warning, and watched it be ignored. Congress paid her for it afterward. That is a specific kind of recognition.