In an age when American newspapers reported on US-Indian Relations in a sporadic and biased manner, Northern Paiute educator, translator, author, and activist Sarah Winnemucca produced sustained, specific, and often sympathetic coverage. She was well aware of newspapers' power, as demonstrated by the more than four hundred newspaper items by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 that form the basis of this essay. As the first section of this essay details, Winnemucca understood that newspapers had the power to shape public opinion locally and nationally. She struggled--and was often able--to control newspaper representations about herself, Northern Paiutes, and American Indians. Creating and controlling news coverage was key to her political strategy; she recognized that newspapers were sites wherein resistance had to take place. She was politically astute and rhetorically sophisticated, a savvy negotiator of the news media. Winnemucca's biographers construct an image of her as someone who consistently promoted herself as an Indian Princess and "enjoyed creating a dramatic impression." This essay corrects the biographical record and demonstrates how the consensus that Winnemucca always performed as a princess has limited one's ability to understand the complexity of her self-representation and obscured other facets of her performances. Winnemucca's contradictory and multiple self-representations--and the news media's coverage of them--formed much of her resistance. The newspaper record makes clear that Winnemucca challenged colonial cliches, becoming what Philip J. Deloria has called an Indian in unexpected places. The second section of this essay demonstrates that when Winnemucca appeared in costume, she critiqued the princess role, and the third section argues that Winnemucca's self-representation as an exemplary Indian destabilized her image as a princess. The fourth section suggests that when the definition of performance is broadened to include reports of Winnemucca's off-stage actions, she seems to have represented herself as a "wild" Indian on the brink of "outbreak." Whether created by Winnemucca, foisted upon her by the news media, or hammered out in the spaces between, her shifting personas allowed her to destabilize the roles cast upon American Indian women, challenge representations of herself and American Indians generally, and keep herself and her causes in the public's eye. (Contains 26 notes.)