Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story

Teaching American Indian Rhetorics

Lisa King,Rose Gubele,Joyce Rain Anderson

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780874219968
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Focusing on the importance of discussions about sovereignty and of the diversity of Native American communities, Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story offers a variety of ways to teach and write about indigenous North American rhetorics.

These essays introduce indigenous rhetorics, framing both how and why they should be taught in US university writing classrooms. Contributors promote understanding of American Indian rhetorical and literary texts and the cultures and contexts within which those texts are produced. Chapters also supply resources for instructors, promote cultural awareness, offer suggestions for further research, and provide examples of methods to incorporate American Indian texts into the classroom curriculum.

Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story provides a decolonized vision of what teaching rhetoric and writing can be and offers a foundation to talk about what rhetoric and pedagogical practice can mean when examined through American Indian and indigenous epistemologies and contemporary rhetorics.Contributors includeJoyce Rain Anderson, Resa Crane Bizzaro, Qwo-Li Driskill, Janice Gould, Rose Gubele, Angela Haas, Jessica Safran Hoover, Lisa King, Kimberli Lee, Malea D. Powell, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Gabriela Raquel Ríos, and Sundy Watanabe.

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Sovereignty, Rhetorical Sovereignty, and Representation

Keywords for Teaching Indigenous Texts

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LISA KING

Representations of “Indians” are ubiquitous; imagine all the images of “Indians” you’ve seen in your lifetime. They adorn romance novels and butter brands, carpet trucks and cigarette cartons; their names are brands of clothing, models and makes of cars, and also cities, rivers, and landmarks; they are Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving decorations. They are John Wayne’s antithesis, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick (or a museum piece, in the case of Johnny Depp), and the subject of many an artist’s rendering now found on greeting cards, in popular clothing chains, or hanging in museums. But where do these images and concepts come from? Though many seem a regular part of everyday discourse, the fact of the matter is that the images and ideas depicting what is “Indian”—like other images and ideas—are constructions deeply embedded in our everyday world. However, the very fact that they are constructions does not often make it into discussion, and the historically unbalanced power relationships surrounding the history of these constructions is also not often acknowledged. The question of American Indian sovereignty, then, and its implications in rhetorical constructions, receive even less attention in mainstream discussion.

Within this context of ever-present but rarely examined representations of American Indians and indigenous peoples, in order to understand how indigenous rhetorics function in relationship to these representations and their consequences, students frequently need a grounding in the key ideas that ground indigenous rhetorics. Furthermore, though many well-meaning instructors are interested in teaching American Indian or indigenous texts as part of their rhetoric and composition classes, without knowing some of the key concepts that shape indigenous discourses, these instructors’ efforts run the risk of misrepresenting indigenous texts or even marking them as simply one more “minority” discourse in a multicultural sampling.

Sovereignty is one of these concepts, without which an understanding of indigenous texts remains incomplete. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustive discussion of indigenous sovereignty or representation, for the sake of providing some background, I will sketch a brief history of the concept of sovereignty as it has a history in North America, link it to historical representations of American Indian peoples, and bring the discussion together with Scott Lyons’s contemporary formulation of “rhetorical sovereignty” as a foundational pedagogical framework. By understanding what sovereignty means in a (broadly) American Indian context, what representations have been made of American Indians by Euro-American cultures, and Lyons’s call to rhetorical sovereignty—“the inherent right of [indigenous] peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires” (Lyons 2000, 449)—instructors and students can be better equipped to work through the rhetorical exigencies and ramifications of a given indigenous text. The rest of the chapter covers some pedagogical strategies for teaching the recognition of sovereignty to assist instructors in helping their students make links between the representations of indigenous peoples students may have already seen, understand why the those representations are significant as texts, and work through how those histories and representations may be addressed in indigenous texts. Specifically, I outline the use of an advertisement-analysis essay that targets representations of indigenous peoples or cultures as a way to think through the implications of sovereignty, representation, and rhetorical sovereignty as they manifest themselves in images made of indigenous peoples and cultures and images made by Native peoples.

Sovereignty

The histories and definitions of sovereignty are complex, and they cover a wide range of issues; in contemporary indigenous discourses, sovereignty has emerged as a term that Joanne Barker observes “[signifies] a multiplicity of legal and social rights to political, economic, and cultural self-determination” (Barker 2005, 1). Laden with connotations from multiple cultures and eras, sovereignty has a history that changes its meaning according to who deploys it (see also Sundy Watanabe’s chapter in this volume). Vine Deloria Jr. traces the concept of sovereignty back to early Asian and European religious conceptions of the “divine right” of deities that could be passed on to rulers with absolute power (Barker 2005, 2). Within feudal Europe, sovereignty defined an individual ruler as “accountable to no one save himself or God” (Lyons 2000, 450), then as an extension, an “assertion of absolute political authority at home, one that could imply designs on territories abroad” (Fowler and Bunck quoted in Lyons 2000, 450). Sovereignty was also part of how the early Protestant and Catholic churches conceived of themselves and their power, often arguing with monarchs who claimed “divine right” over who had the legitimate right to speak and rule on behalf of God (Barker 2005, 2). Eventually structures of church and kingdom in Europe gave way to structures of nations, whose idea of sovereignty still carried with it the assertion of political authority, but this time based not on divine right but on citizen rights. Nationhood is a term with particular implications in the United States; Lyons observes that the young United States, founded as it was on Enlightenment principles of individualism, understood itself as a nation-state made up of individuals that came together to form a public that acted as a whole to run the nation-state insofar as reason dictated and private individual rights and powers were preserved. Also, in periods of colonization, as countries and colonies began to vie with one another for authority, territory, and independence, to be called sovereign was to be understood as on par with one’s international peers, with and among other sovereigns. This notion of power was translated into legislative and political rights. Sovereignty, therefore, carried and carries Euro-American connotations of power, independence, and—perhaps most crucial—recognition by others as powerful and independent in a nation’s exercising of its rights to self-determination.

However, these ideas of nation and sovereignty do not necessarily reflect Native conceptions. Deloria and Lytle argue that the primary term behind sovereignty, nationhood, “implies a process of decision making that is free and uninhibited within the community, a community in fact that is almost completely insulated from external factors as it considers its possible options” (Deloria and Lytle 1998, 13–14). For Native nations, this kind of a nation is defined by peoplehood, a concept that has its roots in the preservation and prospering of the community and binds its members together in cultural and often religious terms. Culture and religion are in turn derived by the people from the land they inhabit; thus, the people, the culture, and the land take their meanings from each other. Deloria and Lytle observe, “[It] is important to understand the primacy of land in the Indian psychological makeup, because, as land is alienated, all other forms of social cohesion also begin to erode, land having been the context in which the other forms have been created” (12). Scott Lyons seconds this definition of peoplehood, adding that as nation-peoples, the priority was not primarily private individual rights but the survival and continuity of the community, its culture, and its land. Decisions were made by council, as a group, not by a single individual ruler. The example Lyons cites is the Haudenosaunee, which was and is a united confederation of six different Native nation-peoples (the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, and Tuscarora) with the goal of mutual prosperity and peace. Their idea of sovereignty, in Lyons’s words, is “the right of a people to exist and enter into agreements with other peoples for the sole purpose of promoting, not suppressing, local cultures and traditions, even while united by a common political project” (Lyons 2000, 456). Sovereignty, characterized this way, is based both on the “power to self-govern and the affirmation of peoplehood” (456).

The term sovereignty as it is applied today has an inheritance from European, Euro-American, and Native nations, and the deployment of sovereignty currently “mark[s] the complexities of global indigenous efforts to reverse ongoing experiences of colonialism as well as [signifies] local efforts at the reclamation of specific territories, resources, governments, and cultural practices” (Barker 2005, 1). Recent developments in these sovereign struggles that encompass land, culture, and identity include the purchase of sacred land (Pe’ Sla) in South Dakota by an alliance of Sioux tribal nations (Schilling 2012; “Tribes Raise $9M to Buy Sacred South Dakota Land” 2012) and the Idle No More movement that brings together the struggle for indigenous and aboriginal sovereign rights and environmental activism and protection in Canada and throughout North America (Idle No More 2012). On a global scale, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has formally recognized the rights of indigenous peoples the world over with its 2007 adoption of the “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues 2013), exhorting the world’s nations to recognize “the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of indigenous peoples which derive from their political, economic, and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories, and resources” (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2008, 2).

However, sovereignty is also a term that has been overgeneralized to the point of losing its meaning, and Barker warns that one of the most important things to remember about sovereignty is that its meaning depends upon its context. Rather, sovereignty in all its connotations, denotations, and actual uses “is embedded within the specific social relations in which it is invoked and given meaning. How and when it emerges and functions are determined by the ‘located’ political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation” (Barker 2005, 21). Every new s...