Speaking of indigeneity: Navigating genealogies against erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite

ABSTRACT

Given the force of colonial violence and the politics of erasure, I argue it is imperative to deeply address what Rhetorical Studies has inherited from academic predecessors and to uncover colonialism's enduring impacts on our field. I contend that much of Rhetorical Studies upholds a system of knowledge that overwhelmingly perpetuates erasure and effacement of Indigenous work and thus the political stakes of complicity in Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness must be addressed. This account of Rhetorical Studies' dominant and embedded histories, narratives, and authors reveals how the discipline is still missing an intellectual genealogy that orients rhetorical scholarship toward indigeneity, which provides possibilities to challenge erasure. Even as settler colonialism receives more attention in Rhetoric, I suggest the necessity of a coarticulated frame that navigates Rhetorical Studies alongside direct intellectual engagement with Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) to build simultaneous attention to indigeneity and settler colonialism. This frame explains racialization and colonization must be addressed together while centering a focus on indigeneity as analytic. Launching this intellectual genealogy reveals contradictions, limitations, and complexities to hold Rhetorical Studies – to hold all of us – accountable for nurturing and building a world beyond colonialism in QJS and in our field.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigeneity
• settler colonialism
• Native American & Indigenous studies (NAIS)
• rhetoric
• erasure

Acknowledgments

Saina Ma’åse (Thank you) to Darrel Wanzer-Serrano for the invitation and labor to organize and edit this forum, to Lisa Flores for providing critical feedback and insight that helped me sharpen how I speak of erasure in rhetorical studies, to the CU-Boulder faculty and graduate students at the Rhetoric & Culture research talk that launched this essay, and to Stacey K. Sowards for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this work. I am grateful for such welcoming/nurturing kinship as we support each other in the ongoing work to address whiteness of the field.

Note on contributor

Tiara R. Na’puti is Assistant Professor of Communication and affiliated with the Center for Native American & Indigenous Studies at University of Colorado Boulder.

ORCID

Tiara R. Na'puti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7984-8308

Notes

1 I follow others by not differentiating Indigenous language terms with italics to avoid “othering” these terms from within the hegemony of standard English Language, and to also avoid imposed colonial terminology.

2 Keith L. Camacho, “Homomilitarism: The Same-Sex Erotics of the US Empire in Guam and Hawai‘i,” Radical History Review, no. 123 (October 2015): 144–75. In U.S. legal terms, poksai has come to define “adoption.”

3 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (January 2015): 162–72.

4 Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion,” 162–72.

5 Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019).

6 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, & Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (April 2018): 254–66.

7 Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion,” 164–70; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2015), 1–28; Nathan Stormer, “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Review of Communication 16, no. 4 (October 2016): 299–316.

8 My focus on Rhetorical Studies within the Communication Studies discipline excludes the work of Rhetoric and Composition—though it comes from a similar branch. I recognize this kinship, and Indigenous scholars in Rhetoric & Composition who have long foregrounded indigeneity and Indigenous epistemologies in their publications (see: Kristin Arola, Ellen Cushman, Qwo-Li Driskill, Malea Powell, Robert Warrior). However, I attend to Rhetorical Studies to highlight how seldom this area has addressed erasures of indigeneity.

9 Teresia Teaiwa, “The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Duke University Press, 2014), 43–55.

10 Wanzer-Serrano, Young Lords, 12–13, 23–25. This work addresses some of these questions of genealogy from a “global south” orientation and offers a kinship with my arguments here about rooting genealogies in indigeneity.

11 Teaiwa, “Ancestors,” 43. Here, I borrow from Teaiwa’s title in my tracing of the “ancestors” and “white influences” within Rhetorical Studies.

12 Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 266.

13 Godfried Agyeman Asante, “‘Rhetoricsowhite and U.S-centered’: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019).

14 Scholars initially began to address these topics in six pieces published somewhat intermittently in QJS from 1983–1999 and several more published from 2009 to the present-day. These works focus almost exclusively on variations of “Native American rhetoric,” on Indigenous issues/rhetors located within the Western Hemisphere (overwhelmingly within the continental borders of the USA, and to some extent Canada and South America), and/or on consideration of Indigenous peoples rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time that society has progressed away from. I forgo citing each, but highlight the work of Richard Morris (Mescalero/Kiowa)—who I understand is the only Indigenous-identifying scholar to have been published to-date in QJS. The following two publications are of particular interest as they foreground issues of indigeneity and erasure: Richard Morris, “Educating Savages,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 2 (1997): 152–71; Richard Morris and Philip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadows of The Ghost Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2 (1990): 164–91.

15 See, for instance: Karma R. Chávez, “Pushing Boundaries: Queer Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 83–95; E. Cram, “Archival Ambience and Sensory Memory: Generating Queer Intimacies in the Settler Colonial Archive,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 109–29.

16 Ashley Noel Mack & Tiara R. Na’puti, “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence,” Women's Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 347–70; Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (February 2017): 3–13.

17 Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism,” 1. Communication Studies and Rhetorical Studies are not included in their review of disciplines with emergent analyses of settler colonialism, reflecting the dearth of scholarship in our field.

18 Patrick Wolfe, ed., The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2016), 1–24.

19 Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai’i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–24; Jean M. O’Brien, “Tracing Settler Colonialism’s Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 249–55.

20 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Critical Indigenous Studies Engagements in First World Locations (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016).

21 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016).

22 Tiara R. Na’puti, “From Guåhan and Back: Navigating a Both/Neither Analytic for Rhetorical Field Methods,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, ed. Robert Asen, Karma Chávez, Robert Glenn Howard, and Sara L. McKinnon (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press: 2016), 56–71; Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

23 Coined by Gerald Vizenor in 1994, “survivance” is “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction;” it specifies more than basic physical survival but also continued Indigenous presence through cultural and spiritual practice and stories—a resistance and life force. See: Gerald Robert Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1.

24 Laura Marie Torres Souder-Jaffery, Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam (Mangilao: Micronesian Area Research Center University of Guam, 1992).

25 Communication scholars engage coloniality, colonial, and/or Indigenous issues broadly conceptualized, these include, but are not limited to: Jason Edward Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 66–88; Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996): 127–53; Kundai Chirindo, “Bantu Sociolinguistics in Wangari Maathai's Peacebuilding Rhetoric,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 442–59; Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 1–26; Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no.1 (2009): 39–60; Rona T. Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black, Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2018); Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983): 127–42; Martin J. Lang, “Written Out of Their Own Story: The Rhetorical Colonialism of Journalistic Practice,” Journal of Communication Studies 66, no. 1 (2014): 85–102; Christa Olson, “Performing Embodiable Topoi: Strategic Indigeneity and the Incorporation of Ecuadorian National Identity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 3 (2010): 300–23; William M. Strickland, “The Rhetoric of Removal and the Trail of Tears: Cherokee Speaking Against Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy, 1828–1832,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 47, no. 3 (1981): 292–309; Mary Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73–98; Wanzer-Serrano, Young Lords, 91–163; Anthony Sutton, “Farming, Fieldwork, and Sovereignty: Addressing Colonialist Systems with Participatory Critical Rhetoric,” in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, ed. Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (Peter Lang Publishers, 2018), 324–42.

26 Maile Arvin, “Analytics of Indigeneity,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 119–29.

27 Arvin, “Analytics,” 126.

28 Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric,” 66–88.

29 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no.3 (1995): 291–309. Decades ago, these authors established the links between whiteness and communication in their essay published in this very journal, though few rhetorical scholars have taken these issues up in general—or published about them in QJS specifically—since its publication. For a historical account of the research turning toward race and the need to center race in our disciplinary practices and rhetorical criticism, see Lisa Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24.

30 Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 261.