Social History as Imperative

Why study and write social histories of rhetoric?


I must begin at home--with my home community,which has had a hand in creating a social history.

As part of a multi-generation farm family in eastern Washington state, I grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of former generations. My great grandfather Frank A. Schell's Model T truck sat below our family’s barn, its slatted sides long ago rotted away, its wheels sunk into the mud. Our family’s barn rose above the truck to a grand height, one of the largest barns left standing in the neighborhood, its drafty and dim exterior and multiple hay lofts called to mind its former occupants: the cows, horses, and goats of previous generations. In the late fall in the 1920s and 1930s, the barn served as an apple shed where my great grandfather, my grandfather, my grandmother, and hired men packed the fall's apple harvest into boxes before hauling them to the railroad depot to be taken to market. In the 1960s and 1970s, the barn became a storage shed for the old and the new. I wandered through it many afternoons, gazing up at the tall stack of homemade apple boxes that rose to the rafters. Stacks of old wooden ladders and new lightweight aluminum ones leaned against the hand-hewn beams. My great grandfather's tools hung on the walls of the hay loft: cross-cut blades, scythes, shingle making equipment, horseshoes, and saddles. Even the feed boxes for the animals were still intact. The barn, once a vital site of production, now housed the equipment, tools, and treasures of former generations, and my grandmother, the caretaker of the family museum, spent hours puttering in the barn’s dim interior arranging relics from the past.

Being constantly surrounded by the past made me, in some ways, obsessed with the past, with history, with the way things once were and the way things came to be. I spent hours talking to my grandmother about the past, listening to her stories, and later typing them for her as she wrote her memoirs in her late eighties (she is now 99 years old). It seemed to me that I didn’t have any choice but to be interested in social history—being part of a farm family guarantees your line in history. But there was more to it than being indebted to the past and the unbroken line of continuity that comes from tracing one’s past. It was a sense of responsibility and duty to acknowledge those how came before and those who got ignored along the way. For our farm once existed and co-existed originally with the Native people—the Wenatchis—who made their home in the Wenatchee Valley for centuries before the trappers. miners, traders, and farmer-settlers came.

My family’s farm stood at the mouth of Brender Canyon, the area the Sinpushquoisoh band of the Wenatchi Indians referred to as the Land of the Blackbirds. Every year the Sinpushquoisoh people traveled through the canyon past the eventual site of our family farm on their way to dig camas roots known as “itwah” or biscuit roots. I grew up hearing stories of how a Wenatchi woman known by her English name Molly traveled on her horse past our farm in June and July to dig her yearly supply of the camas root.. The camas roots were dug in a high mountain meadow in the Wenatchee Mountains known simply as the Camas Lands. The meadow, emblazoned with blue camas flowers, yielded a good harvest of the bulbous root.. The native people dug the roots with a paca, a digging stick made from hard wood or from an elk or deer antler, and they stowed the roots in woven bags around their waists. The high meadow also yielded the sukalusah, another type of camas root, which had white blossoms, and sukwim, or wild carrots . The itwah and sukalusah roots were versatile; the Wenatchis ate them raw or they boiled, baked, or dried them. The camas roots were also used to make a flour to bake cakes or bread. Nearby the Wenatchi also gathered “wild potato, wild onion, tiger lily, cattail, wild celery and pine nuts. Early ripening berries were gathered in June, this month being called Shyayuaenscht or “Service Berry Gathering Time.” (Scheuerman 30).
After gathering camas roots, Molly would stop at the farm on her way back, and my great grandmother Katie Belle Threeton Schell usually served her a meal. Typical of the hierarchical relations between the white settlers and the Indians, Molly ate her meal on the steps of the back porch while the Schell family ate inside.

This bit of social history is not one that most people in my home community of Cashmere, WA know or would even care to know. The Pioneer Village Museum in Cashmere, WA proudly features the history of white settlement in its replicas of log cabins, stores, a one-room schoolhouse, and other structures. The cultural property of the Native people of the region is present in the museum as well, but it is behind locked glass display cases. It is part of a private collection owned by a white resident Willis Carey who left his collection to the museum. Frequently Native people come to the museum and try to take their cultural property back—stone tools, arrowheads, and other items. This property was dug--actually robbed-- from their ancestor’s graves. The museum will not return it the families that come to claim it.

The Indian people in Cashmere are largely gone now—living on the Colville reservation to the north or scattered here and there. The US government never granted the Wenatchis the fishing reservation they were promised in the treaties they signed, and there was not a way to remain in the community without having access to the livelihood that came from unfettered access to the streams and lands that once sustained them.

So social histories matter because it is a history, often, of social injustice as well as the struggle to right social wrongs. Now one might say what is rhetorical about any of this? The rhetoric is in the telling or the construction of historical accounts and their persuasive nature. It is in the way that one version of history gets told—white settlement and white pride and white racism—and in the way another version—the Native people and cultural annhilation—gets completely elided or relegated to a portion of a museum as the “past,” not the future. How did it become persuasive for one story, one history to be acknowledged as the important one? What power relations, public policies, and cultural arguments allowed that to happen? This is where the social historian of rhetoric can step in to addresss the gap between “official” histories of progress and inevitability and address the ways in which such progress was at the expense of whole classes of people and/or the environment. The example I cite is one from my own community, but there are thousands more to address. This is what makes social histories of rhetoric such a powerful area of development for the field. More later!! I have more to say about Thomas Miller and others in relation to this idea of social history.