First Contact as a Site of Persuasion

"the oppressed of necessity know more of the oppressors’ ways than the oppressors understand the ways of those whom they oppress" (Stromberg)


Stomberg's Introduction " Rhetoric and American Indians" offers a useful overview of the major questions surrounding social histories of American Indian rhetorics.One of the first questions he addresses is to review a major question in Native Studies--"What is an Indian?" He summarizes rather quickly the major challenges in a packed paragraph that I want to break apart a bit:

Indianness is about specific markers:
---"As Louis Owens indicates, “[W]e are confronted with difficult questions of authority and ethnicity: What is an Indian? . . . Must one be raised in a traditional ‘Indian’ culture or speak a native language or be on a tribal roll?” (3)" (Stromberg). In other words, what constitutes "Indianness." Cultural knowledge, blood quantam, affiliation on tribal rolls, all of the above?

Indianness is a white invention:
--Examined from another angle, we might consider the extent to which the “Indian” is simply “a white invention and . . . a white image” having little to do with actual indigenous peoples (Berkhofer 3)" (Stromberg). In other words, indigeneous people are not bounded by the creation of Indian-ness. Remember, Columbus thought the peoples he met were Indians as in "East Indians" when he arrived on shore. "Indian" was a designation brought by Columbus, by a colonizer, not a concept that made any sense within indigeneous cultures at the time.

Indianness is a rhetorical trope:
--"All of these questions raise the larger question of the degree to which the idea of the Indian is itself a rhetorical trope designed to perform specific functions within various discourses. As Gerald Vizenor asserts, “The word Indian. . . is a colonial enactment . . . an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation” (Manifest Manners 11). In Vizenor’s argument, thereareno “real Indians,” only more simulations that “undermine the simulations of the unreal in the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners 12). " (Stromberg). Interesting. Reminds me of Baudrillard's discussion of simulacra and simulacrum.

While the category of Indian is interrogated by Stromberg and others, so is the idea of "rhetoric." While Stromberg draws upon Kenneth Burke's rhetorical vocabulary to buttress his analysis of American Indian rhetoric, he points to problems behind Burke's rhetorical framework.

Identification:
What happens to identification, a key term from Burke? According to Stromberg: "Even as Burke defines rhetoric as a process of establishing “identification” between self and other(s), the call for unity remains troubling for many American Indians haunted by an official United States rhetoric of assimilation that proclaimed a unity just so long as it was “our” unity.'"
For many American Indian speakers and writers, establishing a measure of identification with their white audience has been a primarydemand. As Burke asserts, “You persuade aman [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifyingyour ways with his” (A Rhetoric of Motives 55).


Consubtantiality:
When one's interests are joined and being substantially one with the other...what does that mean for American Indian rhetorics? Again, Stromberg: " In other words, the transformation to consubstantiality, a shared sense of identity, was to be only one way: the white way. As a number of the essays in this collection show, the complex negotiation for many American Indian rhetoricians has been to bridge communication divisions while maintaining an insistence of difference. "

The Master's Tools:
Stromberg sees the essential challenge faced by American Indian rhetors as the challenge of " discovering and applying another’s “available means of persuasion.” (Stromberg). The challenge was to persuade the "newcomers," the colonizers. As he puts it, the five men, seven women and three children "detained" and "taken to Spain" must have exercised " elocutionary gestures" to an "obdurate" audience. The problem was that Columbus saw himself as having the right to take them with him. He saw himself as superior to the "savages." What happens in asymetrical power relations?

So the point here is that American Indian rhetorics expand what counts as rhetoric and cause us to rethink our assumptions about rhetoric.

More needs to be said here about rhetorical sovereignty and survivance as key terms in American Indian rhetorics. However,I found Stromberg's framing essay useful as it tackles two major questions that are two halves of a whole:
Who does it mean to be Indian? What are the rhetorics of Indian-ness?
What does it mean to engage American Indian rhetorics and what does it mean to draw on concepts of rhetoric from the Greco-Roman tradition and contemporary Western tradition?