Browsing by Subject "American Indian"
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Item Embodied Storying, A Methodology for Chican@ Rhetorics: (Re)making Stories, (Un)mapping the Lines, And Re-membering Bodies(2012-10-19) Cobos, CasieThis dissertation privileges Chican@ rhetorics in order to challenge a single History of Rhetoric, as well as to challenge Chican@s to formulate our rhetorical practices through our own epistemologies. Chapter One works in three ways: (1) it points to how a single History of Rhetoric is implemented, (2) it begins to answer Victor Villanueva's call to "Break precedent!" from a singly History, and (3) it lays groundwork for the three-prong heuristic of "embodied storying," which acts as a lens for Chican@ rhetorics. Chapter Two uses embodied storying to look at how Chican@s are produced through History and how Chican@s produce histories. By analyzing how Spanish colonizers, contemporary scholars/publishers, and Chican@s often disembody indigenous codices, this chapter calls for rethinking how we practice codices. In order to do so, this chapter retells various stories about Malinche to show how Chican@s already privilege bodies in Chican@ stories in and beyond codices. Chapter Three looks at cartographic practices in the construction, un-construction, and deconstruction of bodies, places, and spaces in the Americas. Because indigenous peoples practice mapping by privileging bodies who inhabit/practice spaces, this chapter shows how colonial maps rely on place-based conceptions of land in order to create imperial borders and rely on space-based conceptions in order to ignore and remove indigenous peoples from their lands. Chapter Four looks at foodways as a practice of rhetoric, identity, community, and space. Using personal, familial, and community knowledge to discuss Mexican American food practices, this chapter argues that foodways are rhetorical in that they affect and are affected by Chican@ identities. In this way, food practices can challenge the conception of rhetoric as being solely attached to text and privilege the body. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how Chican@ rhetorics and embodied storying can affect the field(s) of rhetoric and writing. I ask three specific questions: (1) How can we use embodied storying in histories of rhetoric? (2) How can we use embodied storying in Chican@ rhetorics? (3) How can we use embodied storying in our pedagogy?Item Moving in Choctaw time : baseball and the archive in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings : An Indian Baseball Story(2012-05) Lederman, Emily Ann 1985-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Cvetkovich, AnnLeAnne Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), brings together story, theory, performance, and document to create an archive that positions American Indians in the center and foundation of American culture, shifting the meaning of the “All-American Pastime” and reclaiming baseball’s American Indian history and pre-colonial existence. While a student at boarding school, Choctaw time theorist Ezol Day draws a picture of a tree with an eye at its base and six others floating around its seven branches, gazing in multiple directions. She refers to this tree as a part of herself that allows her to see patterns and develop theories of relativity based on Choctaw temporality. I read this image as indicating a particular depth of sight, representative of looking around, beyond, and through colonial archives and histories to form a Choctaw archive, an act that I argue is part of the project of Howe’s text. In this paper, I use the eye tree as a theoretical lens to examine how Choctaw storytelling and temporality can reframe colonial documents so that they tell a different history. Reading through colonial archives demonstrates their instability; in other words, using these documents to see American Indian histories renders clear the narrow construction of colonial narratives. The histories seen through this archive allow a reimagining of the past that impacts the present, as Howe’s novel suggests that engaging with these histories can strengthen a sense of Choctaw identity and nationhood. Miko Kings presents archiving as an active process of creation that has far-reaching implications across time and space.Item Stoking the fire : nationhood in early twentieth century Cherokee writing(2012-05) Brown, Kirby Lynn; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Sturm, Circe D.; Justice, Daniel H.My research builds upon interdisciplinary trends in Native scholarship emphasizing tribal-specificity; attention to understudied periods, writers, and texts; and a political commitment to engage contemporary challenges facing Indigenous communities. My dissertation examines the persistence of nationhood in Cherokee writing between the dissolution of the Cherokee government preceding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and political reorganization in the early 1970s. Situating writing by John Milton Oskison, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs and Ruth Muskrat Bronson explicitly within the Cherokee national contexts of its emergence, I attend to the complicated ways they each remembered, imagined, narrated and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning state. Often read as a transitional “dark age” in Cherokee history, this period stands instead as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary debates in the Cherokee Nation and Native Studies today.Item "You heal the spirit" : Anishnabe adaptations to historical loss and trauma(2015-08) Brissette, Charlene Nicole; Steinhardt, Mary; Menchaca, MarthaNative American and Indigenous populations around the world face disproportionately higher rates of disease and mortality. There are many nuanced factors that contribute to this, but a common underlying theme is that they’ve all dealt with some form of oppression by colonialism. Native people today still feel the effects of historical trauma as it reverberates through generations that have directly experienced loss of land, language and culture. It’s important to examine the ways different tribal groups experience and perceive historical loss and trauma today in order to teach the next generation of tribal youth to carry on traditions and Indigenous knowledge. In this study we conducted four focus groups in a Midwestern Anishnabe tribe to examine the research question: What characteristics enable Native American people to cope with historical loss and trauma? Using a survey to supplement the focus group data, we also examined relationships among five variables: historical loss, historical loss associated symptoms, resilience, coping and sense of control. Results showed three over-arching themes that allowed our sample to make sense of historical loss and trauma, and trauma that is ongoing: Adaptations to Loss and Trauma, the Legacy Burden, and a Marked Protective Identity. Additionally, the survey results indicated that historical loss was significantly positively related to historical loss associated symptoms. Higher scores of resilience, percentage of adaptive coping, and perceived control were significantly related to lower scores on historical loss associated symptoms. The findings from this study indicate that loss and trauma are present within this community and having a collective Native identity provides strength in the form of resilience for multiple generations. Using the themes and relationships from this study the community can expand resources to facilitate growth of cultural reclamation and traditional knowledge.