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  • Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence
  • Elizabeth Wilkinson (bio)

When one powerful group or individual silences another less powerful group or individual, silence can be viewed as a marker of victimhood. A simplistic example: any public protest that is summarily shut down is silenced, the protesters victims of being silenced. Silence as an indicator of victim status presupposes a gaze from outside looking in and describes silence that happens as a result of oppression. In contrast, even from a position of less power, individuals can use silence not as a victim-based reaction to but as a central strategy of action for. For example, Audra Simpson’s discussions with Mohawk peoples on the issue of tribal membership and citizenship show rhetorical deployment of silence with the goal of negotiating an intricate political situation (76–78). Following the idea of silence as purposeful rhetorical strategy, this article explores the less widely acknowledged use of silence(s) by Yankton writer and activist Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša.1 She deploys manifestations of silence, particularly in the report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians and in her Atlantic Monthly trilogy on Indian boarding school, as an expression of rhetorical agency and discursive power, in both instances primarily addressing an uninformed and predominantly white audience. The goal of this article is to provide another angle from which to evaluate Bonnin’s sophisticated rhetoric; that is, to examine, define, and analyze the multiple iterations of silence and silencing she uses to promote her political purposes. I argue that Gertrude Bonnin uses strategies of silence and of delayed discourse to unsettle her white readers, forcing them to acknowledge the unbalanced relationship between Anglo-America and Native America in the early 1900s. She writes with the obvious goal of urging readers to reform their own and subsequently the US government’s beliefs and actions. [End Page 33]

In the 1924 report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery (opri), Bonnin uses a variety of silences (her own act of being silent) and descriptions of silencing (herself or another silenced by outside forces) as tools for rhetorical advantage when writing for the Euro-American public and political audience. Bonnin coauthored opri, a report destined for Congress and commissioned by the Indian Rights Association (ira), with two white men, Charles H. Fabens and Matthew K. Sniffens. Their hope was to expose and end rampant abuses of Indian peoples by corrupt agents, businessmen, judges, and lawyers in Oklahoma. In the portion of the report that is clearly authored by Bonnin, she provides case studies of victims of Oklahoma’s “legalized robbery,” beginning with the heinous crimes committed against the childlike, eighteen-year-old woman Millie Neharkey. Within the span of a handful of paragraphs in the opri report, and specifically in writing about Millie’s case, Bonnin displays some of her most pointedly effective uses of rhetorical silences.

However, a much longer and textually complex deployment of these strategies of silence and silencing appears almost a quarter of a century earlier in what is perhaps her most widely known and anthologized writings, her Atlantic Monthly trilogy originally published in January, February, and March of 1900 (republished in the collection American Indian Stories in 1921). In these semi-autobiographical essays entitled “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Bonnin’s uses of silence and silencings are more subtle but have transparent rhetorical purpose. The trilogy, published when she was approximately twenty-four years old, was her first major publication, and while it can be read simply as an entertaining bildungsroman of an Indian girl, it is more importantly a scathing polemic criticizing the Indian boarding school system and is an important early example of her use of rhetorical silence.

Because Bonnin’s clear and powerful rhetorical strategies of silences and silencings are more easily discernable in the concise paragraphs of opri (1924), I discuss that work first and establish definitions essential to my discussion of silence in the Atlantic Monthly trilogy (1900). By unpacking the terminology in the later piece and then applying it to the earlier, I shed new light...

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