Episodes in the Rhetoric of Government-Indian Relations (review)

Efforts to provide serious, thoughtful analyses of pre-1960s Native American rhetoric traditionally have been beset by two overwhelmingly difficult barriers. First, exceedingly little such rhetoric was recorded, which makes its analysis impossible and raises suspicions about the adequacy of the remaining sample. Second, the minuscule fraction of what did find its way into the records of the dominant society almost invariably was created by individuals whose motives, to be charitable, typically were suspect and whose understanding of the languages and the cultures to which such rhetorical efforts belonged and from which they emerged all too often were grossly inadequate. As scores of reputable scholars have discovered again and again, finding sensible paths around these barriers is no easy task.

Janice Schuetz's recent contribution attempts to circumvent these barriers by relying on historical accounts as a means of contextualizing the numerous rhetorical efforts she seeks to consider. This attempt is laudable and a welcome addendum to scholarly treatments of Native American rhetoric. Not surprisingly, given her research expertise, Professor Schuetz is at her best in the analysis of legal issues, and she is on the safest ground when addressing rhetoric produced by Native Americans who used English as their primary mode of communication and who were able to oversee the recording of their own rhetorical efforts. Unfortunately, these moments in the book are few and far between and are not sufficient to carry the weight of a project designed to "provide a 'rhetorical ancestry' to the history of government-Indian relations" (xi).

A large part of the problem is that contextualization alone cannot surmount the barriers that persistently have plagued research of this sort. A great many of the historical records from which these contextualized accounts are constructed, for instance, all too well reveal an allegiance to the view that "conquest" of the West was unequivocally a matter of "manifest destiny," which makes Native American societies and cultures mere observers in their own homes, at best, and obstinate obstructions to an inevitable greatness, at worst. Throughout the work, moreover, Professor Schuetz repeatedly turns to context in her attempts to provide close readings of Native American "texts" that were spoken in languages she does not know, that were recorded in English by individuals who had a vested interest in securing an outcome contrary to the interests of the rhetors under consideration, and whose meanings emerge/d from cultures she has not studied and, thus, does not understand. Even if we had evidence demonstrating the general accuracy of a given text, attempting close readings of translations, even accurate translations, is more than simply risky. Knowing that a speech was delivered at a specific moment and under specific conditions is indispensable to good scholarship, but such things cannot substitute for what was actually said or for culturally and linguistically informed analyses of what was actually said.

A second part of the problem is that Professor Schuetz's analyses treat Native Americans as if they constituted a monolithic group with a single religion, set of traditions, culture, language, and the like. This treatment not only elides the obvious diversities among Native cultures, but also feeds into preexisting biases and stereotypes that thwart rather than advance our understanding of things Native. In her analysis of the Sand Creek Massacre, for instance, Professor Schuetz repeats a Hollywood stereotype about Indian cultures being male-centered (citing a highly dubious early-twentieth-century source to substantiate her claim and ignoring more recent, research-based works such as David Svaldi's Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination). Building on this stereotype, she then asserts that "[t]he Indians themselves also shared partial responsibility for the lack of food because they depended on the diminishing resources of the buffalo and refused to farm" (54). The unfortunate result here is not only that the analyses too typically sustain and propagate the flavor of 1950s popular culture portrayals...