Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies by Kimberly G. Wieser (review)

In her monograph Back to the Blanket, Kimberly Wieser takes on the difficult and challenging work of providing an overarching articulation of what "rhetoric" and communicative practices mean in Indigenous settings while at the same time making sure that individual community and cultural orientations to specific practices are not lost. Native American and Indigenous studies face the always-present risk of reproducing paracolonial academic systems through disciplinary divisions and hierarchies without producing work that makes a difference for Indigenous communities. In this context, Wieser's book is a call to decolonize and reclaim the concept of "rhetoric" for Indigenous studies, not just for the sake of illuminating and supporting Indigenous rhetorical practices and knowledges of relationality from time immemorial, but also for the sake of advocating for scholars to do work that actually reflects those knowledges and practices. In short, she both reclaims Indigenous rhetorical practices and challenges scholars to use them. As she writes, "We need the rhetoric of the [academic] argument to be more 'Indigenous' if we want the end result to be more Indigenous, because a good rhetoric and its epistemology are inextricably tied" (7–8).

How to do that within the strictures of a paracolonial frame is not easy to articulate, and Wieser is the first to point out that any scholar will have to consider how to shape their work to function within the individual situation and to the benefit of the community with which that scholar is allied. The intended audience for this book appears to be scholars of Western rhetorics, scholars of cultural and Indigenous rhetorics, and scholars in humanities-based Indigenous studies skeptical of the term "rhetoric" as something superficial or non-Indigenous. To help address multiple reader perspectives and to provide a unifying way forward, Wieser builds on her previous work in Reasoning Together: A Native Critics Collective and brings her network of scholarly and Indigenous relations into play to provide at least one model, from a primarily literature-based and Cherokee-based perspective, of a rhetorical approach that responds to a paracolonial frame while attempting to center the functional benefit to Indigenous communities. Her introduction to the book helps prepare and orient the reader to both content and approach, providing a brief overview of key scholarship in American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics and literatures, a grounding in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpretative structures she draws from—tapping Leslie Marmon Silko's well known spider-web analogy as she goes—and a snapshot of the personal stories and experiences that inform her study and perspective. She constructs each chapter to analyze a strategic sampling of American Indian and settler colonial texts that "incorporate aspects of American Indian rhetorics in English or in American Indian visual, material, kinesthetic, and embodied rhetorics that transcend phonetic language" (12). Each analysis receives contextualization through critical lenses from American Indian literatures, philosophy, history, law, and politics, blended with pieces of her own history, and is then followed by an "eisegesis," or extended personal reflection, that deliberately seeks to apply the theoretical analysis to actual circumstances. Though she notes that these eisegesis sections may seem tangential, she "speaks from the heart," and encourages her readers to follow her lead (12). By structuring each chapter in this way, she endeavors to model how one might enact Indigenous rhetorical practices in scholarship, even as she uses these chapters to discuss the implications of such an orientation.

Chapter one, "'I Speak like a Fool, but I Am Constrained': Emancipating Samson Occom's Intellectual Offspring with American Indian Hermeneutics and Rhetorics," begins tracing this web with an examination of the relationship between academic theory and community-based ways of knowing, and an argument in favor of what she calls an "American Indian Performative Hermeneutics." Such a framework involves "a theory of reading and interpreting 'texts' that is more in line with traditional American Indian teachings, without arguing that...