Plateau Indian Ways with Words: The Rhetorical Tradition of the Tribes of the Inland Pacific Northwest

6. Writing in School: 2000–2004

128 Writing in School 2000–2004 At the Treaty Council at Walla Walla in 1855, U.S. military scribes were not the only ones transcribing the proceedings. Several literate Indians, who had been taught by Presbyterian missionaries how to read and write in English, and in some cases, in their own languages, also took notes.1 This fact is mentioned twice in the official record itself, as well as in eyewitness diaries and in Gustav Sohon’s artistic renditions, most notably of Timothy and Lawyer (Nez Perce).2 All Indian notes have been lost, presumably burned at these authors’ deaths along with their personal belongings, as was Plateau custom.3 Although the Indians’ notes did not survive, the fact of their note-taking nonetheless documents the early embrace of literacy by the Plateau Indians, which was a logical extension of their long-standing regard for multilingualism and education . Traditionally children were often sent to live with another tribe to learn that tribe’s language and customs, so that as an adult, he would be able to serve as translator between tribes, a practice that promoted interdependent goals of trade relations and peace. That Indians were taking notes at Walla Walla speaks to a fundamental faith in writing, their notes serving not only to track the Americans’ promises but also to accurately report them back home. Their notes might help them justify their actions since most did not have prior authorization to act on 6 Writing in School, 2000–2004 • 129 behalf of their respective tribes. On yet another level, the very image of a writing Indian collapses the ersatz divide between orality and literacy, demonstrating the complementary and complex relationship between those modes of communication , rather than setting them in the usual binary opposition, undergirded by the implicitly hierarchical equation: oral = primitive / literate = civilized. Those Indians writing at Walla Walla were not any more assimilated or less authentic for doing so. Rather, they were adopting and adapting new tools to preserve their culture while moving it into modernity. Under investigation in this chapter is the writing of Plateau Indian students, authored seven generations after the Treaty Council at Walla Walla in 1855. Like their forebears, they too (to recall the words of the student’s rap poem examined in chapter 1) “can’t stop representin this / reinventin Indian world.” Adapting the rhetoric of their forebears while keeping faith with the values that that rhetoric embodies, these students write in modern genres about modern topics: Frankenstein , credibility of newspapers, teen pregnancy, statutory rape, the space shuttle disaster, an OutKast performance, the murders of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G., Big Foot, marijuana legalization, Emmitt Till, 9/11, Nightmare on Elm Street, Iraqi suicide bombers, Saddam Hussein, NASA, loss of Internet connectivity, Clear Channel and media consolidation, school-grounds improvements, open campus, and George W. Bush’s chances for reelection. Like their forebears, these students employ multiple strategies of personalization. They rely heavily on personal experience to support their views, their own or others—most often someone they know personally and for whom they hold respect, like a parent, a friend, an elder—and take particular care with attributing the source of their information. These discourse-positive markers speak to the primacy of experience-based knowledge at the heart of Plateau Indian rhetoric. And like their forebears, these students have strong positions on certain topics; when they don’t, they suspend judgment, weighing multiple perspectives, a process that sometimes leads to reversing their original positions. They favor high-affect techniques to support their arguments—most notably, hypothetical dialogue and ideational emphasis, the latter variously achieved in writing with underlines, creative capitalization, and exclamation points. Humor and verbal irony are used not to entertain so much as to persuade. While certain pedagogies seem to have affected traditional features like thesis placement and arrangement, students often overtly question those pedagogies or send them up; more often, however, students’ own discursive preferences simply override them. That students do so, I argue in this chapter and throughout the book, strongly suggests that their own communicative competence , as it has evolved and been transmitted over generations and in other 130 • Writing in School, 2000–2004 domains of reservation life outside school, are very much alive as these students manage the complex negotiations between an indigenous rhetoric and school essayist literacy. In short, Plateau Indian student writing in 2000 through 2004 offers a glimpse of the...