In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xvii Introduction In 1870, in anticipation of the removal of several Plateau Indian tribes to what would become the Colville reservation, the superintendent of Indian Affairs dispatched sub-Indian agent William Parkhurst Winans to northern Washington state to collect census data, among other particulars. At the tribal council, Winans asked his Indian audience if they would like to have teachers and preachers to guide their vocational and religious training. His question elicited this response (excerpted here from a longer speech) from Wee-ah-pe-kum (Okanagan): When you see my Boy working for the Whites, ask him, “Did your Father send you?” if he says no, send him home; for, when he comes home at night I will say to him, “My son, I am thirsty, go and get me some water to drink,” and he turns around and says, “You God damned Indian how much will you give me”; or if you see my daughter prostituting herself for money, ask her, “Did your Father send you to earn money in this manner?,” then, take a whip and drive her home, for when she comes back, her Mother will tell her to get some wood to cook her Father’s supper, she will turn around and say, “You damned old Bitch pay me for my trouble.” All this they have learned from the Whites.1 Even in this brief excerpt, Wee-ah-pe-kum’s words nonetheless embody many of the principles of an indigenous rhetoric that, I argue throughout this book, continues to exert a discursive influence on the writing of Plateau Indian students today. That conclusion has been a long time in the making. In my capacities as an English professor training future English teachers and as a coordinator of a federal grant targeting schools in high-poverty communities in Washington state in the early 2000s, I often heard a common comment from English teachers working in multiethnic classrooms with Indian minorities as well as in Indian-only schools: There is something special about Indian student writing, teachers often said, but were hard-pressed to explain exactly how, much less why. To determine how, I collaborated with two schools on one Plateau Indian reservation, collecting about 940 papers written from 2001 through 2004. To determine why this writing might be special, I looked at possible historical and cultural roots from archival sources; to this material, I then employed the methods of critical discourse xviii • Introduction analysis. Working primarily at the intersection of American Indian studies and rhetoric and composition, I drew additional insights from contrastive rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies. The title of this book pays homage to Shirley Brice Heath’s ground-breaking ethnography, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, published in 1986. Although my methodology and disciplinary background differs from Heath’s, it was her work that inspired me as a young scholar and, unbeknownst to me then, set my research agenda for the rest of my career. My project is also one of recovery. To authenticate the Plateau Indian rhetorical tradition as both distinctive and indigenous, I sought out primary source materials that report Indian words verbatim (either spoken in English or spoken in Native languages and then translated) as well as material written by Plateau Indians. Of necessity, I took what I think of as a post-hole approach, digging deep when I hit rich soil; much has been lost, but enough has survived to establish where the fence must have run. As luck would have it, I found large caches of primary material at roughly twenty-five- to forty-five-year intervals, from 1855 to 2001. Besides outlining a historical evolution, the selected material allows examination of different genres and modalities (oratory, correspondence, petition, telegram , lecture, State Supreme Court brief, General Council deliberations, newspaper letters to the editor) and consideration of different audiences (intergroup and intragroup). While two chapters focus on one Plateau tribe, one chapter draws material from different tribes across the Plateau, showing how those productions still work from common rhetorical premises. Throughout, I found that Plateau Indians spoke and wrote and deliberated primarily to a single purpose: to reassert tribal sovereignty. And they did so using an indigenous rhetoric that crossed languages, genres, and generations. That rhetoric has preserved and renewed cultural values and identity into modernity. I focus on the arts of persuasion and public deliberation in part because storytelling and literary narrative have received much scholarly and popular attention , but in larger...

Share