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

2. Defining Principles of Plateau Indian Rhetoric

20 Defining Principles of Plateau Indian Rhetoric In chapter 1, I theorized how and why a rhetoric might be identified as indigenous , situating that discussion within the context of American Indian studies. In this chapter I describe the indigenous rhetoric specific to the Plateau Indians, situating that description within the context of rhetoric and composition. In so doing, I resuscitate the sociolinguistic roots of the field of cultural rhetorics, a move that allows me to reconsider many of the major conversations in rhetoric and composition of the past several decades, such as the debates on orality and literacy and on cognitive orientations. Although those issues have long since been resolved in rhetoric and composition, they continue to plague scholarship in indigenous studies as well as in Native education. I use applied linguist Robert Kaplan’s “five terrible questions” to organize this chapter’s discussion.1 That framework seems appropriate, given that Kaplan was the first to formalize the idea that rhetorics are culturally marked. He coined the term “contrastive rhetoric” in 1966 to distinguish it from the comparative linguistic studies at the time.2 Kaplan’s work specifically and cultural rhetorics generally are oft criticized for essentializing culture, insofar as that work portrays culture as a static object rather than a dynamic process that is both resilient and responsive to change. Isolating key features of any rhetoric always entails, to a certain degree, making it hold still for a moment in order to pinpoint and de2 Defining Principles of Plateau Indian Rhetoric • 21 scribe those features. A return to the sociolinguistic roots of cultural rhetorics aims to offset that problem, repositioning it more squarely within the history of new literacy studies (NLS). As literacy scholar James Gee has explained, NLS was one movement among many that took a “social turn” with “the view that reading and writing only make sense when studied in the context of social and cultural (and . . . historical, political, and economic) practices of which they are but a part.”3 Among the many other movements that partake of this same social turn are analyses of conversation and interactional protocols and the ethnography of speaking, fields from which I also draw. An early example of NLS is Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words, whose critical orientation inspired and deeply informs my own work. The title of this book pays respect to that debt. According to Kaplan, speakers and writers not working from monocultural assumptions about communications are faced with five terrible questions: 1. What may be discussed? 2. Who has the authority to speak/write? Or: Who has the authority to write to whom under what circumstances? 3. What form(s) may the writing take? 4. What is evidence? 5. What arrangement of evidence is likely to appeal (be convincing) to readers?4 Kaplan’s questions serve well as touchstones, if not mainstays, for understanding the cultural boundedness of all communicative tasks—a term that emphasizes “interactive intentions” and requires “interpretive judgments” in communications between and among people.5 In using these questions, albeit in different order , as my organizing framework, I am both respecting and updating the field of cultural rhetorics, implicitly recognizing how far it has evolved since its inception in the 1960s, while keeping true to Kaplan’s focus on educational consequences. Other more terrible consequences can result, however, regardless of how blended the discourse or powerfully poetic the language, even as adjudged by EuroAmerican standards. At the Treaty Council at Walla Walla in 1855, for example, Plateau Indian rhetors made meaning in culturally consistent ways, but in a world where Euro-American meanings already prevailed. Blending their rhetoric to accommodate the American military would not have changed the outcome: the illegal dispossession of Indians’ ancestral land, forced removal to reservations, subsequent impoverishment, and the intergenerational trauma of conquest. Retrieving Plateau Indians’ habitual ways with words is not a formalist exercise ; it is a project of recovery with an activist agenda. Before the rhetorical sovereignty of Plateau Indian students can be honored, their characteristic discursive 22 • Defining Principles of Plateau Indian Rhetoric practices must first be recognized as distinctive and historical. And what counts as appropriate discursive behavior by whom is always dynamically arbitrated by a historically situated discourse community that has both interpretive and generative power.6 This authentication process preserves even as it modernizes—or modernizes in order to preserve—the rhetorical ethnie. What discursive practices define the parameters of...