Back to the blanket : recovered rhetorics and literacies in American Indian studies

Book

Back to the blanket : recovered rhetorics and literacies in American Indian studies / Kimberly G. Wieser.

Wieser, Kimberly G., 1968- (author.).

Summary:

For thousands of years, American Indian cultures have recorded their truths in the narratives and metaphors of oral tradition. Stories, languages, and artifacts, such as glyphs and drawings, all carry Indigenous knowledge, directly contributing to American Indian rhetorical structures that have proven resistant—and sometimes antithetical—to Western academic discourse. It is this tradition that Kimberly G. Wieser seeks to restore in Back to the Blanket, as she explores the rich possibilities that Native notions of relatedness offer for understanding American Indian knowledge, arguments, and perspectives.

Back to the Blanket analyzes a wide array of American Indian rhetorical traditions, then applies them in close readings of writings, speeches, and other forms of communication by historical and present-day figures. Wieser turns this pathbreaking approach to modes of thinking found in the oratory of eighteenth-century Mohegan and Presbyterian cleric Samson Occom, visual communication in Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, patterns of honesty and manipulation in the speeches of former president George W. Bush, and rhetorics and relationships in the communication of Indigenous leaders such as Ada-gal’kala, Tsi’yugûnsi’ni, and Inoli.

Record details

ISBN: 9780806157276
ISBN: 0806157275
ISBN: 9780806157283
ISBN: 0806157283
Physical Description: xvi, 248 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, [2017]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-233) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Introduction -- "I speak like a fool, but I am constrained" : emancipating Samson Occom's intellectual offspring with American Indian hermeneutics and rhetorics -- Vision, voice, and intertribal metanarrative : the Amerindian visual-rhetorical tradition in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the dead -- The "great father's" tongue is still "forked" : the fight for American Indian resources and red rhetorical strategies in settler colonial politics -- "That little savage was insolent to me today" : ada-gal'kala, idle no more, and the perennial problem of "our mad young men" -- Conclusion.