Malea powell biography of george washington
The Historical Work of Cultural Rhetorics: Constellating Indigenous, Deaf, and English-Only Literacies
Sarah Klotz, Holy Cross
November 2019
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Founded in 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School is notorious as the site where the U.S. government went beyond territorial theft to colonize the language and literacy of North America’s Indigenous nations. At Carlisle, director Richard Henry Pratt created the first curriculum for tribal language extinction. What did Native students do when they faced that curriculum? How did they winnow their language through cracks in the assimilation structure to make the school a site of pan-Indian identity even as the government poured resources into Pratt’s mission to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man?” (Pratt 260). To understand language and literacy at Carlisle, the binary of assimilation and resistance that so often structures scholarly accounts of the off-reservation boarding school is insufficient. I turn instead to the emergent theorizing of scholars working in cultural rhetorics to make sense of Carlisle’s earliest curriculum, which was based in the Deaf education movement. In particular, I am building on the notion developed by Phil Bratta and Malea Powell that “a cultural rhetorics approach to comparative study always requires an examination of issues of power, both those that arise within each cultural site of practice, and the power relations between the cultures involved in the comparative analysis” (“Introduction”). At Carlisle, the federal government invented new methods for a centuries-old project: land and resource theft in the Americas. But other important changes were occurring following the Civil War, including a shift across educational reform movements towards assimilation and standardization. In the interest of national unity and Darwinian notions of social progress, the Deaf education movement united with the Indian education movement to enforce increasingly standardized f Peitho Volume 24, Issue 24 Fall Author(s): Mary Le Rouge Mary Le Rouge is Director of Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She has a PhD in English Rhetoric and Composition from Kent State University, where she taught composition, argumentative prose and professional writing classes. With a masters in publishing from George Washington University, she previously worked as a freelance editor of award-winning encyclopedias in the social sciences published primarily by Sage. Le Rouge currently volunteers as associate publisher for Monographs, Collections, and Conference Proceedings at the WAC Clearinghouse. She is coeditor of the forthcoming edited collection Embodied Environmental Risk: Problems and Solutions Toward Social Sustainability, published by Routledge. Her research focuses on the archival-historical recovery of women’s history, environmental communication, and contemporary rhetorical practices using technology and the human-computer interface. Abstract: In this article, family history leads to new archival-historical research on the Field Matron Program instituted by the Bureau of the Interior on Native American reservations in the American West during the early 1900s. Reflection on this history can provide clues as to how such culturally intrusive, destructive government programs can be dismantled and avoided in the future. Field matrons were employed by the U.S. government to conduct the cultural assimilation of Indigenous women by teaching Indigenous women how to cook, clean, sew, and act like white settler farm women. Field matrons were also involved in the forced removal of Native children from their families and placement in boarding schools, although some resisted this practice. The official correspondence of field matrons collected in the National Archives and Idella Hahn’s personal writings shows their concerns about assimilationi This partially annotated bibliography of resources on American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics is a work in progress. New entries and annotations for existing entries are accepted for review by the editor on an ongoing basis via the entry submission form and annotation submission form. Author bios are available here. The items on listed on this bibliography are inclusive of those written by American Indian, Indigenous, and non-Native scholars. Some of these sources focus on the use of Euro-American rhetorics by Indigenous rhetors. Increasingly, over the years, the discipline has given preference to Indigenous perspectives and writing that examines Native American and/or Indigenous rhetorics that arise out of the cultures themselves. The space that nurtured the proliferation of scholarship on American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics in the past twenty-five years is the American Indian Caucus of the College Conference on Composition and Communication/National Conference of Teachers of English (CCCC/NCTE). This caucus was founded by Malea Powell and Scott Lyons in 1997 as the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship. Despite the shortening of the name, the group has always been and intends to be inclusive of American Indian, Indigenous, and non-Native scholars who do work in American Indian and Indigenous Rhetorics. From its inception to around twenty years later, Malea Powell, Resa Crane Bizzaro, and Joyce Rain Anderson served as co-chairs. Today, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Lisa King, and Kimberly Wieser–editor of this bibliography–serve as co-chairs of this organization. Work by caucus members is highlighted in the bibliography below in red. Some of these sources fall under the further category of Indigenous cultural rhetorics, a set of practices in the field grounded in Indigenous concepts of relationality. Cultural Rhetorics values the ability of story to constel .Works Cited
Research on the Literate Practices of Field Matrons on the Hopi Reservation
American Indian and Indigenous Rhetorics: A Digital Annotated Bibliography