"This dissertation examines the importance of performed and embodied rhetorics to Cherokee survival and resistance and argues for performance as a primary site of Native cultural continuance and rhetorical production. Two historiographic studies are central to making this argument. The first, Indian In The Archive: Performance Historiography as Cherokee Ghost Dance (Chapter Three) looks to the Cherokee Ghost Dance and the Redbird Smith movement as models for radical, decolonial, performative historiography. With a particular focus on recovering a history of nineteenth century Cherokee theatre, this chapter focuses on how archives are and can be used by Cherokee people to re-establish dormant and/or obscured Cherokee performance traditions and histories. The second study, On The Wings Of Wadaduga: Towards the Performance of Two-Spirit Critiques (Chapter Four) focuses on revising both archived and embodied records through the development of an historiographic performance with Two-Spirit, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer-identified Cherokees. This chapter examines performance as historiography and argues for performance as a means to revise both archival and embodied cultural memories. Both studies are grounded in the methodological concepts of [special characters omitted] (duyuk'ta, "balance") and [special characters omitted] (gadugi, "cooperative labor") as a way of conceiving decolonial scholarship, practice, and pedagogy within the field of rhetoric and composition"--Abstract.
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