“33$ 5,3. . ‘ K. 1L...H..L., ; .. . 2.. gang... a _.1.. ,e, “a. wok. ,. a G ,1 3 -55 . flu...” .3 g . a. g S. .r! afimnmwu. W? Nu . 1r . “unfiunv . $0.313! .3 no}: » $.11 ‘9‘ ‘9 ... 3?. . 3%.. (v {a} (W: q I» .11... 95.... 1!... A ..£1 . ¢ .39.» .135. JILL.“ :Sbindfit. bank“: .5 (”NW 1;. :n‘u i... 6.: 3.7!. 25.5. _ .. .7515; s o....i:..h.!.45v.nh§w.. .: «v .. 37...... ....”u07i. . L1}: 5: . 54.... 2-- (I ‘i ‘ulgu'r‘ 2,3: 51 {I .x: 3 LIBRARY 1007 Michigan State University This is to certify that the dissertation entitled A RHETORIC OF ALLIANCE: WHAT AMERICAN INDIANS CAN TELL US ABOUT DIGITAL AND VISUAL RHETORIC presented by ANGELA M. HAAS has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree In RHETORIC & WRITING 7/Zéa?// Major P’rofessor’ slSignature 8/19/08 Date ' MSU is an affinnative-action, equal-opportunity employer PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 5/08 K:lProj/Achres/CIRC/DateDue Indd A RHETORIC OF ALLIANCE: WHAT AMERICAN INDIANS CAN TELL US ABOUT DIGITAL AND VISUAL RHETORIC By Angela M. Has A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rhetoric & Writing 2008 ABSTRACT A RHETORIC OF ALLIANCE: WHAT AMERICAN INDIANS CAN TELL US ABOUT DIGITAL AND VISUAL RHETORIC _ By Angela M. Haas In this dissertation, I trace an American Indian intellectual tradition of digital and visual (dig/viz) rhetoric theories and practices through the study of the early and continuous indigenous sign technologies of wampum belts, pictographs, and petroglyphs—as well as a contemporary site of new media: blogs. Further, I develop and employ a decolonial methodology for resisting the over-reliance on and reproduction of dominant Western domains of thought and knowledge-power structures in rhetoric, computers and writing and technical communication inquiry. Through literature reviews, historiography/archival research, case studies, oral history, and interviews, I explore how American Indian identities have been constructed (by Natives and non-Natives) in relation to technology. I complicate these constructions by interrogating the paradigm of technological progress, which assumes that older technologies are simply replaced by more advanced, more efficient, more convenient, and/or more powerful technologies and consequently perpetuates incomplete and inaccurate cultural narratives about technological expertise. Ultimately, my research demonstrates how American Indians have a rich history of resisting colonial constructs of Indian identity and re-imagining Indianness in hypertextual, dig/viz spaces in the face of a still-present digital divide. Consequently, this dissertation offers rhetoric, computers and writing, professional communication, technology, and American Indian scholars: ' a model for examining how the stories we tell ourselves about how technologically literate and advanced we and others around us are intersect with the historical, political, economic, cultural, and social contexts in which they are told; ' revised definitions and histories of hypertext theory and dig/viz rhetoric that dialogue with American Indian intellectual and technological traditions; I an investigation into the relationships between how Americans Indians have used older and newer—and indigenous and Westem——technologies, as well as how such technology-mediated rhetoric relates to other American Indian rhetorical traditions ' an imperative for understanding and supporting dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty, or the inherent right for indigenous communities to claim their own communication needs and determine the rhetoric of their identities in dig/viz spaces. Finally, I call for a more critical engagement with the legacy of colonialism in dig/viz rhetoric studies and share disciplinary and pedagogical approaches and methods for better interrogating the relationships between colonialism, race, rhetoric, literacy, and technology and for addressing issues of representations and race (and, more generally, gender, sexual-orientation, (dis)ability, and age) in our dig/viz rhetoric scholarship and curriculum. Additionally, I call for a more critical engagement with the relationships between colonization and our treatment of technology in American Indian studies and share disciplinary, scholarly, and pedagogical approaches for interrogating the relationships between colonialism, representation, resistance, sovereignty, literacy, technology, and identity. DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to Keith Brotheridge, my life partner and friend, who selflessly shared the commitment and sacrifices required to complete it. My successes are your successes, as I would not have been able to complete the PhD or this dissertation without your emotional, intellectual, and financial support. Thank you for your love, friendship, encouragement, patience, and understanding, my love. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To begin, I have a deep gratitude for the Rhetoric & Writing graduate program at Michigan State University, which provided me with more professional, academic, and scholarly accomplishment and pleasure than I ever expected. The community of faculty, staff, and students together have created and maintained an atmosphere of camaraderie and support that has sustained my personal and professional growth—and for that I will forever been grateful. Thanks y'all! I'd like to express and collective appreciation to my cohort—the incoming class of 2004———and those we "adopted" along the way. Our conversations in our courses and in the hallways have pushed my thinking in significant ways, and I hope that I reciprocated what you all shared with me along the way. Specific thanks goes to: Qwo-Li Driskill, Jill McKay Chrobak, Michael McLeod, and Jim Ridolfo. Qwo-Li, wa'do for being my first fiiendly face that first day of orientation and sticking by my side through it all the past 4 years. My "wonder Cherokee twin," you are so multi- talented and inspire me to do my best work. Gvgeyu uwodu usdi! Jill, for always being “right there,” talking me off the ledge more times than I would have liked. Your humor and love have been pivotal to my success and joy in this journey—and I suspect they will continue to be throughout my life. I love you, girl! Mike and Jim, your gentle ways and unwavering support have lifted me more times than I can count. Thank you both for being loyal fiiends and confidants. Mike, may all the blessings that life has to offer find their way back to you. I can't think of anyone more deserving. Jim, you make the most divine challah bread; thanks for sharing your many talents. Briefly, I'd also like to note some of the brilliant and friendly colleagues in other cohorts: Collin Craig, Kendall Leon, Stacey Pigg, Staci Perryman-Clark, Robyn Tasaka, and Sue Webb. Collectively, I can’t think of better scholars or people with whom to share this crazy, yet rewarding, experience. As for professors, I have to first thank my committee chair, mentor, and fi'iend, Malea Powell. I am forever in your debt for the steadfast support you have given me over the past 4 years. From your open door policy, late night calls and visits, talking though theories and readings one-on-one, and much more, you have made me a better scholar and person. You were the first to encourage me to constellate my interests in American India rhetorics, digital and visual rhetoric, and professional writing—and your scholarship has been key to my understandings of how these areas can speak to one another. S'gi for all you have done and for pushing me to do the best I can and believing in me throughout. Thank you to: Danielle DeVoss for your enthusiastic encouragement and smart pedagogy that cleared a path for me to do the work that I am loving doing; Jeff for asking hard, yet smart, questions and for being a exceptional sounding board; Terese Monberg for agreeing to sit on my committee in my last year and giving me more helpfiil feedback that I ever expected. Furthermore, a special thanks goes to Kimberli Lee, my trusted friend and confidant who fed my body, mind, and soul—and always had an open door and a vacant couch for me. Thank you to the American Indian bloggers who helped me though my research Debbie Reese, Jim Horn, Matthew Fletcher, and Cynthia Leitich Smith. No only have I learned so much from your blogging, but you all have inspired me to be a better and more dedicated blogger. Thanks to my students at Michigan State; I learned as much, if not more, from you than you did from me. vi Finally, my deepest gappreciation goes to family and friends for shaping me into the person I am today and giving me the strength and courage to accomplish this goal. To my three sets of parents, thank you for always having the confidence in me even when you might not have been so sure what the heck rhetoric and writing is anyway. To my best friends Sherri Doster and Bob Mason, I never would have made it through without you. Thank you always being there for me throughout my life. And a special thanks to my brother, Paul, my aunt Jo, and my uncle Randy. Your gentle souls and kind spirits have nourished me my entire life, and I owe it to you all that I am the "walking *&%?! miracle" that I am today. I learned how from watching you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 (A RHETORIC OF) INTRODUCTIONS, INTERRUPTIONS, INTERVENTIONS, AND INDIANS ................................................. Rhetorical Traditions & Interventions............................................. American Indian Rhetorics, a Story ............................................ What, exactly, is American Indian rhetoric? ................................. What 18 American Indian rhetorical theory?... What work does American Indian rhetorical theory do? ................... What are the deliverables of American Indian rhetorics? ................... An open invitation to a walk a new intellectual trade route, RSVP preferred ............................................................................ CHAPTER 2 TOWARD A DECOLONIAL THEORY & METHODOLOGY .................. A Historical Account of Decolonial Theories and Methodologies ........ A Decolonial Methodology for Digital and Visual Rhetorical Studies... Intellectual transmigrations... . . Texts, Textuality, and Technology Re-tooled Methods to Support a Decolonial Methodology for Digital and Visual Rhetorical Studies ................................................................ In Defense of Decolonial Theories and Methodologies ...................... Poststructuralist Theory Postmodern Theory Cultural Studies Theory Summary ................................................................................ . On the Benefits of This Decolonial Theory and Methodology ............. Theories of Technology and Design... .. Profess1onal/Iechn1cal Communication Theorym Digital and Visual Rhetoric ........................................................ American Indian Studies ............................................................ Limitations and Openings to Decolonial Theories and Methodologies... CHAPTER 3 (RE)EXPLORING AMERICAN INDIAN HYPERTEXTUAL, DIGITAL, AND VISUAL RHETORIC TRADITIONS ....................................... A Brief Story about the Dominant History of Digital and Visual Rhetoric Studies” .. A Decolonial Intervention. (Re)Chart1ng (New) Territorles .............. Wampum as Hypertext: An Intellectual Tradition of American Indian Digital and Visual Rhetoric Theory and Practice ........................... An "Official" History of Western Hypertext viii 12 16 17 19 32 36 42 44 50 55 58 6O 62 62 63 65 68 70 70 73 75 77 78 79 80 84 88 91 Hypertextual Features of Wampum and Western Hypertexts............... Digital Rhetoric ......................................................... Visual Rhetoric .......................................................... Associative Indexing, Storing, Retrieving, and Presenting Information” Non-linear, Webbed Networks of Knowledge ..................... Supplemental Memory... Interactive Design... ... Multi- Modal Web of Meamng Extending the Capability of Western Hypertexts .......................... Implications of Wampum as Hypertext... An Opening of New Intellectual Territory for Digital and Rhetoric Studies” CHAPTER 4 INDIANS IN NOT-SO-UNEXPECTED PLACES: WRITING INDIANNESS INTO THE BLOGOPHERE (AND OTHER DIGITAL AND VISUAL PLACES) ......................................................................................................... ResearchMethods.. .. Introduction to Featured Blogs and Eloggers" ................................ Relationships between "Traditional" American Indian Rhetorics and American Indian Digital and Visual Rhetorics ............................... Sovereignty ............................................................... Self Determination ........................................................ Community Activism and Renewal ................................... Summary of Consistencies.. Potential Promises and Perils of American Indian Blogging and Blog Rhetorics... Challenging Stereotypes ................................................ Building Community ..................................................... Preserving Culture” .. Appropriating Culture/Infnngmg on Intellectual Property Other Concerns. Summary... Implications for R/W and AIS: Toward a Civil Rights Movement and Digital and Visual Cultural Rhetorics Inquiry. Ethical Implications ........................................................ Intellectual Implications .................................................. On What American Indians Can Teach Us about Digital and Visual Cultural Rhetorics Inqulry Blog Rhetorics.......... Cultural Usab111ty Intellectual Property (IP) .................................................. Digital and Visual Material Cultural Rhetorics ....................... ix 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 101 101 104 109 115 121 123 124 125 126 128 131 132 132 134 135 135 138 139 140 140 143 145 146 148 149 150 Cultural/Community Literacy ............................................ 151 Digitizing and Seeing Race ............................................... 151 Intellectual Openings to New Experiences ..................................... 152 CHAPTER 5 F ORGING INTELLECTUAL TRADE ROUTES TOWARD A DIGITAL AND VISUAL CULTURAL RHETORICS INQUIRY AND PEDAOGOGY .......... 155 A Case for Decolonial Pedagogy ................................................ 156 Teaching to Transgress .................................................. 161 Teaching to Support Community ....................................... 162 Teaching to Inspire Hope 163 Summary.... 164 The Transdisciplinary Landscape of a Decolomal D1g/V 12 Rhetoric Pedagogy 1n W and AIS .......................................................... 166 Decolonial Diz/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Course Design .............. 167 Decolonial Diz/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogical Goals. . .. 172 Decolonial Diz/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogical Strategies ..... 175 An Opening and RSVP for Future Work in Support of and Contribution to Dig/Viz Cultural Rhetorics ..................................................... 187 NOTES ............................................................................................ 193 APPENDICES Appendix A: List of American Indian Blogs... .... 200 Appendix B: Research Participant Information '21th Consent Form” ........ 202 Appendix C. American Indian Blogger Questionnaire... 204 Appendix D: List of Visual Cultural Rhetoric Videos ....................... 206 REFERENCES ............................................................................... 208 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Gast's American Progress (1872) ........................................ 52 Figure 3.1: Raw quahog wampum shells .............................................. 89 Figure 3.2: Wampum string held by Six Nations youth Don Fadden ............. 90 Figure 3.3: Wampum belt displayed by Six Nations youth Roger Jock ........... 90 Figure 3.4: Iroquois Chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve reading Wampum belts (ca. 1870) ............................................................................. 90 Figure 3.5: Western vs. Wampum Hypertexts ........................................ 93 Figure 3.6: Cayuga Chief Jacob Thomas with Two Row Wampum Treaty Belt replica .................................................................................. 95 Figure 3.7: Example hypertext with nodes and links ................................. 96 Figure 3.8: American Progress by John Gast (1872) ................................. 105 Figure 3.9: Pictograph of a human figure in white pigment at Steamboat Butte, MT 106 Figure 3.10: Petroglyph of an etched tree line with possible moon phases or hoof prints above the trees at Steamboat Butte, MT .................................. 106 Figure 3.11: A shield-bearing warrior petroglyph at Steamboat Butte, MT ...... 107 Figure 4.1: Jim Horn's (2008) Native American Food blog .......................... 123 Figure 4.2: Turtle Talk blog 123 Figure 4.3: Cynthia Leitich Smith's (2008) cynsations blog ......................... 124 Figure 4.4: Jim Hom's (2008) Native American Recipes blog ........................ 128 xi CHAPTER 1: (A RHETORIC OF) INTRODUCTIONS, INTERRUPTIONS, INTERVENTIONS, AND INDIANS "[L]inguistic discourses on race, class, and gender shape and mold the ways that subjects encounter the world, constraining their possibilities." Robert Warrior, The People and the Word "We are living in a system in which human worth is determined by money, material wealth, color of skin, religion, and other capricious factors that do not tell the true value of a soul . . . [and] in the Western world . . . Indians are somehow less than human . . . We are constantly being defined from the point of view of the colonizer." Joy Haijo, A Map to the Next World "The Indian is an ascribed name, and the name is not native, the ascriptive simulations are the creases of inconceivable discoveries, ethnographic surveillance, and fugitive poses in the pageantry and portraiture of dominance." Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses This is a hypertext. There is a long tradition of non-Natives rhetorically constructing American Indians—via print, visuals, and digital compositions—in stereotypical, essentialized, and fetishized ways that contribute to a larger, monolithic fiction of who/what is "the American Indian. " Think, for instance, of commercial product packaging that typically represents “the American Indian” as a headdress wearing, tribeless, nation-less, generic warrior. American Indians are never shown engaging with computers or other contemporary technologies; American Indians are rarely shown, in fact, as contemporary peoples with complex identities and technological expertise. Instead, on most occasions, American Indians are visually and textually linked to a past and erased from the present. In spite of these constructions, contemporary American Indians and allies are interrupting and consequently destabilizing this homogenous fiction and its byproducts, such as the perceptions of American Indians as outside of (post)modem society and technologically unengaged or inferior. This dissertation serves as one of those interruptions. In this dissertation, I trace an American Indian intellectual tradition of digital and visual (dig/viz) rhetoric theories and practices through the study of the early and continuous indigenous sign technologies of wampum belts, pictographs, and petroglyphs—as well as a contemporary site of new media: blogs. Further, I develop and employ a decolonial methodology for resisting the over-reliance on and reproduction of dominant Western domains of thought and knowledge-power structures in rhetoric, computers and writing and technical communication inquiry and explore (through literature reviews, historiography/archival research, case studies, oral history, and interviews) how American Indian identities have been constructed (by Natives and non- Natives) in relation to technology. I complicate these constructions by interrogating the paradigm of technological progress, which assumes that older technologies are simply replaced by more advanced, more efficient, more convenient, and/or more powerful technologies and consequently perpetuates incomplete and inaccurate cultural narratives about technological expertise. However, I do not suggest that I can correct or offer a complete narrative of American Indian technological theory and practice; instead, I offer just another story—or a hypertext of stories, if you will—that offers a way for us to imagine a relationship between American Indian studies (AIS), rhetoric and writing studies (RAW), and professional communicationl studies. To do so, this dissertation asks: ' In W, a discipline that is becoming increasingly more interested in interrogating power, language, literacy, and knowledge structures, and challenging established definitions, do our current definitions of dig/viz rhetoric (and dig/viz literacy)—and corresponding theories and methodologies—subjugate, disenfranchise, or omit some traditions important to rhetorical inquiry? I What can we learn from American Indians about dig/viz rhetorical inquiry and pedagogy and expanding AIS? I In what ways are American Indian dig/viz rhetorical theory and practices consistent with and/or divergent from American Indian rhetorical studies writ large? Ultimately, my research demonstrates how American Indians have a rich history of resisting colonial constructs of Indian identity and re-imagining Indianness in hypertextual, dig/viz spaces in the face of a still-present digital divide. Consequently, this dissertation offers rhetoric, professional communication, technology, and American Indian scholars: ' a model for examining how the stories we tell ourselves about how technologically literate and advanced we and others around us are intersect with the historical, political, economic, cultural, and social contexts in which they are told; I revised definitions and histories of hypertext theory and dig/viz rhetoric that dialogue with American Indian intellectual and technological traditions; I an investigation into the relationships between how Americans Indians have used older and newer—and indigenous and Westem—technologies, as well as how such technology-mediated rhetoric relates to other American Indian rhetorical traditions I an imperative for understanding and supporting dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty, or the inherent right for indigenous communities to claim their own communication needs and determine the rhetoric of their identities in dig/viz spaces. Finally, I call for a more critical engagement with the legacy of colonialism in dig/viz rhetoric studies and share disciplinary and pedagogical approaches and methods for better interrogating the relationships between colonialism, race, rhetoric, literacy, and technology and for addressing issues of representations and race (and, more generally, gender, sexual-orientation, (dis)ability, and age) in our dig/viz rhetoric scholarship and curriculum. Additionally, I call for a more critical engagement with the relationships between colonization and our treatment of technology in AIS and share disciplinary, scholarly, and pedagogical approaches for interrogating the relationships between colonialism, representation, resistance, sovereignty, literacy, technology, and identity. Consequently, this research will contribute to the intellectual work in several disciplines—from R/W studies writ large, to cultural studies, dig/viz rhetorical studies, and AIS. To explain, my research follows that of rhetoric scholars who have recovered “alternate” histories of rhetoric, thereby engaging our discipline with non-Westem intellectual and rhetorical traditions just as rich and long as Greek and Roman rhetoric. At the same time, this dissertation extends such revisions of the history of rhetoric to the histories of dig/viz rhetoric, as I position wampum belts, petroglyphs and pictographs as sites of dig/viz writing practices in the Americas that predate contemporary research in fields that typically place the computer and Internet at the center of inquiry. To do so, my dissertation forges intellectual trade routes2 between dig/viz rhetorics inquiry, cultural theory and rhetoric studies and it employs broader, more flexible, and more historically- situated definitions of technology and considerations of technological theories and practices. These definitions reflect a larger history of technological design and use by people of color and in turn rupture widely held theoretical and political assumptions and racial stereotypes about technological expertise. Thus, by discussing the everyday practices of technological use and (re)production by American Indians, this dissertation contributes to the growing literature3 in computers and writing and professional communication inquiry that recognizes technology not as transparent things but as cultural artifacts imbued with history and values and, subsequently, offers research and theory on how different people use digital technologies, how visuals act rhetorically, and the relationships between older and newer technologies. Rhetorical Traditions & Interventions Many contemporary rhetors (Villanueva, 2004; Powell, 2004; Lyons, 2000; Anzaldua, 1987) have called for the reconstruction of new theories and histories of rhetoric by including the stories of those who have been historically and systematically ignored or silenced by "traditional" rhetoric studies. Although still limited, Bizzell and Herzberg's (2001) second edition of The Rhetorical Tradition recognizes the importance of including such stories in studying the history of rhetoric. The editors explain, As white women and women and men of color have increasingly participated in public forums, they have begun to theorize the differences race and gender make in language use. This work parallels other contemporary theory that investigates the epistemic nature of rhetoric, since women's rhetorics and the rhetorics of color typically find language use is constitutive of gender and racial identities. (p. 15) I Given this perception of increased participation, Bizzell and Herzberg dub the rhetorics of women and rhetorics of color as strands of "new rhetorics." While this editorial move has influenced some re-visioning of the "traditional story" of rhetoric, at the same time, the traditional origins, sites and protagonists of rhetorical production in the story are nonetheless reinscribed as the touchstone for "new rhetorics" inquiry in this collection. In contrast, another strand of inquiry is emerging in rhetoric studies that understands these "new rhetorics" as nothing new—as women and people of color have participated in public forums and theorized race, gender, and language for thousands of years—and thus seeks to study parallel traditions of communicative and inventive knowledge production just as rich and complex as Greek and Roman traditions. This strand of inquiry itself and the "texts" at the center of and that result from this inquiry are often described as alternative, ethnic, and cultural rhetorics, and several edited collections have been dedicated to such scholarship. Gray-Rosendale & Gruber (2001) consider their collection of essays as alternative rhetorics, as they explain that the contributors draw from as well as disrupt and challenge the hierarchical nature of some - traditional rhetorical studies while recognizing that such challenges are temporarily open to co-optation[,] . . . illuminate the tradition's form and shape as well as its tendencies to construct itself as seamless despite the obvious fissures within its own narratives[,] . . . testif[y] to the power relations involved in offering up these texts[, . . . and] contribute a different book, an alternative text, through which we as scholars and teachers might research and teach rhetoric." (pp. 4-5) Thus, by challenging traditional canons of rhetorical thought, this collection presents readers with alternative ways to approach formal rhetorical situations and offers deeper understandings of marginalized rhetorics, studies of discursive acts and communities that have gone unrecognized by Western culture, and new methodologies of investigating histories of rhetoric. In another collection, Schroeder, Fox, & Bizzell (2002) explain that [t]he label alternative is helpful because it gets at what is perhaps the key feature of the discourses we are discussing, namely that they do not follow all the conventions of traditional academic discourse and may therefore provoke disapproval in some academic readers. Alternative invokes a sort of counter-cultural image that bespeaks the political resistance to hegemonic discourse that these new forms express . . .." (p. ix) Consequently, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the academy should value alternative forms of discourse, as doing so will encourage further alternative (thus, new and different) forms of intellectual production and a broader range of expression in academic work. Such alternative rhetorics include unconventional forms, such as multi- modal/genre, "hybrid,"4 "mixed,"5 and ESL6 rhetorics, as well as other rhetorics that strive to understand the relationships between and across communities, discourses, and linguistic and literacy standards. Other alternative rhetoric scholars have edited collections concerned specifically with rhetorics of/from color (Villanueva, 2004) or ethnic rhetorics (Gilard & Nunley, 2004). To summarize a few, Gilyard's (1999) Race, Rhetoric, and Composition aims to hasten the contemporary movement in rhetoric and composition to inspect the various and complex dimensions of race more critically and thus "render visible the implicit yet dominant discourses on race, racism, and identity" (p. ix). Further, Gilyard & Nunley (2004) and their contributors "foreground questions of how ethnic rhetorics might function as generative sites of difference, how they intersect with social movements, how they might shape composition instruction, and how they should relate to presentations of the rhetorical tradition" (p. v). Such work answers Henry Louis Gates' (1986) call in his pivotal "Race, " Writing and Difference—which explores the "curious dialectic between formal language use and the inscription of metaphorical racial difference" (p. 6)—for rhetoric and composition scholars to "analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us" (p. 15). Given this, ethnic rhetorics often interrogate how literacy has been held up as evidence of civilization and demonstrates how it has simultaneously stood in place of racism to inscribe and re-inscribe difference. Similarly to alternative rhetorics and rhetorics from/of color, cultural rhetorics inquiry is concerned with challenging traditional canons of rhetorical thought through the study of rhetorics historically marginalized or unrecognized by Western culture and with constructing new methodologies for investigating the plurality of histories of rhetoric. However, cultural rhetorics attempt not only to make alternative and ethnic rhetorics present in rhetoric inquiry, but also to interrogate the influence of dominant domains of thought and structures of power that have subjugated some rhetorics in favor of others. Agreeing that rhetoric and culture are inextricably and dynamically linked, scholars practicing cultural rhetorics study, theorize, and write about the complex relationships between rhetoric and race, gender, class, nationality, age, gender, sexuality, and ability, among other cultural influences. Cultural rhetoricians investigate everyday rhetoric and writing practices of specific cultural groups (typically outside of "traditional", male European and Greco-Roman cultures) and the historical, social, cultural and political contexts that shape those practices. Collectively, then, scholars from/of traditions of African American studies, AIS, Chicana/o studies, Latina/o studies, Pacific Islander studies, Asian American studies, Arab American studies, (dis)ability studies, queer studies, working-class studies, whiteness studies, and diasporic studies—just to name a few—are contributing toward the emerging field of American cultural rhetorics, theory, and methodology. In brief, cultural rhetorics are alternative rhetorics and may be ethnic rhetorics; ethnic rhetorics are both alternative and cultural; and alternative rhetorics may also be ethnic and cultural (but may not be due to genre-mixing as a form of alternative rhetorics). Cultural rhetorics inquiry understands rhetoric as always already cultural and thus foregrounds issues of culture in research practice, design, conduct, write-up, and delivery. Although the intellectual work of cultural rhetorics scholars produces unique understandings of specific and local everyday rhetorical theories and practices of specific cultural groups, we tend to share some similar theoretical and ideological underpinnings. Among other things, we think that: rhetoric is both enabled and constrained by culture and identity—and culture is rhetorical rhetoric is produced by the interaction between and across multiple cultures and cultural encounters narrative is rhetorical and epistemological history and nostalgia is the absence of real7 rhetoric is more than texts/discourse (e. g., material rhetorics) rhetoric shapes identities and bodies Accordingly, when formulating methodologies, cultural rhetoricians tend to: destabilize historically bifurcated frameworks, such as rhetoric/poeticss, production/consumption, epistemological/metaphysical, and nature/culture recuperate pre-colonial systems of rhetoric and writing interrogate data collection practices and ownership in the knowledge-making enterprise9 - theorize beyond the traditional canonical boundaries of rhetoric and towards intersections with interdisciplinary scholarship that helps to describe what has been absented from the historical rhetorical chronology value local discourses, practices, and knowledgesl0 and experiential culturally- saturated knowledge through narrative, the body, performance, memory, etc.ll Furthermore, when writing up our studies, cultural rhetoricians may employ some of the following rhetorical strategies: 10 I transcend, subvert and constellate time and space12 I articulate the difl‘erences between writing and being written'3 I challenge binaries and "accepted" definitions I avoid the replication of oppressive discourses I challenge the fraud of neutrality I articulate complex identity constructs and subjectivities I subvert dominant discourses often by dismantling and reassembling them in productive waysl4 Given these features of cultural rhetorics inquiry, it is clear that a cultural rhetorics approach affords us access to and dialogues between and across rhetorics from those who have been historically silenced, ignored, and underrepresented by dominant culture. Such inquiry may serve as a response to mixed-blood Indiana Miami scholar Malea Powell's (2004) call for rhetorics of alliance that have the potential to allow for an emergence of a “new story about ourselves, not a ‘prime’ narrative held together by the sameness of our beliefs, but a gathering of narratives designed to help us adapt and change as is necessary for our survival” (“Down By the River,” pp. 57-5 8). This dissertation, then, in a response to this call, draws upon and contributes to cultural rhetorics inquiry15 and crafts a rhetoric of alliance between and across indigenous (predominantly American Indian) and Western rhetoric and technological theory and practice. However, in order to investigate what American Indians can tell us about contemporary Western dig/viz rhetoric inquiry—and because I am employing a decolonial methodology (which will be further detailed in Chapter 2)——we must first listen to stories of American Indian rhetorical traditions. 11 American Indian Rhetorics, a Story The emergence of American Indian rhetorics inquiry over the last decade has resulted from intellectual alliances between rhetoric and AIS scholars and research. A key group of scholars working at the C&R Ranchl6 (Powell, 1999, 2002, 2004; Lyons, 2000; Bizzaro, 2002 & 2004; Baca, 2006) have contributed to the development of American Indian rhetorics inquiry—a strand of American cultural rhetorics studies that engages in conversations with other cultural rhetorics but with its own theories and methodologies rooted in American Indian theoretical and experiential knowledges. This recent alliance, then, results in both the reliance on and the forging of new directions in the already extensive and interdisciplinary field of AIS, which has historically resided at the nexus of numerous intellectual trade routes. In addition to intersecting with literature, creative writing, and now rhetoric, AIS interconnects with "American" studies, education, environmental science, botany, ecology, biology, genetics, "American" history, political science, law, art history, textiles, economics, anthropology, archaeology, fine arts, and museum, disability, performance, ethnic, postcolonial, and feminist studies—just to name a few. This interdisciplinarity has been a feature of Native American and American Indianl7 studies programs ever since their development in the late 19605, influenced in part by the American Indian political activism at the time. Paramount to the development of the (inter)discipline, American Indian scholars, tribal elders, educators, linguists, scientists, artists, historians, attorneys, medical doctors, and other professionals in March 1970 at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars at Princeton University”. Imagined, organized, managed, and executed entirely by American Indians, the 12 Convocation steering committee invited approximately 190 American Indian and ten non-Indian participants and sought the contributions from a good cross—section of American Indian tribes, geographic locations, disciplines, and professions. Further, the Convocation provided a non-partisan space—free of federal, government, political, social, or religious agency sponsorship or involvement—dedicated to opening conversations about improving the educational opportunities for and experiences of American Indians. Those contributing to this historic meeting and leading its critical and creative inquiry included Rupert Costo (Cahuilla engineer, President of the American Indian Historical Society, and spokesman for the Cahuilla Indian Tribe of Southern California), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa writer and comparative English professor who had just received the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn), Alfonzo Ortiz (Tewa professor of anthropology who had recently published Being and Becoming in a Pueblo Society), Vine Deloria Jr.l9 (Standing Rock Sioux and political science professor), Jeannette Henry (Eastern Cherokee, PhD in history, and editor of The Indian Historian), Bea Medicine (Standing Rock Sioux anthropology professor), and dozens of other now legendary American Indian scholars. Together, they answered the call for convocation: As always before in the past . . . there is very little true representation of Indians on the highest levels, where conclusions are drawn, decisions made, and long-range policies formulated. This is why the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars is called, to bring together not only scholars but Indian students, tribal leaders, and nonlndian friends, to explore the issues as these bear on the Indian people as a whole. 13 This is a call for Indian scholars to come together and take the lead in formulating clear-cut stands and goals on the issues. This is a call for Indian scholars to look to the mountaintops and to greatness in seeking a better life for our people; to demonstrate that we are not the inarticulate masses about whom so much benevolent concern has been voiced in the past. (p. 1) In essence, the (inter)discipline of AIS itself was forged via a series of highly rhetorical multi- and cross-disciplinary, generational, community, and cultural contexts and exchanges on American Indian issues, policies, and goals—and how those should be implemented in educational systems. Despite the obvious longitudinal and community success of the convocation— given just the hundreds of contemporary AIS programs in higher education alone—early scholars in these programs had robust intellectual traditions from which to draw”. One of these traditions includes the writing and community activism of the Society of American Indians (circa l913-late 19205) and its 50 members, from Dakota writer and physician Charles Eastman (aka Ohiyesa) and fellow Dakota writer Gertrude Bonnin (aka Zitkala— Sa) to Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai physician and outspoken critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Native ethnographers, such as George Hunt (Kwakiutl), Francis LaFlesche (Omaha), Arthur Parker (Seneca), John N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora), and Ella Deloria (Lakota)2'. Hence, AIS has both traveled diverse routes—as evidenced by the foundational writing from early published American Indian writers and pivotal work from the Society of American Indians and the First Convocation of American Indian 14 Scholars—and cleared diverse paths for future American Indian rhetors, writers, and activists. These American Indian intellectual traditions continues to inspire and inform contemporary literary and rhetoric studies. For example, Crow Creek Sioux Elizabeth. Cook-Lynn (1997) reports that a major impetus "for the development of Native American Studies as disciplinary work was to defend indigenous nationhood in America," and to do so, AIS "centered on two concepts: indigenousness (culture, place, and philosophy) and sovereignty (history and law)" (p. 11). Interestingly, American Indian rhetoric and literary studies continues to defend indigenous nationhood in America and to support both pan-Indian and nationalist modes of inquiry—or inquiry that spans across indigenous communities and inquiry that focuses on one indigenous sovereign nation, respectively. Further, our inquiry and often recuperates or revisits the work of early American Indian writers and rhetors and constellates concepts of indigenousness and sovereignty with issues of memory, power, knowledge production/consumption, literacy, language revitalization and acquisition and Western literary and rhetorical canons. This breadth of inquiry is evidenced by the work of English studies scholars, such as Robert Warrior (Osage), Malea Powell (Indiana Miami/Eastem Shawnee), Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek/Cherokee), Daniel Heath Justice (Oklahoma Cherokee), Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee/Lenape/Osage), Virginia Carney (Eastern Cherokee) Resa Crane Bizzaro (Cherokee), Chris and Sean Teuton (Cherokee), Damian Baca (Mexican/Spanish/Rio Grande Pueblo), Phil Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux), and Kimberli Lee (Oglala Lakota”). Although only a few of these contemporary Native scholars have formal ties to rhetoric programs, they each contribute to American Indian 15 rhetorical inquiry, as their research, scholarship, and activism are centered on American Indian discourses. The next section, then, will highlight some of this work in an attempt to frame my research within this tradition. What, exactly, is American Indian rhetoric?” Simply put, American Indian rhetorics are sign technologies written about/for/by/with peoples indigenous to the Americas to influence public action. Thus, American Indian rhetorical inquiry simultaneously draws upon and contributes to discussions in rhetoric, American cultural rhetorics, literacy studies, history, and AIS. Although Ernest Stromberg (2006), the first editor of a collection of rhetorics from/on American Indian rhetors, aptly critiques the appropriateness of applying Western theories of rhetoric to indigenous communication practices—as well as questions the "degree to which the idea of Indian itself a rhetorical trope designed to perform specific functions within various discourses" (p. 2)-—-he settles on defining rhetoric as "the use of language or other forms of symbolic action to produce texts (in the broadest possible sense) that affect change in the attitudes, beliefs, or actions of an audience" (p. 4). Accepting this definition, then, American Indian rhetorics are not confined to texts or to only one genre. Poems, autobiographies, short stories, novels, instructions, songs“, lessons, pictographs, websites, blogs, material rhetorics . . . they all are rhetorical. They each tell stories and are made from stories”. They have the potential to be both persuasive and epistemic— inasmuch as they each can be and have been crafted by American Indians to alter and reflect our understandings of the world around us. Further, American Indian rhetoric— like Western rhetoric—is a techné that cannot be stabilized: an art of productive knowing, remembering, revealing, and opening spaces and opportunities for intervention. 16 In spite of the dynamic nature of rhetoric, rhetoric also relies on the momentary stabilizing of this productive inquiry. Thus, despite the dynamic and complex social, political, and economic forces that influence the ways in which we come to know, invent, and re-invent, and intervene, rhetors must nonetheless temporarily fix how rhetoric is generated, interpreted, dispersed, and consumed in social, cultural, and community contexts in order to study it. American Indian rhetorics, then, seek to interrogate these forces, influences, and contexts. Given that "the five-hundred year relationship between America's indigenous people and Europeans and their descendants may easily be described as an unending chain of rhetorical situations . . ." (Stromberg, p. 5), it is clear that there are many forces, influences, and contexts that are worth interrogating when considering the ways in which rhetoric has both been used against and by American Indians to shape the ways in which people perceive American Indians. What is American Indian rhetorical theory? Theories are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world around us. And “the truth about stories,” Cherokee novelist Thomas King (2005) writes, “is that that’s all we are” (p. 2). Although the value of stories in the humanities and social sciences has only recently developed in the last couple decades, the historiographical work in AIS and rhetorics demonstrate that Native communities have valued the role of narratives in theorizing, or make sense of the world, for millenia. As Lee Maracle (1990), Toronto Métis, posits, “There is a story in every line of theory. The difference between us and European (predominantly white male) scholars is that we admit this, and present theory through story. We differ in the presentation of theory, not in our capacity to theorize” (p. 7). l7 American Indian rhetorical theory is concerned with the activist and rhetorical work that narratives do to destabilize the hegemonic "rhetorical tradition" and dominant rhetorics of Indianness by examining the how stories intersect with the historical, political, economic, cultural, and social contexts in which they are told. Given this, American Indian rhetors listen to the ghosts of our ancestors, including "both the stories of material colonization and the webs and wisps of narrative that are woven around, under, beneath, behind, inside, and against the dominant narratives of 'scholarly discourse'" (Powell, 2002, Listening, p. 12). In doing so, American Indian rhetorics (re)tell stories to theorize new notions of the academy, the discipline(s) and Indianness, as well as new approaches to decolonization, self-determination, and sovereignty. Therefore, American Indian rhetoric theory is aligned with the foundational work of other indigenous scholars to the Americas, like Chicana scholars Gloria Anzaldua (1987), who employed narrative to theorize a metiza consciousness, and Emma Perez (1999), who shared stories to theorize a new Chicano/a historical consciousness. As many indigenous scholars suggest, those who critique the validity of narrative inquiry are those who want to keep hegemonic structures in place—and who fail to recognize that Western theories are also based on fictions. Cruikshank (2002) notes that such structures gain their footing by “monopolizing and categorizing information and by routinely silencing local traditions that do not fit official categories” (p. 6). “Official” categories can only remain so via stability, and narratives threaten this stability. As Cruikshank learned from a research participant, Angela Sidney, her “stories were not merely about the past, they also provided guidelines for understanding change” (p. 13), 18 and from another participant, Kitty Smith, that “. . .once things change, nothing is ever quite the same again” (p. 19). Consequently, stories about everyday practices are sites for theorizing local knowledges and changing their place in the global information marketplace. Cruikshank explains that such stories "have social histories, and they acquire meaning in the situations in which they emerge, in situations where they are used, and in interactions between narrators and listeners . . . [Furthermore,] their telling emerges as the intersections of power and ideas where larger forces impinge directly on local experience" (p. 21), so “to relegate them only to the local and the particular is to oversimplify the real work that stories do” (p. 6). Cruikshank reminds us, “. .. ancient narratives provide scaffolding from which to interpret inexplicable events. . . [and] global forces driving human history are always experienced in locally significant ways. Familiar narratives provide ways to engage with historical events and expand our understanding of the social work that stories do” (p. 11-12). In other words, stories negotiate and mediate the folds, disconnects, constraints, and contingencies in local, regional, and global/universal knowledges. What work does American Indian rhetorical theory do? As indicated earlier, in addition to rhetoric theory, American Indian rhetorical inquiry draws upon the intellectual and activist strategies and goals of AIS to build its theory and methodology. In turn, Cherokee scholar Chris Teuton (2003) explains that American Indian Studies continues to draw upon political activism to shape both its political goals and methodological approaches. American Indian Studies contextualizes the development of new knowledge within 19 the social and political realities experienced by American Indians today. For this reason, American Indian Studies strives to create scholarship that may be useful to American Indian people and communities. Two continuing aspirations of American Indian Studies is to recover and discuss Native intellectual and political leaders of the past and present, and to create intellectual and political conceptual models for future generations. (p. 124) Similarly, contemporary American Indian rhetoric scholars are interested in recuperating the work of American Indian intellectuals and activists, assessing the relationships between traditional and recent American Indian rhetorical traditions, analyzing the influences of Western traditions on American Indian rhetorics and lives, and crafting intellectual, political, and rhetorical models and clearing a path for future American Indian rhetoric scholars and communities. To explain, American Indian rhetorics seek to develop methodologies that allow us to interrogate issues of how rhetoric has been complicit in the social and political realities of how American Indians relate to, remember, and re-imagine power, place, identity, history, colonialism, sovereignty, language, literacy, literature, and material culture—among other things. Thus, this next section will briefly sketch highlights of the methodological, theoretical and rhetorical work that American Indian rhetorics have accomplished to: recuperate historiographical American Indian rhetorics; challenge dominant essentialized notions of Indian identity; support sovereignty, self-determination, community renewal and activism; and build alliances—and to the extent I can within the scope of this dissertation, I will attempt to highlight how some rhetorical strategies and tactics have changed over time, due to 20 changes in audience, historical context, and the fact that all traditions are process- centered and must change in order to flourish.26 To begin, many American Indian rhetoric scholars27 are methodologically drawn to historiography, textual analysis, narrative inquiry, case study, and oral histories to study particular rhetorical contexts in the Americas that transpired during the past 500 years of rhetorical situations between the colonizers and the colonized and explicate on their relevance to contemporary American Indian communities. For example, Leech Lake Ojibwe Scott Lyons (2000) studies 19th century legal rhetoric, stories of Cherokee and Haudenosaunee sovereignty preservation efforts, 1837 Chippewa Treaty, and the work of early 20th century Oglala Lakota (Sioux) writer Luther Standing Bear. These case studies offer non-Native scholars a better understanding of the cultural and political implications of rhetoric of sovereignty and the right American Indians have to rhetorical sovereignty, or the claiming of "the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit [of agency, power, and community renewal], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse" (pp. 449-450). Additionally, Miami scholar Malea Powell (2002) recovers the writing of two 19th century American Indian intellectuals, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute) and Charles Alexander Eastman (Dakota). Through her historiography and rhetorical analyses, Powell examines how they responded to colonization via rhetorics of survivance, or rhetorics that layer writing to survive with writing to resist. For a final example, Cherokee compositionist Bizzaro (2004) constellates family oral histories with 19‘'1 and 20th century legal documents written by Indians and the US Government about Indian identity to complicate the question of who counts as Indian. Interrogating factors 21 of intemal/self colonialization, paternalistic rhetoric, blood quantum, and enrollment rhetoric, Bizzaro ultimately calls for and contributes to the development of an American Indian rhetoric of identity that considers unenrolled Indians. To add to these discussions of Native rhetorics written post-contact, American Indian rhetoric scholars are also drawn to these same methodologies in recuperating indigenous writing that transpired pre-contact to demonstrate rhetorical traditions before colonization. Such work includes Damian Baca's (2006) (Mexican/Spanish/Rio Grande Pueblo) historiography that retells the story of the 12 pre-Codex28 codices, evidence of an Aztec intellectual tradition long before European despite the claim that the Aztecs were "people without writing, without letters, and without any kind of enlightenment" (p. 17). Further, Powell's (2005; 2007) most recent historiographical work recovers the material rhetorics of American Indian women, specifically beadwork and river cane baskets, and demonstrates that material rhetorics are made up of stories that produce things and can influence public action. Thus, Powell urges us to "look carefully at what it means to tell outside of alphabetic text." In addition to employing methodologies that position American Indians as pivotal contributors to a rhetorical tradition in the Americas and rhetoric studies writ large, theoretically and in practice American Indian rhetorics tend to challenge dominant essentialized notions of Indian identity. We must remember that the notion of "Indian" itself is a white invention. As White Earth Chippewa (Anishnaabe) Gerald Vizenor (1998) reminds us, "The word Indian . . . is a colonial enactment . . . an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation" (p. 11). Given this, Vizenor asserts that there are no "real Indians," only more simulations that "undermine the simulations of the 22 unreal in the literature of dominance" Q3. 12). Thus, based on the rhetoric of empire2 9—a rhetoric that seeks to diminish the value of the pre-existing community, kills its cultural memories, and allows for the re-writing of history—dominant culture named Indians as less civilized, intelligent, and advanced and continues to rely upon and perpetuate these simulated, essentialized, and monolithic fictions of Indian identity. However, as Stromberg makes clear, "the idea of Indian is itself a rhetorical trope designed to perform specific functions within various discourses" (p. 2). Therefore, the rhetoric of Indianness can and does perform differently in American Indian rhetorics, where dominant fictions of Indianness have been, and continue to be, challenged. To explain, in subtle resistance to Western pressures of American Indian assimilation, it was common for 19‘h century published American Indian writers to appropriate the "elements of Christian discourse, sentimentalism, democratic discourse, and an emerging nationalism in the service of sophisticated arguments made on the behalf of Native rights and identity" (Stromberg, 2006, p. 8). Such discourse is evident in the published autobiographies of William Apess (1831), Pequot writer and ordained Methodist minister, and Andrew Blackbird (1897), Odawa interpreter, postmaster, diplomatic advisor, teacher, and activist. To explain, Apess relates his Pequot identity in part via spiritual confessions and conversion rhetoric, while Blackbird complicates his Odawa identity as a baptized Christian. In contrast to assimilation rhetorics, both Apess and Blackbird, as well as Sarah Winnemucca3O (1883), subvert their positioning as Christians by engaging in rhetorical resistance and employing ironic reversals3 1—the turning of racist EuroAmerican rhetoric about American Indians back on itself and EuroAmericans. Using Christian rhetoric and metaphors, these 19th century writers analyze the irony of 23 "savagery" when comparing the stories told by the whites about the Indians with stories of savagery committed by whites who claim to be Christian—not to mention pointing the finger at whites for introducing illegitimacy and alcoholism to Indians. Stromberg (2005) describes this discursive move as syncretic rhetoric, which "moves fluidly between allusions to Indian figures, beliefs, and narratives and the figures, beliefs, and narratives of the dominant white culture" (p. 9). Thus, these 19th century authors engage with the contemporary EuroAmerican rhetoric of the time to counter popular dominant narratives that American Indian peoples and cultures are uncivilized and uneducated. Such engagement with "analyzing the psychological and political effects of the knowledge about racial difference, struggling with its naturalization in the period, and attempting to reconcile tradition and modernity" (p. 7) is highly rhetorical, and Konkle (2004) claims this engagement is still significant, if not fundamental, in American Indian discourse today. This position is made evident by examining contemporary American Indian rhetorics that tend to identity issues. Although not through the appropriation and subversion of Christian rhetoric, Cherokee rhetoric scholars Resa Crane Bizzaro (2002; 2004) and Ellen Cushman (2005) share their own identity stories to work toward developing a rhetoric of American Indian identity. Although both complicate Western understandings of indigenous phenotype and Indianness via their own identity narratives, Bizzaro (2004) translates this act of resistance into a political agenda, as she ultimately argues for a place for unenrolled Indians in sovereign tribal communities. In spite of this interest in identity rhetorics, Warrior (1995) condemns contemporary scholarly preoccupations with issues of identity and authenticity as essentialist in that it reduces, 24 constrains, and contains American Indian thought instead of engaging with the myriad of critical issues more crucial to an Indian future. Further, he asserts that such preoccupations demonstrate a disconnect between academic discourse and community experience, as there are more pressing concerns of racist violence and prejudice, sovereignty, self-determination at the local community level. Some of Bizzaro's work (2004), however, does constellate identity rhetorics with the pressing issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and community, as she complicates the issue of Indian identity by examining the extent to which dominant discourse has named what it is to be a "real" or "true" Indian and has been used as the benchmark for legitimizing Indian identity, recognizing the ways in which "the oppressed have oppressed themselves" (p. 62) via internalized colonization”, and questioning an unenrolled lndian's relationship to rhetorical sovereignty. In sum, regardless of Warrior's keen concern for other issues more critical to an American Indian future, or where one might stand on this debate, it is clear that American Indian rhetorics nonetheless have been and continue to be interested in challenging, dismantling, and complicating dominant fictions of Indianness that may limit future possibilities for American Indian peoples and communities. In addition to resisting Western simulations of Indian identity, American Indian rhetorics are also concerned with supporting sovereignty. From the first wampum belts woven to establish treaties with the settlers to the Aztec codices, Vine Deloria's work on American Indian law, and Craig Womack's work on Creek nationalist literary traditions, American Indian rhetorics have sought to support sovereignty. Recent scholarship within _ and adjacent to American Indian rhetoric studies includes theories of rhetorical and intellectual sovereignty. Lyons (2000) elucidates the difference between Western and 25 American Indian rhetorics of sovereignty, as Western notions of sovereignty are based on self-govemance from the shackles of monarchical sovereignty, while Indians defended sovereignty against newly formed "conceptions of the modern nation-state and new bourgeois ideologies of the individual" (p. 453). For Indians, "[t]he sovereignty of individuals and the privileging of procedure are less important in the logic of a nation- people, which takes as its supreme charge the sovereignty of the group through a privileging of its traditions and culture and continuity" (p. 455). Furthermore, Warrior (1995) extends discussions of tribal sovereignty from community to academic contexts. He contends, "it is now critical for American Indian intellectuals committed to sovereignty to realize that we too must struggle for sovereignty, intellectual sovereignty, and allow the definition and articulation of what that means to emerge as we critically reflect on that struggle" (p. 98). Lyons' (2000) work helps to articulate part of what that means for indigenous rhetoric scholars and practitioners, as well as the rhetoric studies community. To explain, Lyons discusses the legacy of colonization based on rhetorical modes of naming and claiming (which have ties to identity and literacy) to promote the importance of rhetorical sovereignty, or the inherent right and ability of American Indians to determine their own communicative needs, goals, modes, styles, languages, and desires for public discourse in the pursuit of agency, power, and community renewal. He draws on Deloria to remind us that claiming sovereignty is based on a recognition of that group's power by both the self and the other. Given this claim, however, Bizzaro (2004) interrogates the dilemma for mixed-bloods who are unenrolled (and thus are not positioned to speak for the Nation) and their relationship to rhetorical sovereignty. She ultimately postulates, "What kind of rhetorical 26 and political power would accrue to indigenous nations if they considered, to some degree, those among them like me [unenrolled mixed-bloods]" (p. 62). Regardless of the role of enrollment, however, rhetoric scholars learn from this conversation what American Indian intellectuals need from rhetoric and writing, including self representations that serve to replace the Western recapitulation of "Indian stereotypes, cultural appropriation, and a virtual absence of discourse on sovereignty and the status of Indian nations" within composition and rhetoric research (Lyons, p. 458). Closely related to the theorizing of sovereignty is the importance of self- determination (taking control of our own destinies) in American Indian rhetorics—both historically and contemporarily. For example, Konkle (2004) posits that two early 19th century Native writers, George Copway (Ojibwe) and William Apess (Pequot) both endorsed "the prior and ongoing autonomy of Indian nations from subordination to EuroAmerican authority and Native peoples' authority over traditional knowledge, history, and contemporary experience" (p. 5). Further, in his pivotal text, Custar Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, Deloria (1969) mobilized self-determination in scholarly and activist agendas and set the stage for a similar transformation among Native reservation and diasporic (via removal and relocation) communities. Deloria claims, "Indian people . . . have a chance to re-create a type of society for themselves that can defy, mystify, and educate the rest of American society" (p. 268). This thrust is still evident today, as Muscogee scholar Daniel Wildcat (2001) reminds us of the significance of intellectual sovereignty and self-determination: "It is essentially a tribal intellectual and moral mandate requiring action, unless we want our current educational system to be like our contemporary political structures and practices, which all too often merely reflect 27 the dominant society's institutions (p. 7). Consequently, American Indian scholarship often tends to the rhetoric of self-determination as an act of resistance and activism. For example, Baca (2005) reveals resistance tactics encoded in the post-Columbian amoxtli that "critique Spanish colonization of the Americas, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the consequences of globalization in the territories of immigration, language, and popular culture" (p. 3). Ultimately, these tactics evidence a rhetorical self- fashioning of IndoHispanic cultures as survivors of colonization and globalization, and as politically and rhetorically savvy, which subsequently influences future perceptions of IndoHispanic communities. Given the importance of community and cultural survival in American Indian cultures, American Indian rhetorics share the activist agendas of supporting community agency and renewal. From a nationalist perspective, Daniel Heath Justice, Cherokee literature scholar and science fiction writer, both emphasizes the importance of kinship to Cherokee literary traditions in his anthology Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2005) and demonstrates how kinship plays out in cultural practice in his novel Kynship (2005), which chronicles the survivance strategies employed by Cherokees during removal and relocation. Further, Craig Womack (1999) writes about the community benefits reaped from focusing on the study of nationalist literary traditions, in his case, Creek. Finally, Chocktaw novelist LeAnn Howe (2001) conveys the importance of Chocktaw community in her novel Shell Shaker, as the story is told from a variety of community members, the community members make sacrifices for the benefit of the whole, and the community pulls together to amass the power to counteract the corruption and restore justice and balance. 28 In contrast to these Nationalist visions of community, Bizzaro (2002) stresses that community renewal might be better achieved should unenrolled, mixed-blood Indians be invited to be a more integral part of the community. Bizzaro encourages a collective credibility, legitimacy, and saliency for her community: Imagine the strength a collective voice might carry if we could incorporate the voices of other mixed-bloods who have passed through the dominant culture’s educational system but have remained silenced. This group might fully establish a Native American rhetoric that takes into account issues of identity and acknowledgement, sustaining our efforts to actively resist those identities imposed upon us and offering support for the continued survivance of indigenous nations in the United States. (p. 73) Despite disagreements in the ways in which American Indians conceive of community, both enrolled and unenrolled Indians agree, however, that community renewal efforts are enhanced through tribal language preservation and revitalization efforts.33 In addition to these tribal-based views of community and community renewal, American Indian rhetors inside and outside have engaged in political and activist agendas that collectively serve to restore agency to American Indian communities of all kinds and inspire community-based activism—from the foundational work of early published American Indian writers, to the Society of American Indians, the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, and contemporary American Indian writers. The collective work of early American Indian rhetors and writers collectively served to persuade EuroAmerican audiences that Indians were just as human as they were in ways that allowed 20th century American Indian rhetors and writers to position themselves as just as 29 intelligent. Consequently, American Indian rhetors and writers at the turn of and into the 21St are the beneficiaries of improved community agency—both politically and academically—wand have employed this agency in various ways that not only support community agency and activism, but also often simultaneously challenge dominant conceptions of Indian identity, and support sovereignty and self-determination activism and restore American Indian agency in specific rhetorical situations. Nowhere in American Indian rhetorics is this constellation of rhetorical purposes more apparent than in discourse surrounding land. As Maureen Konkle (2004) explicates, "Native peoples' connection to the land is not just cultural, as it is usually, and ofien sentimentally, understood: it is also political—about governments, boundaries, authority over people and territory" (p. 2). It's political in way that is deeply rhetorical and culturally-specific. To explain, since the invasion of the Americas, American Indians have had to confront a cultural ideology that is so intimately juxtaposed to their own, as the Western paradigm of land ownership is built on rhetoric and practice that has supported individualism over community and the cycle of removing indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and the subsequent remapping of Indian territories, land grabs, "surplus" land claims, and ultimate destruction of sacred land. Further, Konkle adds, "no other instance of European colonization produced as many of as significant treaties[, . . . and] despite the pervasive discourse of 'broken treaties,‘ treaties had and continue to have legal authority" (p. 3). Given this unique legal and rhetorical history, American Indian rhetorics are concerned with the "rhetoric of dominion and conquest used to legitimize dispossessing indigenous peoples of their lands and rights" (Stromberg, p. 11). Thus, 30 rhetoric inquiry has much to contribute to this political discourse on land that does more than move boundaries, but it also impacts people, bodies, identities, and communities. This concern is evident in the writing of American Indian rhetors and activists inside and outside the ivory tower. For example, Qwo-Li Driskill (2005), Cherokee two- Spirit/Queer rhetoric scholar, poet, performer, and activist (also of Afiican, Irish, Lenape, and Osage ascent), writes poetry that confront the legacies of colonization—specifically land theft, forced removal, and biological and cultural genocide—and tells stories of how maps erase people and how borders are artificial and arbitrary“. One poem, "Map of America," reminds us that the Americas were "born" out of genocide, built on the bodies and bones of indigenous peoples. Further, White Earth Chippewa (Anishnaabe) writer, activist, environmentalist, former vice-presidential candidate for the green party, and founder, of the White Earth Land Recovery Project35 and Honor The Earth“, Winona LaDuke (1999; 2005) writes about the ongoing degradation of Native American land, Native resistance to environmental and cultural degradation, the direct relationship between the loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity, and the importance of self- deterrnination and community involvement. In All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, LaDuke (1999) includes case studies of community-based, feminist rhetorics of risk (Seminoles, Anishinaabeg, Innu, Northern Cheyenne, Mohawks, and Hawai'ians, among others) that draw upon the testimonies from local indigenous community members and activists who have struggled to enact environmental change in their communities. In Recovering the Sacred, LaDuke (2005) traces the colonization of indigenous histories/stories, bodies, genetics, lands, waters, skies, vegetation, ceremonies, images/representations—all sacred to native peoples and integral to self—determination. 31 She notes, "By the 19303, Native territories had been reduced to about 4% of our original land base. More than 75% off our sacred sites have been removed from our care and jurisdiction" (p. 14). Despite this loss, and the subsequent devastating impacts on the wildlife on these lands and on Native ”diets and ceremonial practices, Driskill and LaDuke nonetheless reveal stories of American Indians who serve as agents for change in their own communities and thus resist the ongoing, devastating effects of colonization on American Indian identities, self-determination, sovereignty. What are the deliverables of A merican Indian rhetorics? At this point, I have only sketched a landscape of American Indian rhetorics and a few sites of interest along the way rather than mapping out an entire territory. Regardless, it is clear that American Indian rhetorics have exported intellectual goods to the C & R Ranch. Two of these deliverables include rhetorics of survivance and rhetorics of alliance. To begin, Vizenor (1994) defines survivance as "an active sense of presence, the continuation of Native stories, not a mere reaction, or survivable name . . . [rather] survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate" (p. vii). Thus, rhetorics of survivance (survival + resistance) are activist rhetorics that insist on the continuation of American Indian stories that resist dominant, monolithic stories of American Indians as tragic victims and revision Indians. Therefore, survivance is both a rhetorical tactic and a result of this tactic. This is evident in Powell's (2002) study of Sarah Winnemucca and Charles Eastrnan's rhetorical responses to colonization. In her essay "Rhetorics of survivance: How American Indians use writing," she offers “the space of absent presence, the space where the rhetorical tactics of folks like Winnemucca and Eastman 32 can be put into conversation with Euroamerican ‘oratorical culture’ as a way to complicate its so-called transformations” (398). Through her detailed historiography, among other things, we learn about the rhetorical tactics Winnemucca and Eastman employed to respond to the challenges of the ongoing process of empire-building and its effects on governmental policy decisions and destroying indigenous memory in the 19th century. Survivance has continued to inspire rhetorical tactics that intervene in the strategies of the dominant culture designed to exclude some from the full power of language. To illustrate this intervention, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1987) describes what motivated her survivance writing: what happens to a reasonably intelligent child who sees him or herself excluded from a world which is created and recreated with-the obvious intent to declare him or her persona non grata? Silence is the first reaction. Then there comes the development of a mistrust of that world. And, eventually, anger. That anger is what started me writing. Writing, for me, then, is an act of defiance born of the need to survive. (p. 57) One of the rhetorical tactics often credited for the success of American Indian rhetorics of survivance to intervene in dominant discourses is trickster discourse—or what Vizenor (2005) defines as "a comic discourse and language game" (p. x). He continues, "The trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical" (p. xi). In essence, trickster discourse employs linguistic tricks to manipulate the dominant, all the while reversing the normal power structures by exposing the "the arbitrary and sometimes self-contradictory rules laid down by the dominant culture" 33 (Terrill, 2004, p. 172). Ultimately, trickster narratives interrupt discourses of power by: discovering and applying the dominant culture's available means of persuasion; dismantling and revising "terministic screens" shaped by frontier, assimilation, and relocation rhetoric; developing an acute sense of audience awareness; "establishing a measure of identification with their white audience . . . [and appropriating their] language, styles, and beliefs . . . in order to establish a degree of consubstantiality" (Stromberg, pp. 5-6). Given these rhetorics of survivance and the ghosts of thousands of others—as well as discursive features that are both unique to American Indian rhetorics and have comparative functions to other rhetorics from/of color—rhetoric studies has a responsibility to engage with American Indian rhetorics in our research and pedagogy. As Powell (2002) makes clear, her goal is “to make visible the fact that some of us read and listen from a different space, and to suggest that, as a discipline, it is time we all learn to hear that difference” (p. 398). If we listen rhetorically and act responsibly, Powell (2004) suggests that “we can begin to reimagine ourselves, our pedagogies, our discipline in relation to a long and sordid history of American imperialism. That we will not shirk from the hard work implied by stories—like the new histories and theories—being offered" by American Indian rhetorics (p. 428). So how do we listen, engage, and act in these ways? American Indian rhetorics of alliance offer us some models for doing so, as the rhetoric of empire has shaped the social consciousness of non-Indians in ways that require American Indian rhetorics to engage with Western rhetoric studies writ large. Thus, many indigenous schools in our discipline are asking for reciprocal intellectual engagement from each of us in the 34 discipline——to participate in an intellectual alliance to interrogate the ways in which colonialism has influenced our habits of mind. For example, Victor Villianueva (2004) urges us in his "Rhetorics from/of Color" special issue of CE, to “break from the colonial mindset and learn from the thinkers from our own hemisphere” (p. 40). Further, Lyons suggests that our scholarly community begin "prioritizing the study of American Indian rhetoric—and the rhetoric of the Indian" (p. 464), as we have a responsibility to tend to the legacy of the "the duplicitous interrelationships between writing, violence, and colonization," which "set into motion a persistent distrust of the written word in Englis " (p. 449). This history was also influenced by the use of rhetorical imperialism, or "the ability of dominant powers to assert control of others by setting the terms of the debate" (p. 452), and consequently rhetorical paternalism, with rhetorical strategies that moved "sovereign" to "ward," "Nation" to "tribe," and "treaty" to "agreement" (p. 453). Given this history, Powell (2004) calls us to imagine “a usable past in which Native peoples’ writings (and African American and Chicano/Latino and Asian American, et cetera) aren’t just included but are, instead, critically important.” She adds: We need a new language, one that doesn’t convince us of our unutterable and ongoing differences, one that doesn’t force us to see one another as competitors. We need a language that allows us to imagine respectful and reciprocal relationships that acknowledge the degree to which we need one another (have needed one another) in order to survive and flourish. We need, I would argue, an alliance based on the shared assumption that “surviving genocide and advocating sovereignty and survival” has been a focus for many of the people now on this continent for several centuries 35 and, as such, should also be at the center of our scholarly and pedagogical practices enacted in theseUnited States. (p. 41) Ultimately, Powell offers the story of Susan LaFlesche—Omaha physician, public health advocate, and Indian spokeswoman—and her alliance-building work that bridged the communication gap between Indian and Western traditions and knowledge systems as an impetus for change in our discipline: It’s her sense of equal and shared responsibility that offers . . . the most promise for a new disciplinary story. This doesn’t mean that we ignore our history; no, an acknowledgement of that history and respectful efforts to redress its wrongs is an absolute necessity for the survival of any alliance. That’s why Villanueva’s call for a history of American continental rhetorics is so important, because if Rhetoric and Composition is to grow and survive as a discipline, then this continental history of rhetorics must be writ large in our stories about ourselves. But we cannot, we must not, write these as “other” histories, magnanimously included alongside the “real” history. (p. 57) Powell, then, posits that rhetorical listening and rhetorics of alliance can help us to learn to intellectually adapt and change as is necessary for our disciplinary survival. As Powell reminds us, all cultures must change in order to survive—and I add, to thrive. An open invitation to a walk a new intellectual trade route, RSVP preferred Just as Foucault argues that history has been based on the continuity of ideas, so has the history of WW. American Indian rhetorics serve as interruptions in the Western knowledge "tradition" that has a history of endorsing a homogenous, continuous, and 36 unified history of rhetoric.37 American Indian rhetorics re-imagine the discipline and its complicity in the imperial project38 by listening to ghosts and seeking alliances for decolonial healing and community renewal—~for everyone's sake. Thus, like other American Indian rhetorics, this dissertation aims to challenge dominant notions of Indian identity and support self-determination, sovereignty, and community activism. Further, by interrupting colonial narratives emerging in dig/viz rhetorical scholarship that attempt to primarily serve a Western canon and epistemology by situating the origins and major protagonists squarely in Western culture, this dissertation responds to: calls from American Indian rhetoric scholars Powell, Lyons, and Baca to decolonize the Western rhetorical canon and epistemology; the call from computers & writing scholars Cindy & Dickie Selfe (1994) for writing teachers who teach with technology to be more cognizant of the colonial constructs that we may inadvertently reinscribe in our classrooms; and the call from technical communication scholars J. Blake Scott and Bernadette Longo (2006) for our discipline to make a cultural turn and to re-theorize professional and technical communication theories and practices in ways that support Stuart Hall's (1996) treatment of theory and practice as “set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges which have to be debated in a dialogical way” (p. 275). Just as we have come to understand that written texts are not neutral, nor are our understandings of rhetoric objective, my research reminds rhetoric scholars that dig/viz texts are biased and our understandings of them are subjective. Thus, I forge intellectual trade routes between and across Western and American Indian dig/viz rhetorics in an effort to prove this and consequently call for a decolonial change in our visual and digital rhetoric inquiry and pedagogy and the ways in which we engage with dig/viz analytical 37 and rhetorical works from non-Westem cultures. As such, this methodology asks readers and viewers to suspend prior understandings of dig/viz rhetoric as limited to computer- mediated textual and visual communication and presents an additional, "new" history of dig/viz performances in the Americas—one that traces Indian dig/viz practices over time. This research ultimately results in a disciplinary critique of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry that situates its origins in the last 25 years or so. Consequently, the final product of this intellectual endeavor results in a rhetoric of alliance between indigenous (predominantly American Indian) and Western rhetoric and technological theory and practice that benefits both R/W and AIS. In addition to the aforementioned benefits to rhetoric studies—such as offering dig/viz rhetoric inquiry an opportunity to learn from and engage with American Indian theories, practices, and rhetorics of technology use and production—Ahis dissertation will contribute to AIS by honoring and walking the path laid out by other American Indian scholars who have recovered indigenous intellectual histories and traditions that offer generative insights for contemporary indigenous peoples. Thus, my research recuperates case studies of historical precedents for technological expertise in American Indian communities and establishes new indigenous intellectual trade routes within dig/viz rhetoric inquiry in an effort to restore technological agency to contemporary American Indian communities. Please remember, dear reader, that this is a hypertext, one that simultaneously further opens the scope of our understanding of American Indian rhetorics yet closes off some connections to intellectual routes worth walking. I have only told a few stories of American Indian rhetorics and described just a few features of them in this hypertext, and I can include only but a few more here. Perhaps walking the paths that have led me to 38 these inquiry junctures might better describe how intellectual alliances transpire. In Chapter 2, I develop a decolonial theory and methodology—and justify corresponding research methods—for imagining, mapping out and deploying a decolonial research project that seeks to dismantle colonial imperatives structured into language, rhetoric, literacy, technology, history and theory. Specifically, I build a framework for self- deterrnination and social justice that interrogates how the Western paradigm of progress is a colonial construct that continues to influence how others perceive American Indians in relation to technology and how our discipline is enamored with "new media. " Essentially, this chapter clears the path for my three case studies—each of which offer their own intellectual trade routes but also have tributaries that occasionally wander off and re-connect with and cross paths with one another—that collectively serve to encourage intellectual transmigrations between Indian territory and Western dig/viz rhetoric. Chapter 3 offers the first two case studies. The first case recuperates hypertext theory through studying the indigenous material rhetoric and technology of wampum belts, thereby demonstrating that hypertext theory is still viable to new media studies and applicable to AIS and American Indian communities. With support from Tehanetorens, Wallace, Williams, and other wampum historians, this chapter investigates the hypertextual qualities of wampum belts and ultimately situates American Indians as the earliest skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals known to us in the Americas, and in doing so re-visions the history of digital rhetoric and hypertext theory and practice. In a brief second case study, Chapter 3 builds upon this revisioning of digital rhetoric history by positioning American Indian pictographs and petroglyphs as early dig/viz rhetorics in 39 the Americas that offer us pre- and post-contact information ecologies that predate our current course of study that often places the computer and the Internet at the center of our dig/viz rhetorical inquiry. Chapter 4 offers the final case study of American Indian technological expertise and examines the differences and similarities in the ways Western and indigenous technologies are taken up by American Indian communities. Specifically, this chapter looks at how American Indians are increasingly employing blogs in a variety of ways, such as telling stories, writing news articles, reporting on tribal services, sharing tribal histories, crafting poetry, networking with other American Indians, posting information about powwows and other gatherings, providing language preservation and revitalization resources, advocating political and activist agendas, as well as exhibiting arts, crafts, music, and performances. In addition to case studies of American Indian blogs and interviews with NDN bloggers, this dissertation discusses some of the potential promises and perils of this public sphere writing technology—from community building and cultural preservation and continuation, to cultural appropriation, intellectual property issues, and dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty—and generates ways for American Indian bloggers and non-Indian allies to discuss, address, and reconcile the possible risks related to participating in the blogosphere. Finally, this chapter will address how contemporary American Indian bloggers are contributing to rich intellectual traditions in both R/W and AIS, the ethical and intellectual implications for both disciplines, and how to foster other trans-disciplinary work that will result in a more diverse and widespread dig/viz cultural rhetorical scholarship collective. 40 Finally, Chapter 5 will translate the ethical, intellectual, and disciplinary implications of my research to the classroom. Because it is common for American Indians—and other students from underrepresented and disenfranchised groups—to encounter dig/viz stories that misrepresent their identities in multiple ways based on non- Native nostalgic fictions, Chapter 5 builds upon the previous case studies in American Indian dig/viz rhetorics to offer a decolonial change in our curricula and pedagogy that works toward digital cultural rhetorics and visual cultural rhetorics inquiry. I propose specific course outlines and assignments that incorporate a host of dig/viz cultural rhetorics to promote the study of rhetoric in relation to the intersection of such interpretive categories as nationality, race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability, and gender and to reconceptualize various emerging interdisciplinary dig/viz cultural rhetorics as core knowledges and projects for scholars, teachers and students rather than as marginal add-ons to a traditional humanistic education. Ultimately, this final chapter provides a hypertextual map of the dynamic territory of dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry and pedagogy by establishing trading posts for alliance building between AIS and R/W, professional communication, and new media studies and forging tributaries toward future rhetorical listening, engagements, and actions that acknowledge, respect, and value the diversity of knowledge-production across cultures. 41 CHAPTER 2: TOWARD A DECOLONIAL THEORY & METHODOLOGY "Colonized peoples have been compelled to define what it means to be human because there is a deep understanding of what it has meant to be considered not fully human, to be savage." Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies "Throughout the world indigenous populations have had to reckon with the forces of "progress" and "national" unification. The results have been both destructive and inventive. Many traditions, languages, cosmologies, and values are lost, some literally murdered; but much has simultaneously been invented and revived in complex, oppositional contexts. If the victims of progress and empire are weak, they are seldom passive." James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture While Chapter I imagined the intellectual trade routes I will be forging in this dissertation, this chapter attempts to describe the process involved in clearing the paths. To be precise, this chapter draws upon the work of contemporary decolonial 42 methodologists (Tuhiwai Smith; Perez; Mignolo) in order to describe, build, and promote a decolonial research methodology (which will also later inform which will later inform the decolonial pedagogy proposed and outlined in my last chapter) for dig/viz rhetorical studies. By decolonial methodology, I mean an epistemological and ontological approach to: l) exploring how we have individually and collectively been affected by and complicit in the legacy of colonialism in the Americas; and 2) interrogating how the effects and complicities play out in our rhetoric and research practices, theories, and scholarship. Specific to this study, decolonial methodology is the interface through which I am forging intellectual trade routes and alliances that afford scholarly conversations about and with American Indian intellectual traditions of technological theory and practice within a few research communities: W and professional communication communities that often position the "new media" movement as the most influential in contemporary dig/viz rhetoric inquiry and AIS communities that are often critical of Western new media and paradigms of progress, do little scholarship on American Indian technological theories and practices, and teem with intellectuals who negotiate a host of technologies in their everyday lives but nonetheless dub themselves as technologically challenged. Consequently, although a goal of this decolonial research methodology is to destabilize and resist reproducing hegemonic Western domains of thought and knowledge-power structures that ignore, silence, cover up, or negate the technological expertise of non-Westem cultures, this articulation of a decolonial methodology also resists serving as an essentializing anti-European critique. Instead, this chapter aims to engage Western dig/viz rhetoric studies and "alternative" American dig/viz cultural rhetorics—specifically American Indian rhetorics of technology—in critical dialogue, 43 thereby extending the research of American Indian rhetoric scholars (e. g., Powell; Villanueva; Lyons; Baca) working to decolonize the Western rhetorical canon and epistemology to dig/viz rhetoric studies. To be sure, this methodology attempts to offer more than exotic alternative counter- stories to Western stories of technological origins, pioneers and progress. Rather it seeks to forge productive, reciprocal, responsible, and ethical intellectual trade routes among American Indian and Western technological worldviews, practices, strategies and tactics in the hopes of modeling a way of achieving scholarly balance and justice among and across these worldviews in ways to do not colonize and re-colonize. Foundational to this goal is a critical engagement with the legacy of colonialism in rhetoric studies, as doing so makes us more cognizant of knowledge structures that allow for intellectual colonialism to persist and better positions us to be agents of decolonial change in our field. Thus, in this chapter I will foster this critical engagement by: 1) describing the historical and activist work of decolonial theories and methodologies; 2) building a decolonial methodology for studying and sharing the dig/viz rhetoric expertise of American Indians; 3) determining the methods best suited to facilitate this decolonial methodology and scope of study; and 4) defending and promoting this methodology in dig/viz rhetoric and AIS studies. A Historical Account of Decolonial Theories and Methodologies Since its emergence in the late 20th century, decolonial inquiry (and its corresponding interdisciplinary approach, decolonial theories and methodologies) has sought to interrogate the colonial powers and discourses still at play in the ways we continue to make sense of the world as well as the Western claims to the enterprise of 44 knowledge-making (from origin stories to production to delivery). Decolonial research aims to be culturally sensitive to, and appropriate for, indigenous communities in sharp contrast to traditional research methodologies that often assume a culture-free research environment from both the researcher's and "subject's point of view. Consequently, a decolonial methodology places such cultural influences at the forefront where subjectivities, positionality, and power relations are interrogated, and research participants are partners in our intellectual endeavors. Although the decolonial methodology built and employed in this dissertation is unique to W studies, decolonial theories and methodologies are more common in AIS, indigenous studies, Chicano/a studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, queer studies, cultural studies, education, and history. Consequently, there is a rich tradition of decolonial theory, methodology, and practice from with to draw. Contemporary interest in decolonial methodology theory and practices are heavily influenced by Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (N gati Awa/Ngati Porou) pivotal work, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). According to Tuhiwai Smith, indigenous education specialist, a decolonizing methodology is a "framework of self—determination, decolonization, and social justice" (p. 4) that privileges the indigenous presence, perspectives, and continuing existence, (p. 6) and seeks to dismantle "imperialism's dehumanizing imperatives which were structured into language, the economy, social relations and the cultural life of colonial societies" (p. 26). Although specifically written in context of the Maori of New Zealand, Tuhiwai Smith's work is potentially beneficial for all indigenous peoples—and from which both colonizers and the colonized can learn. She articulates research practices specific to 45 understanding the struggle of survival for indigenous communities and the role of colonialism in the current living conditions of these communities. Further, Tuhiwai Smith warns us against limiting decolonizing research practices to only deconstructing dominant theories and revealing underlying texts, as such moves do not actually improve the political and social conditions in which indigenous people live or prevent them from dying. Consequently, Tuhiwai Smith calls readers to be activists in their research methodologies and resist the reinscription and facilitation of academic and institutional research policies that support, reinforce, and/or legitimize unbalanced and unjust power relations—which ultimately serve cultural, intellectual, and economic imperialism. Emma Pe'rez—Chicana historian, feminist theorist, creative writer—is another key contributor to decolonial studies. At the same time that Tuhiwai Smith was shaping her decolonizing methodology theory, Pe’rez (1999) was practicing one by interrogating why and how Chicanas have been written into, erased from, and silenced by history. In The Decolonial Imaginary, Pérez writes in resistance to the colonial imaginary and crafts her own decolonial imaginary—"a political project for reconceptualizing histories” (p. 4)——where she arranges events in ways that suit her and asserts arguments she excavates from historical texts to piece together a Chicana history in which she can believe. Thus, Pérez demonstrates a decolonial methodology by example, as she theorizes a Chicano/a historical consciousness that provides “an alternative model for conceptualizing a subaltern and self-consciously oppositional Chicano/a historiography that can account for issues of the modern and postmodern, immigrations and diasporas, and genders and sexuality” (p. 4). Such a theory can help us to imagine a future that decolonizes "Otherness" (p. 6), but to do so, Pérez asserts that we must learn “to retool, to shift 46 meanings and read against the grain” (p. xvii). Fundamentally, Perez demonstrates this re-tooling as she simultaneously critiques the limitations of existing Chicana historiographies and offers an alternative to essentializing narratives of the Chicana experience by re-reading genealogies of Chicana identities and sexualities as counter- hegemonic responses to dominant cultures. Thus, by reading against the grain and shifting meaning, Pérez positions Chicana historiographies as critical to the interrogation of desire as a medium for social change, for revolution, and for a postcolonial type of future (p. xix). Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) Borderlands/La F rontera also challenges the colonial imaginary by resisting colonial binaries that impose either/or positionality and instead writes from the both/and positioning vis-a-vis Mexican and American, a speaker of English, Spanish, and Nahuatl, a migrant worker and student, a poet and a rhetor, Chicana and queer, and more. She calls this identity mestiza, "a hybridity, a mixture, 1 because I live in this liminal state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge, in between symbology systems. This liminal borderland, terrain or passageway, this interface, is what I call Nepantla" (p. 1538). But instead of recapitulating the tragic "caught in between two worlds" post-contact stereotype often associated with mixed-bloods, she demonstrates the promises of occupying this hybrid identity, where she can negotiate the distance between several discourse communities with several rhetorical tactics: she speaks 5 languages, thus her "border tongue;" she can code switch; and she recognizes the connections between place, language, and identity. Thus, she lives in a state of mestiza consciousness, where she enjoys a synergy between cultures (p. 1590) and the flexibility of a shape shifter (p. 1592)—-and she acts as "an 47 agent of transformation, able to modify and shape primordial energy" (p. 1596). Ultimately, then, mestiza consciousness is a site for both local and global decolonial resistance, activism and agency as it requires the straddling of two or more cultures and the dismantling of colonial paradigms and allows for individual, contextualized responses to the colonization of specific indigenous peoples and their minds, languages, and culture via her contextualized border theory analysis as well as large-scale redresses of colonial influences on the perceptions of literacy, language, culture and the relationships therein. Finally, Walter Mignolo (1995; 2000; 2003; 2007; forthcoming), a Latin American/Argentinean (with Italian ancestry) theorist interested in past, present, and future global coloniality, has also contributed to the decolonial intellectual tradition by reconceptualizing histories of literacies, languages and cultures. Dedicated to unveiling the underlying logic of coloniality, "a logic of oppression, of expendability of life;— 'human and nature'—hidden under the Salvationist rhetoric of modernity,"39 Mignolo is also devoted to supporting, facilitating, and starting decolonial projects worldwide that collectively call for a "shift toward a future of dialogue toward pluri-versality, rather than the monologue toward uni-versality." Mignolo's intellectual labor on this front most notably began with his groundbreaking text, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995). In this study, he complicates the typical distinction between the Renaissance and early modernity, and demonstrates how the darker side of the Renaissance underlines "the rebirth of the classical tradition as justification of colonial expansion and the emergence of a genealogy (the early colonial period) that announces the colonial and postcolonial" (p. vii). In response, Mignolo exposes the colonization of Mexican (or Anahuac) languages, memories, and space that 48 first transpired in the 16‘h century"0 and inscribes "the darker side of the Renaissance" into the "silenced space of Spanish/Latin America and Amerindian contributions to universal history and to postcolonial theorizing" (p. xi). Mignolo accomplishes this inscription by tracing how writing and the politics of language implemented by the Crown, friars, and missionaries was used against Amerindians to assimilate them and convert them to Christianity vis-a-vis hegemonic ties between alphabetic writing and civility through the context of the colonization of Amerindian languages (primarily Nahuatl) by Spanish/Castilian. He thus demonstrates how Western literacy was spread by combining grammar, orthography, laws, and edicts with teachings on how to be a good Christian, all of which suppressed the colonized self- descriptions or led to the colonizers' appropriation and integration of Amerindians' self- descriptions into their own. Further, he ties the celebration of the letter and book to a warranty of truth and Western assumptions about the necessary relationship between alphabetic literacy and history, essentially dismissing the value of oral traditions and relegating peoples without alphabetic writing as peoples without history. Thus, despite Vico's and the Ad Herreniurn's notion of memoria as the recording of memory via visual mind mapping (imagines), and the fact that Amerindians employed such means of memory in conjunction with oral traditions (not to mention visual and material rhetorics)“, Amerindian history and memory was colonized as well. Memory was not only colonized via the re-writing of Amerindian histories by Europeans, but also via the ways in which the Europeans privileged Western ways of organizing knowledge (e.g., Western chronology, genres, categories, etc.) over Amerindian ways of organizing knowledge, which diminished the capacity for a 49 coexistence of languages, literacies, memories, and space and instead positioned Western truth as the only truth that mattered by perpetuating the notion that what is different is wrong or less than. Therefore, "The colonization of space and the colonization of languages mean that dominant views of languages, of recording the past, and of charting territories become synonymous with the real by obstructing possible alternatives" (p. 5). A Decolonial Methodology for Digital and Visual Rhetorical Studies Although none of the aforementioned work directly discusses decolonial methodologies for studying technology, much less dig/viz rhetoric inquiry, Tuhiwai Smith, Perez, Anzaldt’ra, and Mignolo have been critical to my imagining of a decolonial theory, methodology, and practice for dig/viz rhetoric studies—along with the reason as to why a doctoral student in R/W might be reading these theorists. To explain, with dual doctoral concentrations in cultural rhetorics and digital rhetoric & professional writing, I am the beneficiary of an amazing and distinctive set of intellectual experiences. Engaging in a program of study that included taking coursework such as Danielle DeVoss's Visual Rhetoric for Professional Writing42 and Digital Rhetoric"3 and Jeff Grabill's Professional Writing Theory & Research“ in tandem with courses like Malea Powell's American Cultural Rhetorics: Theory & Methodology45 and American Indian Intellectual Traditions"6 cleared a space for me to more deeply consider the complex and dynamic relationships between rhetoric, writing, culture, technology, and identity. Further, I am able to situate these relationships within historical and contemporary treatments of rhetoric studies writ large, given my enrollment in Jim Porter's The History of Rhetoric and Malea Powell's Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric. 50 These intellectual experiences afforded me the opportunity to work on variety projects located within the interstices of cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and technical communication, including (but not limited to) analyses of the persistence of a digital divide in Indian country, existing and potential definitions of digital rhetoric, the associations non-Natives make between color red as well as the function and value of red in Native communities, what American Indian case law and history can tell us about intellectual property issues, how cultural rhetorics (e. g. indigenous environmental activist rhetorics) might inform usability research and risk communication, and the relationships between visual and material rhetorics, material rhetorics and digital rhetorics (and hypertext theory)—and between material rhetorics and the canon of memory—via wampum belts. As a result of this inquiry, I began to imagine a decolonial dissertation study: an investigation into how American Indians negotiate memory, identity (both individual and community), literacies, knowledge work, power, and agency though digital, visual, and material media. Ultimately, this decolonial dissertation could not have been imagined without the theorists, scholars, and professors who have cleared paths to allow for intellectual trade routes to be forged across the seemingly disparate fields of dig/viz rhetoric and AIS. It is at this intellectual intersection that I come to understand decolonial theorists and methodologists have quite a bit to tell us about dig/viz rhetoric research. Just as rhetoric is both enabled and constrained by colonialism, so is dig/viz rhetoric. Just as colonialism is highly rhetorical, so is dig/viz colonialism—and decolonial theory for that matter. Ultimately, just as rhetoric and decolonial theory scholars are interrogating the colonization of cultures, languages, literacies, memories, histories, identities, bodies, 51 places, and spaces, dig/viz rhetoric studies has a responsibility to interrogate how this colonization plays out in dig/viz spaces. Given this imperative, this decolonial methodology puts into conversation dominant notions of . technology and technological literacy, what is considered technological outside of traditional Western notions, and what counts as technological literacy in Figure 2.1: Gast's American Progress (1872) relation to and in contrast to these Western notions. This conversation begins with a critical view of manifest destiny, which continues to reinscribe the frontier metaphor to signify what counts as technological trailblazing and equate progress with "new" technology. Gast's (1872) portrait of American Progress is a pictorial, allegorical representation of manifest destiny, and through its colonial visual rhetoric, it (re)establishes how manifest destiny and its love of progress is relevant to civilization, technology, literacy, and religion. To explain, the portrait illustrates that progress is the evidence of civilization and was ordained by God. Thus, God blesses only the invaders of the Americas with the cutting edge of technology and all others are left in the darkness of technological illiteracy and primitivity. Although this visual rendition of manifest destiny also alludes to the Western desire to dominate nature with the use of technology, this will not be the topic of 52 discussion here (despite the contradiction it exposes in what the settlers considered to be civilized vs. uncivilized). I don't offer this decolonial analysis as only a critique of how colonial visual rhetoric has historically fixed American Indians as primitives outside of (post)modem and technological cultures, but also as a demonstration as to how technological assemblages are perceived and produced differently in different cultural contexts. One of the most disconcerting issues I take with this visual depiction besides its continued pervasiveness in our society within the mindset of dominant culture is its insidious proliferation within the mindsets of American Indians as well (as well as other people of color). Many Indians dub themselves as technologically illiterate and fearful. Not that Indians don't have a right to be fearful of technology given the legacy of how certain technologies have been used against to destroy them physically, psychologically, and emotionally, but this decolonial approach to technology refuses to allow this legacy to affect Indians intellectually. After all, indigenous peoples of the Americas have been technologically literate, proficient, creative, and ingenious for at least thousands of years, given the expert interaction with a variety of technologies in the complex production of beadwork, birch bark scrolls & canoes, blow guns, inscription tools, quill work, dolls, regalia, drums, flutes, codices, and more. Given this imperative, I offer a decolonial research "framework of self- determination, decolonization, and social justice" (Tuhiwai Smith, p. 4) in dig/viz rhetoric studies. This methodology aims to de-colonize some of the ways in which our scholarly communities think (and/or not think) about the relationships between colonialism, race, rhetoric, literacy, and technology. Specifically, this decolonial research 53 methodology is concerned with learning and healing from the historical, rhetorical, intellectual trauma experienced by indigenous peoples in the Americas as a direct result of empire-building and some of its implications for ethical and democratic knowledge production in dig/viz rhetoric studies. To be sure, it is an futile task to present, much less employ, all potential aims of a decolonial methodologies, but the ways in which my research in this dissertation moment harness the productive power of decolonial knowledge work is as follows. Among other things, the decolonial methodology built and employed in this dissertation is informed by: I Valuing and privileging indigenous discourses, practices, and knowledges I Understanding everyday practices of American Indians as theoretical and epistemological I Regarding American Indian narratives as epistemological and rhetorical I Considering “Culture” & culture as rhetorical I Interrogating the differences between American Indians writing and being written I Challenging binaries, "accepted" definitions, and the tyranny of the majority in dig/viz rhetoric inquiry I Destabilizing hegemonic structures of knowledge production and consumption by juxtaposing disparate concepts from disparate mindsets (in this context, Western and American Indian worldviews) in order to question the established notions of what counts as digital rhetoric, hypertext, hypermedia, and technological literacy I Dismantling the imperialism's dehumanizing imperatives that have been structured into the language, economy, and consumption of dig/viz 54 representations of Indianness Countering the dismissal of, lack of engagement with, and/or consumption of American Indian knowledges in dig/viz spaces Addressing oppressive discourses toward and about American Indian knowledges Exposing the fraud of neutrality toward issues critical to indigenous survival Confronting complex American Indian identity constructs and subjectivities regarding relationships to and with technology, broadly and variously defined Recuperating pre-colonial American Indian technological knowledge systems and put into dialogue with recent and current, paracolonial indigenous technological knowledge systems—as well as Western knowledge systems Playing with the linearity of time and question origin stories Supporting intellectual and rhetorical sovereignty for American Indians in dig/viz spaces Employing trickster discourse, or what Gerald Vizenor (2005) explains as "a comic discourse and language game" (p. x), a trick that aims "to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical" (p. xi)."7 To realize these research ideologies and tactics in dig/viz rhetoric studies, this decolonial methodology reads against the grain in an effort to engage in intellectual transmigrations across and between Western and indigenous rhetorical scholarship (that can and do inform dig/viz rhetoric studies) and to re-tool and shift the ways in which we typically understand textuality and digitality. Intellectual Transmigrations. Decolonial theories and methodologies support the co-existence of cultures, languages, literacies, memories, histories, places, and spaces— 55 and encourage respectful and reciprocal dialogue between and across them. Although some may liken such intellectual spaces to Pratt's (1992) "contact zones," or “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (p. 4), contact zones do not require respect or reciprocity. In fact, Pratt relates contact zones to “the colonial frontier” (p. 6), as she describes the travel writer, often a white male, with imperial eyes who passively looks out on a landscape and possess it, regardless of his not-so-innocent “anti- conquest” stance (p. 7). After all, it is the writer who assigns value to the culture being observed, via rhetorical choices in the write up of his experiences. As Pratt posits, the culture of the visited community only gets ‘made’ for real after the traveler (or other survivor) returns home, and brings it into being through texts: a name on a map, a report to the Royal Geographical Society, the Foreign Office, the London Mission Society, a diary, a lecture, a travel book. Here is language charged with making the world in the most singlehanded way, and with high stakes. (p. 204) Although Pratt does illustrate how some writers are more concerned with reciprocity with the culture they are studying than others, nonetheless Pratt's "contact zones" is oft cited in our discipline as a way of promoting "safe spaces" for students from disparate cultures to interact, when the legacy of the contact zones on the colonial frontier substantiates that such zones were often not safe, respectful, or reciprocal for indigenous peoples of the Americas. 56 Consequently, I suggest that we look beyond "contact zones" to "transmigrations" for decolonial work that is more dedicated to respectful and reciprocal dialogue between and across culturally-specific dig/viz rhetorics. This transmigrations approach is inspired by James Thomas Stevens (Mohawk) and Caroline Sinavaiana's (Samoan) Mohawk/Samoa Transmigrations (2005), a book resulting from a collaborative creative project, where these poets engage in cross cultural exchanges by first translating songs from their cultures and then writing poems in response. Next, they write poems in response to each other's poems. Stevens also designed pen and ink drawings to illustrate each tri-phased poetic dialogue: from song, to poem, to response poem. These illustrations are relevant to the poem topics and are labeled in its corresponding native language. Songs about canoes, mosquitoes, cornbread, thunderers, rats, fimerals, drums, wampum pigeons, and sarongs—as well as the responses to them—give each artist in the conversation and deeper understanding of the song and poem author's culture and a glimpse into ways in which each other's culture make sense of the world. This is a unique project, in that these poets demonstrate a decolonial methodology worth practicing in our profession, from research to practice. Thus, instead of the frequently cited "contact zones" and frequently tokenized "border crossing," where violent interactions may occur, transmigrations require rhetorical listening and respectful dialogue. In this text, Stevens and Sinavaiana model the non-hierarchical conversations that could take place between and across cultural rhetorics as well. After all, for Sinavaiana, the project became a "metadialogue with 'messages' streaming inward and outward, individually and collectively, temporally and spatially; in short: call and response" (pp. 12-13). Thus, this decolonial theory and methodology asks researchers, 57 research partners, and scholars in dig/viz rhetoric studies to responsibly participate in such a call and response with a plurality and variety of dig/viz rhetorics in cultural contexts rather than merely consuming the intellectual labor of Others. Ultimately, I posit that a commitment to this call and response approach to dig/viz rhetoric studies will result in forging dig/viz intellectual transmigrations across and between Western and indigenous rhetorics. After all, it is my participation in this call and response process that has led me to forge intellectual alliances between dig/viz rhetoric and AIS scholarship. To be clear, among other intellectual alliances, this process has allowed me to simultaneously respond to: Tuhiwai Smith's call to resist the reinscription and facilitation of academic and institutional research policies that support, endorse, reinforce, and/or legitimize unbalanced and unjust power relations—which ultimately serve cultural, intellectual, and economic imperialism—in our research methodologies; and Selfe & Selfe's (1994) call for R/W scholars who engage and teach with technology to be more cognizant of the colonial interfaces and technologies we may inadvertently that re-inscribe cultural, intellectual, and/or economic imperialism. Thus, this decolonial methodology has the potential to heal social and intellectual relations fractured due to the legacy of colonialism, provide a framework from which both AIS and dig/viz rhetoric scholars can learn, and consequently promote intellectual alliances between these disciplines. Texts. Textuality, and Technology Re-tooled. Because colonialism has limited our understanding of texts, textuality, and technology, this decolonial methodology works to re-tool our accepted definitions and subsequent perceptions of these terms. Given my departure from the prescribed definitions, my "reading" of these aforementioned 58 American Indian "texts" may at first glance appear unconventional to many readers. While many in dig/viz rhetoric recognize blogs as worth studying as contemporary, rhetorical and digital (hyper)texts, wampum belts as well as pictographs and petroglyphs are not commonly known for their rhetorical agency. Although Malea Powell (2005) recovers wampum belts (and other beadwork) as material rhetorics made of story, and Damian Baca (2006) situates Aztec codices as a pre-contact rhetorical tradition that may pre-date the Western rhetorical tradition that places its origins in Greece and Rome, those unfamiliar with their work may not realize the textual, readable features of material rhetorics that can be studied anthropologically, aesthetically, rhetorically, and theoretically, nor the narratives employed to craft the material rhetorics that influence public action or their ability to move through time and space (not fixed) via memory and delivery in particular. Building on this foundational work, this dissertation not only recognizes blogs as contemporary dig/viz rhetorics, but also situates pre- and post-contact wampum belts, petroglyphs, and pictographs within this intellectual tradition of American Indian hypertextual and multimedia theory and practice. To do so, although there are certainly "teXtual" and textile features of each rhetoric in this study, I expand typical relegations of American Indian rhetorics as "text"-based to the use of sign technologies by the peoples indigenous to the Americas to influence public action. Such a move, then, challenges current definitions of digital rhetoric as result of human-computer interaction and instead suggests that computers are simply a technological interface for encoding information, not the only interface. To explain, digital refers to our fingers, our digits, one of the primary ways (along with our ears and 59 eyes) through which we make sense of the world and with which we write into the world. All writing is digital, digitalis in Latin, which means “of or relating to the fingers or toes" or a "coding of information.” Given this, we should be cognizant of other human- technology interactions48 other than Western hypertexts known to us though history executed with the use of fingers (or other body parts that serve to function similarly to our digitalis) and codes, resulting in digitally encoded information—from the Mesopotamian Cuneiform, to the Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, Chinese logograms, Aztec codices, to American Indian wampum belts, pictographs and petroglyphs. Finally, the way in which I treat these rhetorics as contiguous American Indian traditions of everyday technological practices evidences how this dissertation challenges Western notions of linear timelines and claims to the origins of hypertext, multimedia, dig/viz rhetoric, and "new" media theory and practices. As a result, this re-tooling suggests that a steadfast persistence in preserving an official history of hypertext, multimedia, dig/viz rhetoric and contemporary Western fixations on "new media" merely parallel and reinforce paradigms of progress and manifest destiny that ignore, twist, and silence non-Westem histories of technological experience and expertise. However, this does not mean that I in turn ignore, twist, or silence Western histories of technological experience and expertise. In contrast, in the spirit of forging intellectual trade routes, this dissertation aims to engage in an intellectual interweave of Western and American Indian dig/viz rhetorics in an effort to call for and encourage future scholarly dig/viz rhetoric interweavings and transmigrations. Methods to Support a Decolonial Methodology for Digital and Visual Rhetorical Studies To support this methodology, my research methods must coincide with and work to 60 facilitate such ambitious goals and claims. In brief, this dissertation uses a combination of both primary and secondary research methods, including: interviews of American Indian technologists regarding their technological use; historiography and archival research into the "official history" of hypertext theory and pre- and post- contact production and uses of wampum, pictographs, and petroglyphs; rhetorical analyses of Western hypertext theory, wampum, pictographs/petroglyphs, and American Indian blogs; literature reviews on the legacy of colonialism on rhetoric studies, education, pedagogy, and visual and digital representations of Indianness and technological expertise. This multi—method approach allows for: the constellation of contemporary and historiographical work pertinent to both Western and American Indian technologies and rhetorics; the studying of the relationships between older and newer and Western and indigenous technologies; and the studying of the rhetorical work and relationships therein between American Indian "traditional" storytelling practices and dig/viz American Indian rhetorics. Furthermore, my methods for write up resist, and thereby transcend, the normalizing gaze and order of Western culture. For one, by weaving together and juxtaposing Western and indigenous stories of technological origins and expertise, I foreground the understanding of all stories as hypertextual and narrative as epistemological and thus advocate for a deep commitment to responsibly interrogating the cultural contexts in which these hypertextual stories are told. Further, this dissertation rearranges "official" orders for understanding dig/viz rhet. For example, in Chapter 3, I excavate historical texts, draw upon case studies of wampum belt and pictography/petroglyph technologies, and arrange events in way that interjects, values, and respects indigenous knowledges and provides me with a theory of hypertextuality 61 and digital rhetoric in which I and others can believe, think, and contribute. In chapter 4, I share the interview responses of several prominent American Indian bloggers, build case studies of bloggers and their blogs, consider those bloggers to be experts in blogging theory and practice, and constellate their theories and practices of blogging with other American Indian rhetorical theories and practices and Western theories and practices of blogging. Finally, through literature reviews, Chapter 5 braids together the promises of critical pedagogy and Red pedagogy to propose a decolonial pedagogy that builds upon cultural rhetorics inquiry and decolonial theories and research methodologies. Consequently, what results is a hypertext of decolonial course proposals, designs, projects, assignments, and discussions suitable for undergraduate and graduate AIS and R/W programs. (See each individual chapter for more on the specific methods employed therein.) In Defense of Decolonial Theories and Methodologies Decolonial methodologies interrogate issues at the interstices of writing, history, and theory, and consequently have to varying extents dialogued with, paralleled, and been shaped by poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, as well as cultural studies and theory. Because these approaches are more familiar to—and consequently valued among many in—our disciplines, this portion of this chapter explains the connects, folds, and disconnects between decolonial theory and poststructuralist, postmodernist, and cultural studies theory in an effort to not only defend decolonial theory's suitability to R/W and AIS but also to illuminate existing and inspire future intellectual trade routes worth forging across and between them. Poststructuralist Theog. To explain, poststructuralism also subscribes to the view 62 that meaning is inseparable from the culture(s) in which it is produced and received, acknowledges the subjugation of knowledges critical of and divergent from dominant Western thought and culture, critiques the underlying assumptions of Western norms, and rejects claims to absolute origins and truths and singular, cohesive notions of self identification and perception. While Foucault (1969) posits that history has been based on the continuity of Western ideas, decolonial studies posits that so has the history of our colonialism. Like Foucault's assessment that "Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogenous manifestations of a single mind or of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn development of a science striving to exist and to reach completion at the very outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions" (p. 4), a decolonial theorist seeks to uncover, recover, and add to the interruptions emerging from the cracks and fissures of the monolithic structure of colonialism and colonial rhetoric. Postmodern Theg. Similar to poststructuralism's dissatisfaction with and critique of structuralism, and decolonial studies' dissatisfaction with and critique of colonialism, postmodernist theory is a response to the discontent with modernist thought. Such postmodern thought, although in alignment with some poststructuralist thought, was first defined by Lyotard (1979), in The Postmodern Condition, as "incredulity toward metanarratives" employed to prescribe, legitimize and perpetuate universal values and knowledges. Lyotard discusses the pragmatics of narrative knowledge and argues its value in all forms of meaning-making, including scientific knowledge: "[N]arratives allow the society in which they are told, on the one hand, to define its criteria of 63 competence and, on the other, to evaluate according to those criteria what is performed or can be performed within it, " lend themselves to "a great variety of language games," are "performed not only by the speaker, but also by the listener, as well as by the third party referred to[,]" and has an effect on time through its rhythm and meter (pp. 18-21). Thus, narratives require a "know how," a "knowing how to speak," and a "knowing how to hear"——all "through which the community's relationship to itself and its environment is played out. What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond" (p. 21). Ultimately, then, Lyotard's understanding that even scientists, like all other knowledge workers, are before anything else people who tell stories (p. 60), is in alignment with both Cherokee novelist Thomas King's assertion that all we really are, are storytellers and made of stories and decolonial approaches to theory that recognize stories as theoretical ways of making sense of the world. Consequently, instead of meta—narratives and universal knowledges, both decolonial and postmodern theorists promote a multiplicity of narratives that are only temporarily bound by time, space, and language games. As Lyotard explains, "We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goal of the system, yet the system tolerates it. This bears witness to the existence of another goal within the system: knowledge of language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for their rules and effects" (p. 66). This position of skepticism toward falsely imposed unified, hegemonic metanarrative structures has led both decolonial and postmodern theorists to reject the prescriptive linearity, temporal order, forms, and categories of metanarratives and have played with genre, form, style, and language—through trickster rhetoric for decolonial theorists and via petit récits 64 (mini-narratives) for postmodern theorists. With regards to visual rhetoric, both decolonial and postmodern theorists are critical of Western media displays. For example, Baudrillard (1981) added to postmodernist skepticism by exposing the images produced by mass media as simulations of and replacements to reality. Instead, Baudrillard posits that hyperrealities reign, and the subsequent proliferation of these reproductions in turn intensifies the desire for the "authentic original" which is in fact based on simulacrum. Such postmodern thought has been extended and contextualized by Anishnaabe decolonial theorist Gerald Vizenor. In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999), Vizenor characterizes the dominant use of simulated and New Age American Indian imagery (e.g. "noble " H savage, shamans," etc.) in mass media as evidence of a "nostalgia" for an imagined, hyperreal, pre-Industrial, pre-European conquest America, but the irony of this move is that the preoccupation with and consumption of simulated American Indian imagery and spirituality encourages them to simultaneously buy into the nostalgia and ignore real indigenous peoples and the reality of their contemporary cultures and even dismiss such cultures as "inauthentic" or "unreal." Thus, Vizenor calls for work by and for post-Indian warriors and a deeper understanding of the complexities of Indian identity and spirituality in postmodern culture in support of post-Indian survivance (survival + resistance). Cultural Studies Theory. Besides poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, cultural studies and theory has served as an ally to some decolonial theory as well, with its attention to specific and local everyday cultural knowledges and practices and the relationships between these culturally-saturated local knowledges and practices and economics, politics, hegemony, and agency. Further, like cultural theory, decolonial 65 theory acknowledges the power of speaking for and representing Other—not to mention the power of appraisal when choosing which stories and artifacts to include/discard, and the power of categorization, arrangement and description within the subjective narratives and knowledge structures that interpret often-times decontextualized cultures on display (alphabetically and visually). For example, while not specifically promoting decolonial research methodologies, James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988), a collection essays on 20th century ethnography, literature, and art, critiques typical anthropological research practices, in particular the legacy of the modern ethnography of "participant observers" and "native informants," its reliance on collecting and classifying cultures supposedly in an effort to "save" them from vanishing and/or preserve some sense of "authenticity," and its common decontextualized and displaced discussions and exhibitions of the identities and artifacts of said cultures. He challenges the notion of ethnographic "truth" and "authority" and instead positions ethnographic texts as "orchestrations of multivocal exchanges occurring in politically charged situations . . . [where the] subjectivities produced in these often unequal exchanges—whether of 'natives' or of visiting participant observers—are constructed domains of truth, serious fictions" (p. 10). Ultimately, then, Clifford draws heavily on Edward Said to assert that it is becoming more difficult to maintain a researcher position of cultural "outsider" or "insider" subjectivity in our increasingly interconnected, but not unified, world where culture and identity are "inventive and mobile" (p. 15) but do not collectively make a monoculture. Consequently, he positions his own work as "a spliced ethnographic object, an incomplete collection" (p. 13) that "surveys several hybrid and subversive forms of cultural representation . . . that prefigure an inventive future" (p. 17) with the goal to 66 "open space for cultural features, for the recognition of emergence [, which] requires a critique of deep-seated Western habits of mind and systems of value . . . in service of a unified vision of history—to relegate exotic peoples and objects to the collective past" (pp. 15-16). Such a space is also promoted by cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau (1984), who is interested in everyday practices of those who tactically intervene in structures and institutions to which hegemonic, strategic power has historically been ascribed, where the environments are circumscribed to control the distribution of meaning. de Certeau demonstrates the how strategic power plays out via the "elite", who typically perceive themselves as producers and dub common people as passive consumers, and how disciplines promote specialists to expert status but at the same time give no authority to those with know-how and make their work invisible "by eliminating the ordinary use of language (everyday language) . . . [and making] it possible for science to produce and master an artificial language" (p. 10). Nonetheless, he more concerned with how those outside immediate loci of power learn the foreign terrain on which they intend to intervene—as well as the laws that govern that terrain—before calculating their tactical actions, and he exhibits this via his cross-cultural analysis of the tactics employed by the indigenous people who resisted and subverted the Spanish colonial practices of exchange and behavior of the Spaniards, to workers who steal from and play on company time (la perruque), to students and other intellectuals who poach and subvert required and canonical texts prescribed by the government and promote alternative interpretations. Consequently, de Certeau promotes movement away from traditional notions of theory and focuses on the producer and product, and more so on how tactical consumption is a 67 form of production, and a science of the ordinary, or the study of everyday practices as theory. Further supporting his examination of the mechanics of power in The Practice of Everyday Life, and consequently a decolonial agenda, de Certeau's The Writing of History (1988) analyzes the practice of historiography and writing history. He posits that history is not a truthful, faithful record; instead, it is a practice of writing that itself constructs history, and thus such practices of historical writing and their theoretical, economic, and political underpinnings should be investigated to better question and understand content choices. de Certeau promotes an interrogation of the theoretical underpinnings of a text over the author's intent, and consequently a focus on the practice. Ultimately, de Certeau's collective work positions common, everyday people as agents for the writing and re-writing/righting of history and policy. After all, as de Certeau elucidates, "historians always create absences" (p. 288), which clears space for those who have been wronged, elided, or made invisible by the fictions manufactured by historians to make their absence present. This space, then, is open to decolonial theorists who have the agency to employ rhetorical tactics to simultaneously challenge unified histories and interject alternative histories of everyday practices. Summm. Thus, like poststructuralism is a response to structuralism, and postmodernism a response to modernism, decolonialism is a response to colonialism (both intentional and unintentional). However, decolonial theory and methodologies are distinct from postcolonial and neocolonial theory. To explain, decolonial theories and methodologies work to undo and rewrite some of the legacies of long-standing, local, on- going, para-colonial conditions, whereas postcolonial studies is somewhat bound to 68 theories about literature and film produced in ex-colonies of European rule (primarily Great Britain, France, and Spain) and neo—colonial work tends to limit its inquiry to examining new forms of colonialism (economically, educationally, environmentally, scientifically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally) subjected to former European colonies after gaining independence, with contemporary interest on the control of media representations in those ex-colonies. Thus, decolonial theorists in the Americas are uniquely situated to simultaneously draw from both of these fields of inquiry to better inform paracolonial theory, the study of the complexities, layers and folds of a multitude and variety of past and present local colonial experiences and cultures within one claimed country, a country which continues to colonize other locations of the world in various new and "traditional" ways. In summary, then, it is no surprise that decolonial theory and methodologies dialogue with these theories—as well as critical, radical, feminist and indigenous theories—if not just for the fact that each of these areas of study surfaced in the last half of the 20th century. And although by their very nature decolonial theories and methodologies resist categorization and definition, there are certain shared characteristics with how these aforementioned theories conduct complex knowledge work. And there is room for a variety of decolonial theories and methodologies to work in alliance—to find the dialogues among knowledge workers that serves to decolonize; search for new meaning in traditional language games; privilege local narratives that communicate local use, know-how, local discourse, local social bonds; actively and imaginatively seek out instabilities and anomalies in current theories; make the absent present; resist totalizing metanarratives in creative and productive ways. After all, as Lyotard posits: "Let us wage 69 a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name" (p. 81). Consequently, the sum of these similarities among and across the aforementioned theories does not a decolonial theory or methodology make. 0n the Benefits of T his Decolonial Theory and Methodology Although the decolonial methodology proposed in this chapter and employed in the subsequent chapters has been touted to benefit dig/viz rhet theory, the work of this methodology and corresponding theory has the potential to extend theories of technology, design, professional communication, and dig/viz rhet theory for both W and AIS. Theories of Technology and Design. Because this dissertation will contribute to the current dialogues located at the interstices of culture, technology, and design, I want to talk specifically about how it will do so. Specifically, my dissertation aims to rupture racial stereotypes and widely held theoretical and political assumptions by providing case studies on specific culturally-situated technological practices of a specific race, utilize a broader, more flexible, and more historically-situated definition of technology and considerations of technological theories and practices, thereby reflecting a larger history of technological design and use by people of color. Thus, I build upon the foundational research from Banks (2006) on the relationships between race, rhetoric, and technology, Deloria and Wildcat's (2001) inquiry into the differences between how indigenous and Western models of education shape the relationships American Indians have with science and technology, Ebo's (I998) cultural critique of race, class, and gender on the Internet, Gomez Per‘la's (1996) work on the "Chicano Intemeta," Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman's (2000) collection that interrogates race in cyberspace, to Nelson, Tu, and Hines (2001) 70 compilation of case studies that explore the relationships between race and technology and how people of color use technologies in their everyday lifes. For example, in the groundbreaking Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for a Higher Ground, Adam Banks' (2006) critiques the "whitinizing of cyberspace," or the "invisibility of people of color on the Net [that] has allowed White controlled and White-read publications like WIRED to simply elide questions of race" (p. 1). Banks goes on to discuss how this invisibility is ironic, given the sophisticated theories and tools Afiican Americans can offer the analysis of cyberculture and how postrnodernity was a reality for African Americans pre-postmodemism. He thus charges our discipline to better understand how "African Americans have always sought 'third way' answers to systematically racist exclusions, demanding full access to and participation in American society and its technologies, to ensure that not only black people but all Americans can participate as full partners" (p. 2) and interrogate our perceptions of the relationships between and across race, rhetoric, and technological advancement, access, theory, and literacy. Similarly, while Banks and Vizenor collectively and respectively posit that African Americans and American Indians have always been postmodern, I claim that despite persistent digital divide issues, American Indians have always already been hypertextual and multirnediated. Further, like Banks' "story of African Americans' pursuit of transformative access," which allows for the development and articulation of specific models and practices "that can provide excluded members of society access to systems of power and grounds on which those systems can be challenged and ultimately changed in meaningful ways" (p. 2), I seek to tell stories of American Indian transformative access to 71 technology and design theory and practices pre- and post-contact that will allow for revised perceptions and articulations of American Indian technological "advancements," access, theories, and literacies by Natives and non-Natives alike. Along with this rich technological history comes an intellectual tradition of American Indian design theories and practices. Extending the work of Heller (1994) and Lupton & Miller (1999), and others who tend to issues at the interstices of culture, symbology, and design outside of visual culture studies (which will be discussed in a latter section), I draw upon American Indian rhetorics of design as cases of culturally- situated design practices, such as the work of Craig Howe (l 995; 2002; 2005), a Oglala Lakota scholar, architect, and multi-media designer concerned with the historic, cultural, economic, political,'and psychological shaping of technology and design considerations. He builds a theoretical framework for the design of contemporary tribal architectures and bases it on his view that architectures are communication systems with social functions and embodied rhetorical messages that should be relevant to community identities. For instance, Howe (1995; 2005) develops a theory of architectural tribalism, or tribally- specific architectural design traditions that are relevant to Native American communities today by taking cues from tribal lands and reflecting design patterns symbolic within that land, resulting in tribally-centered designs that emphasize their unique cultural identities and correlate with their traditional spiritual beliefs. Further, Howe (2002) also explains how to work with tribal communities in designing culturally-relevant hypermedia and museum installation architectures for communicating tribal histories and provides a specific five—phase process for mainstream institutions and partner tribal communities to 72 collaborate in co-producing tribal histories, which includes working in the space of the project participants. Consequently, the cases of American Indian design theories and practices I share in this dissertation, will serve to provide contextualized cases of everyday indigenous design practices, which expands both Howe's theory of ethnoarchitectonics and on Norman's (1990) work on the design of everyday things. Norman stresses the importance of human-centered design and demonstrates via example that designers must understand the processes by which devices work and the everyday contexts in which they work; otherwise, designers will build unworkable technologies for the humans that use them everyday. A decolonial approach to the design of everyday things will, in contrast, flesh out the some of the cultural variances in the everyday use of technologies and design of them. Consequently, decolonial everyday design theories and methodologies values a human-centered design that considers all humans and attempts to consider and address significant differences among them when doing so. Professional/Technical Communication Theory. Although the research presented in this dissertation is centered in dig/viz rhetoric inquiry, this transmigrational, decolonial approach to design and technology theory also serves usability studies. bell hooks reminds us that "[w]e must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible" (p. 513). This leaning takes us to a space of radical postmodernism, a "postmodernism of resistance" (p. 517) that "calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would 73 promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition" (p. 514). Such constructions of empathy open up our imaginings of all people and things as interactors, capable of productive and meaningful culturally-situated knowledge work. Thus, like Foucault, I attempt to alter power and knowledge configurations that have historically privileged theory over practice, design over use, and designer over user.“9 Further, like Robert Johnson (1998), I call for alliances between all designers and users, where technologies/information products are collaboratively "created through a process of 'give and take' that places users on a par with the developers and the system itself: a space within which users and developers can learn to value each other's knowledge and accept the responsibilities of technological design and development in new, shared way 3" (p. 33). Thus, this theory strives to dismantle the historically hierarchical relationship between designer and user and intervene with one of equal cooperationSO—"one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations" (Foucault, p. 5) that are usable, useful, and dynamic in local contexts. One that listens to the cultural rhetorics of use that once because of power relations, certain languages, statements and discursive formations were silent in the writing of design, technology, and usability theories. A decolonial approach to these studies, then, will rupture dominant notions of what it means to be technical. What's technical to one population is not technical to another. Categories like beginner, advanced beginner, competent, semi—technical, and highly-technical shift depending on the user's level of access to and interaction with a given technological product or document. A decolonial methodology also pushes user centered design theorists and practitioners to interrogate the extent to which all designers 74 imagine users that mirror themselves. Further, decolonial theories and methodologies will call into question the extent to which designers are capable of imagining users different from themselves—and if they are capable, will generate responsible and productive ways of imagining a diversity of users and research participants. Digifirl and Visual Rhetoric. This decolonial revision of design, technology, and usability theories certainly impacts dig/viz rhetoric studies and the ways in which we have historically used these theories to depict American Indians digitally and visually— not to mention come to understand the history of visual and digital rhetoric studies. Just as we have come to understand that written texts are not neutral, nor are our understandings of rhetoric objective, my research reminds rhetoric scholars that dig/viz texts are biased and our understandings of them are subjective; thus, I connect American Indian rhetorics to dig/viz rhetorics in an effort to prove this and consequently call for a decolonial change in our visual and digital rhetoric inquiry and pedagogy and the ways in which we engage with dig/viz analytical and rhetorical works from non-Westem cultures. As such, this methodology asks readers and viewers to suspend prior understandings of dig/viz rhetoric as limited to computer-mediated textual and visual communication and presents an additional, "new" history of dig/viz performances in the Americas—one that traces Indian dig/viz practices over time. This research ultimately results in a disciplinary critique of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry that situates its origins in the last 25 years or so. This decolonial approach builds upon the work of visual culture studies inquiry of Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, Marita Sturken, and Lisa Cartwright, to name a few, but employs it within a rhetorical frame and within specific American Indian cultural and community contexts. To illustrate, Sturken and Cartwright (2001) explain, "A single 75 image can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range of settings, and mean different things to different pedple" (p. 10). Given this, every image encountered has the potential to tell new stories, remind viewers of stories they already know, and revise these pre- existing stories. Consequently, just as Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us that "There are numerous oral stories which tell of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people" (p. 29), there are visual stories that have the capacity to do the same rhetorical and personal damage. It is not uncommon for American Indians to encounter dig/viz stories that misrepresent Indian identities based on non-Native nostalgic fictions of what Indians and Indian-settler relations should resemble. Anishnaabe postmodern theorist Gerald Vizenor and Philip Deloria write about the phenomenon of dominant culture's consumption and production of ahistorical, fetishized and simulated rhetorics of Indianness and how these fictions are taken up even by Indians are re-inscribed in culturally destructive ways. Consequently, a decolonial methodology in dig/viz rhetoric inquiry presents our community with techniques for engaging with and incorporating into our pedagogy American Indian dig/viz rhetorics that may differ from or be in direct conflict with our preconceived notions of what Indianness entails. Ultimately, then, dig/viz rhetoricians are positioned to simultaneously answer Scott Lyons call to for rhetoricians to respect and support American Indian rhetorical sovereignty (as explained in Chapter 1), but in dig/viz contexts, and Nancy Allen's (1996) call for us to "reevaluate what we 'see' . . . [and] become especially concerned about the ethical implications of [our] work" (p. 88). And, to me, being ethical about the implications of our work suggests that we should look, un- 76 look, and re-look at the visual rhetoric we have consumed, produced, re-produced, and disseminated to make sense of our world—and to teach our students to do the same. American Indian Studies. Decolonial research in general is concerned with interrogating colonial powers and its impact on both the colonized and colonizers, but it often specifically addresses land redress, language preservation, reclamation, and revitalization, ethical treatment of indigenous research participants, and recuperating pre- contact intellectual work, among other things (some of them mentioned earlier in this chapter). While this dissertation concerns itself at times with some of these issues, primarily in the implications and pedagogical portions of this text, this dissertation aims to draw upon the work of others (Powell; Baca; Mignolo; Stromberg; Pratt; Spurr) particularly interested in the ways in which these colonial powers continue to shape the ways in which Natives and non-Natives make sense of the world via rhetoric, but I will extend these discussions to dig/viz rhetoric inquiry. As for AIS, I will build upon the work of other Native scholars (recognized in my introduction) who have recovered indigenous intellectual histories and traditions for intentionally generative contemporary insights into AIS writ large by forging connections between traditional and contemporary indigenous rhetorics and ways of knowing. However, I hope to extend this work further, as my research seeks to restore technological agency to American Indian communities by positing that these communities have a historical precedent for technological expertise. Although American Indians may not have influenced the Western definition of technology, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t used technologies in unique, productive, innovative, generous, and 77 culturally-relevant ways—and in ways that have the potential to shape contemporary decolonial, American Indian, and rhetoric studies. Limitations and Openings to Decolonial Theories and Methodologies To be clear, this nor any other‘decolonial methodology does not necessarily work to decolonize survivors of colonization, as it is impossible to decolonize people who have been colonized; however, this dissertation suggests that via intellectual trade routes we as a community of knowledge workers within this discipline can work cooperatively to dismantle the structures within our discipline—as well as those disciplines impacted by our work—that have served, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the colonial agenda. Despite that de Certeau (1988) makes a compelling case that all writing is colonial by its very nature of imposing a subjective rationality on the subject and history about which we are writing, and thus suggests that we can never actually achieve decolonialism, decolonial theories and methodologies nonetheless have a decolonizing potential within our profession, as they move us to better understand our stake in addressing how colonization has impacted the ways in people (both native and non- Native) perceive American Indian literacies, rhetorics, discourses, technologies, and identities—and consequently, our curriculum and pedagogical choices. 78 CHAPTER 3: (RE)EXPLORING AMERICAN INDIAN HYPERTEXTUAL, DIGITAL, AND VISUAL RHETORIC TRADITIONS51 We do not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. Chief Seattle, West Coast Duwarnish (1854) As discussed in Chapter 2, American cultural and disciplinary memories have been shaped by colonization and its corresponding rhetorics of empire. Collectively, the work of Mignolo ( 1995), Pratt (1992), and Spurr (1993) demonstrates that among other things colonialism has supported—and the rhetoric of empire recapitulates: the privileging of alphabetic writing; the hegemony of naming, claiming, and classifying; the inventing and re-inventing of history—including the histories of others; the ordering of Nations; the representation of others; the simultaneous negation of indigenous peoples, knowledges, and materials and (re)affirmation of dominant culture, knowledges, and materials. These rhetorics of empire have also influenced the ways in which we often conceive of the fields of dig/viz rhetorics—as well as their intellectual precursors and successors. This chapter, then, serves as a decolonial intervention in and response to the rhetorics of empire that have claimed and named these fields and continue to reaffirm a dominant history of dig/viz rhetoric studies. Consistent with the decolonial framework already established in this project, this chapter combines critique, historiography, and case 79 study. In doing so, this chapter will begin by providing a brief snapshot of this dominant history and a decolonial critique of this history and its corresponding rhetoric. Next, I will interrogate the rhetorics of empire that lend to the negation of indigenous knowledges which have the potential to offer theoretical transmigrations that may open these areas of inquiry more fully and describe a longer, richer history of dig/viz rhetoric practices. Finally, I will provide a case study that illustrates this potential and offers opportunities for better understanding the breadth and futures of these areas of inquiry and hint at some promises for charting new directions in information ecology, cultural usability, intellectual property rights, and ethics discussions and AIS. A Brief Story about the Dominant History of Digital and Visual Rhetoric Studies Although current dig/viz communication theories and practices have come out of many other fields (such as computer science, library sciences, instructional technology, cognitive psychology, educational theory, human-computer interface, and information management systems theory), this history is concerned specifically with how rhetoric and composition has taken up dig/viz rhetoric inquiry. In brief, the study of dig/viz rhetoric in R/W has always been tied to technology. Around the time of the software boom in the early 1980s, several rhetoric and composition researchers became increasingly interested in the relationships between student writing and computing, best practices for integrating technology in the classroom, and developing software for student writers. Some of these researchers coalesced in 1982 at the "Integrating Computer Technology to Serve the Needs of Students and Teachers in Writing Courses" intellectual gathering organized and hosted by Donald Ross and Lillian Bridwell at the University of Minnesota—and it was 80 this meeting that later became known as the first Computers & Writing conference (Gerrard, 1995). The development of HyperCard and the World Wide Web in the late 19805 sparked an interest in hypertext, hypermedia, and hyper rhetorics.52 This interest, along with the proliferation of easy-to—use e-mail programs, moved discussions among computers & writing scholars to focus on discourse communities and collective knowledge construction. As Lisa Gerrard (1995) notes, Both networks and hypertext/hypermedia invited collaboration of all kinds, from multiple authorship of texts to online class discussion. These technologies became the ideal vehicles for a socially based pedagogy; they supported the composition field's shifting interest from individual writing processes to collaborative learning. Thus, in conjunction with networked and hypertextual tools, the conferences shifted their focus—from the individual learner to the learning community and from the student's relationship with the computer to the student's relationship with other people. (p. 283) This shift resulted in studies on the impact of computer networking on collaborative inquiry in the writing classroom, which in turn cleared paths for new directions in scholarship. The 19905 opened with critical studies of hypertext/hy permedia and its effects on writing, the history of writing, and the future of writing (Delany and Landow, 1990; Bolter, 1991; Hawisher and Selfe, 1991; Landow, 1992) and influenced a range of related critical discussions on the relationships between hypertext, hypermedia, and 81 computer-mediated discourse and pedagogy and power, identity, community, politics, race, and gender. Consequently, a host of new literacies were developed throughout the 19905 and early turn of the century—computer literacy, multirnodal literacy, information literacy, digital literacy, and visual literacy—and. these continue to have supporters and critics. With the critique of the limitations of hypertext (as limited to just text) and the development, growth, and mass adoption of htrnl editors, the rhetorics of multimedia, digital rhetoric/writing, and new media has gradually all but replaced the rhetorics of hypertext and hypermedia. Understandably, discussions of digital, visual, and aural rhetorics are now overlapping and intertwining. As Carolyn Handa (2001) asserts in the first special issue of Computers and Composition on digital literacy and rhetoric, incorporating digital elements into writing—especially in the form of Web pages and multimedia projects—demands that we draw on our knowledge of rhetoric perhaps even more than our knowledge of HTML, design issues, or graphics software. Images and sounds are rhetorical. And for all the early talk several years ago about hypertext disrupting notions of reading and writing, which it admittedly does, we still need to remember what we know as composition teachers, rhetoric scholars, and ultimately, humanists, when we design digital writing assignments and articulate to students the notion that images and sounds can serve rhetorical purposes more complex than mere illustration or pushing the “Wow!” factor. Thus, Handa situates digital rhetoric as rhetoric crafted with digital elements, or multimedia, and sound digital writing projects as those that require us and our students to better understand the rhetorical purposes of texts, visuals, and sounds. Less concerned 82 with the elements and more with the digital environments, when using the term “digital writing,” the WIDE Research Center Collective (2005) refers to a changed writing environment—that is, to writing produced on the computer and distributed via the Internet and World Wide Web . . . [T]he computer itself as a stand-alone machine is not revolutionary in the sense we mean. Rather, the dramatic change is the networked computer connected to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Connectivity allows writers to access and participate more seamlessly and instantaneously within web spaces and to distribute writing to large and widely dispersed audiences. (n.p.) Given these understanding of digital rhetoric and digital writing (and the associated elements and environments) coupled with claims that we were in the late age of print at the turn of the century (Bolter, 2001 ), many rhetoric and composition scholars now agree with the digital writing collective53 Digirhet.org's (2006) assertion that we are in the very late age of print, well into a world of writing and document distribution that primarily happens digitally. Networked devices create a new kind of writing space, and this space changes not only writing processes, but also communication dynamics between writers and readers, and between writers and the devices themselves." (p. 233) In response to these new writing spaces, some R/W scholars discuss the use of new media within dig/viz rhetoric inquiry and scholarship, while others elide discussions of digital rhetoric and visual rhetoric inquiry and opt to discuss these emerging fields as new media studies and the scholarship therein as new media scholarship. However, 83 Cheryl Ball (2004) makes a distinction "between scholarship about new media, which uses print conventions such as written text as the main mode of argument, and new media scholarship, which uses modes other than only written text to form an argument" (p. 404). Further, she posits that just because a text may be delivered digitally, it does not make it a new media text. Rather, the label "new media scholarship should only be applied to texts that experiment with and break away from linear modes of print traditions . . . scholarship that uses modes such as audio, video, images, and/or animation in addition to written text to make meaning" (p. 404). From Ball's description, then, we can extrapolate that while new media inquiry requires dig/viz rhetoric inquiry, dig/viz rhetoric inquiry doesn't require new media. Further, we learn that digital rhetorics that once transcended texts and textuality have now been relegated to primitivity as primarily written texts that still employ "print conventions." A Decolonial Intervention: (Re)Charting (New) Territories To be sure, the aforementioned narrative of a dominant history of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry is brief and incomplete; I simply traces a crude path of R/W's fleeting obsessions with text, then digital rhetoric, and now most recently with new media. However, it does provide a rough overview of the framework within which many scholars in R/W are operating and thus limiting their inquiry. Consequently, in this section, I will provide a brief decolonial analysis of the rhetoric of this emerging field, considering the colonial rhetorical strategies listed in the introduction of this chapter. I begin with the bold assertion that contemporary dig/viz rhetoric scholarship is currently positioning the field to make an interesting decolonial move that will impact all of rhetoric and writing studies. To explain, the traditional colonial strategy of 84 simultaneously denouncing other cultures without alphabetic/print literacy and re- affirming and privileging their own is losing ground. Currently, dig/viz rhetoric inquiry is complicating the once established understanding of literacy as being able to write and read in Standard English. In addition to what we have learned from AAVE, ESL, (dis)ability studies, dig/viz rhet studies recognizes the knowledges and skills required to understand and convey information orally, aurally, visually, and technologically. This understanding can only benefit indigenous cultures that had rich oral, aural, visual rhetoric and technological traditions long before colonial contact and rule—traditions that were not recognized as literacy markers for any population by colonial rhetoric until the 20th century. A problem with realizing this potential, however, is that the naming of these storytelling and technological traditions has changed. Colonial rhetoric has replaced (and continues to replace) most of the indigenous names for these literacy stories with stories of primitivity, myths, folklore, and artifacts. As a result, although the computers and writing/digital and visual rhetoric community has consistently been known to value intellectual intersections with other disciplines, AIS has not been one of them. The colonial strategy of naming and claiming is common across academic disciplines, and while this is how we establish common knowledge, it is what we name things that matter. For example, look at the transitional rhetoric for the fields often called dig/viz rhetoric. From hypertext to multi-media and new media, many of the shifts in our rhetoric are reactionary to newer technologies introduced the global market. On one hand, this reaction is understandable, as Scott DeWitt (1996) makes clear in his historiography of hypertext research in rhetoric and composition, "when new technologies are introduced to existing curricula, not only are theoretical problems exposed but 85 researchers find both new and existing theories in flux, reshaping and reforrnulating, integrating and synthesizing" (p. 71). On the other hand, just because a new technology is introduced into the global market, it doesn't mean that it has immediate application in our rhetoric and writing classrooms. Further, this sort of rhetoric of "new media" is consistent with and subsequently reinforces the Western rhetoric of progress—progress for progress sake, not a clear ends to a means or always a solution to a pre-existing communication problem (see Chapter 2 for more on the Western intellectual paradigm of progress and its corresponding rhetoric). Further, technology-centered rhetoric in our field suggests that while there have been scholars and periods in our short history where the dynamics between actors and technology are what is studied, we nonetheless privilege the rhetoric of technology not the human (or animal actors) or the relationship between them—with the exception of hypertextuality and digital rhetoric (which I will explain later in this chapter). Thus, new technological developments beget new rhetoric about communicating with those technologies. Just as digital writers are affected by the variety of environments they write in, rhetoricians are affected by the variety of rhetorics we are exposed to everyday, both inside and outside academia. We both respond to and reinforce dominant Western rhetoric in our everyday rhetorics of technology in our classrooms, at our conferences, in our manuscripts, in our collaborations. And everyday we are bombarded with Western digital, visual, and aural rhetorics of technological manifest destiny, from our journeys on the new frontiers of the World Wide Web (reminiscent of the Wild, Wild West) to our conquering of the "information problem" while on Safari, Explorer, and Netscape." Yahoo! The colonial imagery and material realities associated with such rhetoric surely 86 have their impact on the psyche of both American Indians and non-Indians alike. Thus, naming and claiming impact the rhetoric used by and about non—Westemers regarding their technological expertise, from the classifying of cultures to be underdeveloped due to their technological use in contrast to the Western world. This is a common perception of American Indian cultures, despite the fact that little research has been done on the technological expertise of American Indian communities outside of the fields of fine arts, ethnobotany, ethnohistory, archaeology, and anthropology—and these disciplines are less concerned with rhetoric than they are with interpreting cultural, historical, and artistic artifacts, despite their obvious reliance on rhetoric for such interpretations. The end result is that it is most often colonial rhetoric that shapes public perception as to the technological advancement of Native Nations and peoples. Thus, in order for our scholarly community to address the relationships between hegemony, rhetoric, race, and technology (and inspire a decolonial move in our scholarship, pedagogy, and other everyday rhetoric), we must interrogate the ways in which our very own rhetoric might perpetuate the "traditional" colonial re-writing of Amerindian histories and privilege Western ways of organizing knowledge (e.g., Western chronology, genres, categories, etc.). If we fail in this interrogation, we risk being complicit in the colonization of knowledges, which diminishes the capacity for a coexistence of languages, literacies, memories, and spaces. As Mignolo (1995) asserts, "The colonization of space and the colonization of languages mean that dominant views of languages, of recording the past, and of charting territories become synonymous with the real by obstructing possible alternatives" (p. 5). 87 Ultimately, colonial inventions often cover up the knowledge work of Others, while the decolonial imaginary aims to recover and uncover (or un-obstruct) by remembering the knowledges of Others that have been collected, claimed, named, ignored, appropriated, and consumed. Given this, I build upon the intellectual framework of decolonial inquiry a (re)eonstructive, productive rhetoric. To do so, I begin by remembering hypertextuality and its promises for rhetorical agency outside of bound and printed texts—after all html coding allowed for the insertion of image and sound sources and internal and external linking—despite the rhetoric of our field to suggest that new media is inherently better, more efficient, advanced. In addition to recuperating hypertextuality and its foundational theory and practice critical to contemporary dig/viz rhetoric studies, I also remember that non-Westem cultures have a good deal to teach us about dig/viz rhetoric. Wampum as Hypertext: An Intellectual Tradition of A merican Indian Digital and Visual Rhetoric Theory and Practice We round the comer of the Many Tribes, Many Trails gallery that maps the US government's forced removal of other indigenous tribes into the Cherokee Removal gallery at the Cherokee Heritage Center Trail of Tears exhibit”. The wind is howling; it's freezing cold. We walk among the ghosts of our ancestors, some clinging to each other, others with walking sticks, others pulling their coats close. We pull each other close along side the wampum belt record. Surrounded by the white wampum honor beads that lay the path for the continuance of our culture and language, the purple wampum beads remind us of the survival of some, but the genocide of thousands. We weep. As you say Qwo-Li, "We are not the ones who forget. We remember . . . Our bodies hold everything 88 we are told to forget." This portion of this chapter traces a counter-story to Western claims to the origins of hypertext and multimedia by remembering how American Indian communities have employed wampum belts as hypertextual technologies—as wampum belts have extended human memories of inherited knowledges through interconnected, non-linear designs and associative storage and retrieval methods—long before the "discovery" of Western hypertext. By forging intellectual trade routes56 between Tehanetorens, Wallace, Williams and other wampum historians with the work of Western hypertext theorists, such as Bush, Nelson, Bolter, Lanham, and Landow, I position American Indians as the first known skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas. Thus, wampum has the potential to re-vision the intellectual history of technology, hypertext and multimedia studies, and thereby AIS—and such a revisioning calls for a responsibility to dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty. To begin, wampum is a small, short, tubular bead, made from the quahog clam shell. The white beads are made from the inner whorl of the shell, and the purple beads come from the dark spot or "eye" on the shell. Dating back 1000 years or more, Woodlands Indians have used wampum and other material components (e. g., bark fibers, sinew, hemp fibers, string—or other weaving materials) for ceremony and as records of important civil affairs (e.g., alliances, treaties, marriage proposals, ceremonies, wars, etc.) Figure 3.1: Raw quahog wampum shells. by stringing the wampum beads together on individual strands or weaving them into 89 belts”, as pictured in contemporary contexts below: Roger Jodr holding friendship belt. Figure 3.2 (pictured on the left): Wampum string held by Six Nations youth Don Fadden (Tehanetorens). Figure 3.3 (pictured on the right): Wampum belt displayed by Six Nations youth Don Fadden and Roger Jock (Tehanetorens). Thus, wampum serves as a sign technology that has been used to record hundreds of years of alliances within tribes, between tribes, and between the tribal governments and colonial government. According to Tehanetorens, the coastal Indians were the first to make and use wampum, but through trade with other tribes, it traveled to the interior and western regions of the continent. Post contact, wampum was also appropriated by American colonists, ‘ r . . who used it as their first form of Figure 3.4: Iroquois Chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve reading Wampum belts (ca. 1870) currency in colonial " America." (National Archives of Canada). Further, it was the wampum of the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas) that influenced the democratic thought that led to the Constitution of the United States (cf Tehanetorens, 1999; Williams, 1997; Wallace, 90 1994) Wampum strings and belts served to engender further diplomatic relations, and its presentation was a gesture that required reciprocity on the part of the recipient. Consequently, accepting a gift of wampum meant that the recipient accepted its implied message and responsibility. Wampum records are maintained by regularly revisiting and re-"reading" them through community memory and performance, as wampum is a living rhetoric that communicates a mutual relationship between two or more parties, despite the lack of one of those parties to live up to that promise (which we know was the result of most wampum treaties with the colonists). Thus, wampum embodies memory, as it extends human memories of inherited knowledges via interconnected, non-linear designs with associative message storage and retrieval methods. And it is this complex rhetorical functioning that first engaged my thoughts on how Indians have always been hypertextual. An "Oflicial" History of Western Hypertext’ 8 Western hypertext theorists mark Dr. Vannevar Bush, as the "grandfather"59 of the concept of hypertextuality through his concept of the Memex, interestingly enough described in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article as an instrument designed to extend human memory by allowing us to associatively store and retrieve memories through non-linear trails, or a webbed network, of interconnected scientific knowledge and data. Dr. Vannevar Bush, distinguished professor of electrical engineering at MIT, co-founder of Raytheon Corporation (a high-tech company), and Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development for the Roosevelt administration (i.e., Director of war-related research for the US. government during World War II), credited science with providing 91 the swiftest of communication between individuals, but he grew increasingly concerned that the "growing mountain" of research would be too much for a researcher to manage, as Bush himself admitted that was "staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear." Therefore, Bush calls for a technology that can provide for the "collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record." Further, he discusses the need for technological development to allow for compression of information. Consequently, he offers his vision for a future device to make research more efficient: the Memex. Bush describes the Memex as: a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. . . . It affords an immediate step . . . to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the Memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. Thus, the Memex was imagined as a device would allow for an associative system for indexing, storing, retrieving, and delivering of memories. Although the Memex was never built, hypertext scholars credit Bush as the frrst to conceive of the concept of hypertext, while many recognize Ted Nelson as the man who coined the term "hypertext" for "non-sequential writing." Ted Nelson's material vision for 92 hypertext was as Xanadu, a global hypertext network that would "make all published information available to everyone and to enable anyone to freely recombine any and all documents and add their own textual content" (Farkas & F arkas, 2002, p. 13). Although Nelson has not finished building Xanadu, Nelson's dream of the Xanadu "Docuverse" has been partially fulfilled vis-a-vis the World Wide Web, despite that the Web does not currently make all published information available, nor do we currently have a system for ensuring hypertext copyright holders are paid whenever their intellectual property is used. Consequently, even though Bush and Nelson's visions for hypertexts never materialized, they are most often credited for the origins of hypertext theory and the general perception that hypertext is an interactive system of storing and retrieving images, texts, and other computer files that allows users to directly link to relevant images, texts, sounds, and other data types in a non-linear environment. Hypertextual Features of Wampum and Western Hypertexts This section offers a preliminary historiographical decolonial theory that suggests that the "history" of hypertext is a Western frontier story, a narrative that most often begins with the exploration of the land of Xanadu and the Memex and eventually leads to the trailblazing of the World Figure 3.5: Western (right) vs. Wampum Hypertexts (left). Is there a difference between the hypertextual work of connecting Western scientific knowledge and American Indian cultural, material, and technological told of hypertexts that existed in knowledge? Wide Web. Few stories have been American Indian territories long before the land of Memex and Xanadu. Given this, this 93 decolonial narrative proposes that the concept of hypertext, and the rhetorical work it does, is not new—nor is it unique to Western culture, despite the terrninology's Western etymology (hyper + text). To accomplish this goal, this section demonstrates how wampum is an example"0 of a pre-Memex, pre—Xanadu, and pre-Intemet American Indian technology that was not only imagined but became a reality, and not only works like hypertext, but it in fact extends those capabilities beyond the current capacity of interconnected hypertexts we see on the "World Wide" Web. Digital Rhetoric. To begin, both Western and wampum hypertexts employ digital rhetoric to communicate its non-linear information. To explain, digital refers to our fingers, our digits, one of the primary ways (along with our ears and eyes) through which we make sense of the world and with which we write into the world. All writing is digital, digitalis in Latin, which typically denotes "of or relating to the fingers or toes" or a "coding of information." Given this, we should be reminded of writing known to us though history that was executed with the use fingers and codes—from the Mesopotamian Cuneiform, to the Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, to the Chinese logograms, to the Aztec codices, wampum belts, and Western hypertexts. Wampum then, codes local knowledges and alliances with wampum shells and sinew (or other stringing device). Thus, the beads and stringing technologies could be represented as 0-0—0—0-0-0- 0-0-0-0-0—0, or strands of wampum code that when strung together communicate information to its "readers." Similarly, the standard language Web designers use to create hypermedia documents is the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Web documents are typically digitally written in HTML and they consist of nothing more than standard text with 94 formatting codes that contain information about font, layout, design, and hyperlinks. When broken down to it's simplest form, digital coding for computers is represented as 0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|, or a strands of binary code that when strung together communicate information to its "readers." Visual Rhetoric. Just as the digital coding dictates the visual rhetoric (i.e. font, layout, information design and display, etc.) of Western hypertexts, so too does the digital coding of wampum hypertexts. To explain, wampum communicates visually . ‘1 A.“ . . 2 Figure 3.6: Cayuga Chief Jacob Thomas with via the contrast between the dark purple Two Row Wampum Treaty Belt replica (Jake Thomas Learning .Centre, 2004). and the white beads and the meaning inscribed in the resulting patterns. To illustrate, Figure 3.6 shows Cayuga Chief Jacob Thomas holding a replica of the Two Row Wampum Treaty Belt, which embodies a treaty between the Iroquois Confederacy and colonists. Tehanetorens explains that "[t]his belt symbolizes the agreement and conditions under which the Iroquois welcomed the white peoples to this land . . . This wampum belt confirms our words" (p. 74). The two rows symbolize two paths or two vessels, and though the two parties will travel together side-by-side, they will do so in their own boat Neither "will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other"; neither "will try to steer the other's vessel" (p. 74). Such everyday practices of digital coding results in culturally-saturated visual rhetorics that signify meaning to those who re-visit wampum treaties—not to mention the 95 culturally-specific visual mnemonics61 associated with the subsequent re-reading of the patterns encoded in wampum belts via white, purple, red, and black wampum. Associative Indexin Storin Retrievin and Presentin Information. Besides encoding information, both . HYPERTEXT technologies also employ mg» “w. ' 1% WEEK}; We :m mm was. I nmvw‘c ! A A 9 u’WV‘V“ W\’\/ N’N/Vfiazu systems of nodes and lrnks gm: 4* awakfifiw gags: amé t - Ema: ares/1a eases: M w” 3mm mm ”xv. o n WVJ that form informatron View WI? 0 ‘ 0 structures vrs-a-vrs WW - a yMM/‘s AW .. aN/‘vv‘ tr; .ng's. 3.4.4:" . We: 3% m: . . . . WW mm: assocratrve indexrng. To W ~ W are» / '\ WW VxA NV~ N _ . "v" :M‘ W zszr; ex lam nodes can be M W ““ W P : W, Ava/aw: =W 9»,ch ~Wa ...- -. E's/Wu WW EWMm W :W . . W IW “3% “A“ consrdered pornts of M W information and links the Figure 3.7: Example hypertext with nodes and links. Note that each text may house several nodes of visual and/or alphabetic/syllable nodes information that can be linked to each other independently from the whole text. pathways that connect them. This centrality of nodes and links to hypertext theory can be explained in the rhetorical work that hypertexts do. As Farkas & Farkas (2002) explain, "Hypertext theory considers how various arrangements of nodes and links express meaning and how these arrangements are reflected in the user interface. Hypertext theory classifies these arrangements of nodes and links into various kinds of hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures, often called 'information structures'" (p. 123). Similarly in wampum belt hypertexts, wampum beads serve as nodes to topics and the sinew, hemp, tree bark twine, or other stringing devices serve as links or pathways to associated information. To explain further, architectural mnemonic associations are employed as wampum belts and strings are encoded with information. 96 Thus, a wampum hypertext constructs an architectural mnemonic system of knowledge- making and memory recollection through bead placement, proximity, balance and color. Thus, like colors are employed in Western visual design to signify certain moods for its readers, the color usage of wampumreminds its "reader" how to organize and read the story woven into the material rhetoric.62 In order to retrieve the encoded communication, an individual must be a part of the community with the cultural context for accurate retrieval of that information. The messages are spoken and woven into the wampum and those messages are repeated each time an individual (re)presents the material rhetoric, or wampum hypertext, to the community. Thus, in this way, wampum hypertext is more similar to Bush's vision for hypertext, one that is culturally situated among a community. As such, the wampum community can be seen as a community of heritage and cultural knowledge workers. Thus, wampum hypertext can be understood more as intra- and cross-community communication than global or mass communication, as with Nelson's vision for Western hypertext. Non-linear, Webbed Networks of Knowledge. The organization of nodes and links forms a non-linear, or webbed, network of information in both wampum and Western rhetorics. From Myron Tuman's (1992) work, we can trace some of the key features of hypertext—from a "web of relations" (p. 60), to "a connected system of documents" (p. 61), to "a system without end or center" (p. 63). Further, hypertext theorist Jay David Bolter (2001) describes hypertext as "layered writing and reading" environment, where "[a]ll the individual pages may be of equal importance in the whole text, which becomes a network of interconnected writings" (p. 27). Thus, Bolter conveys 97 the value of non-hierarchical content linked in a hypertext and the capacity for hypertexts to have multiple layers of meaning. Moreover, he notes how this layering of information subverts the traditional hierarchy of information in print and focus on the associative relationships among and across content. Similarly, wampum offers a layered writing a reading experience, as wampum can communicate more than one story, as meaning is layered in the materials with the technology and digital rhetoric. To illustrate the layers of purpose and meaning, Robert Williams (1997) demonstrates how the Guswentah wampum, otherwise known as the two-row treaty wampum (see Figure 3.6 for replica), has the capacity to secure trade, alliances, and goodwill and to offer "tribal approaches to the problems of achieving law and peace in a multicultural world" (p. 5). This layering is also evident in Williams account of how reading and listening to the wampum requires an understanding of the layered messages embodied by the wampum. He writes about the telling of stories spoken by the [condolence ceremony] wampum: stories of rekindling the fire 'to bind us close'; of grave sorrow for the dead chief; of wiping away any bad blood between the two sides; of sharing the same bowl to eat together; of dispelling the clouds and restoring the sun that shines truth on all peoples. (pp. 55-56) Thus, these layers of stories are woven together and can be pulled apart by members of that community for a layered "reading" or presentation of the wampum as well, thereby facilitating a hypertext of data representation and interpretation. Supplemental Memog. As demonstrated in the aforementioned wampum introduction and the two-row belt example, stories are encoded with digital rhetoric and 98 the technologies of shells and sinew (or other stringing device) and subsequently stored in the material rhetoric. Thus, both wampum and Western hypertexts supplement memory. Vannevar Bush envisioned his Memex as an intimate extension of a male's scientist's memory, while hypertext allows designers to input their memorized knowledge, and wampum strings and belts serve as communal, cultural, and civic memory. According to Tehanetorens, for the Iroquois, every treaty or law passed by the Council was recorded with a particular string or belt of wampum and memorized by certain trained individuals (p. 12). In order to memorize the belt and its story, the trained individual would impress in the mind the visual representation of the belt and subsequently forge mnemonic associations between the visual representation of the belt and the accompanying story. Thus, the wampum "reader," or presenter, can trace the nodes of information and links their associated inherited knowledge by tracing the embedded stories "told" by wampum and sinew hypertext. As touched on briefly earlier in this analysis, wampum beads serve as nodes to topics and the sinew, hemp, tree bark twine, or other stringing devices serve as links or pathways to associated information. To explain, architectural mnemonic associations are employed as wampum belts and strings are encoded with information. As with classical Roman memoria exercises promoted by Cicero and Quintilian, where mental images (imagines) were placed in an architectural background (loci), purple and white wampum beads are likewise woven into a meaningful pattern dictated by memoria and purpose onto a background of a stringing material technology. Interactive Design. Farkas and Farkas define hypertext as 99 the original term for interactive content. For this reason, we find it in the phrases 'hyperlinks,’ 'hypertext jumps,’ and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Because most of the interactive systems of the 19603, '70s, and early-to-mid '805 displayed only text and _st_at_ic_: [my emphasis] graphics, they were referred to as hypertext systems. (p. 10) According to Bolter (1991), "the key qualities of hypertext are still the creation of a structure of elements and their presentation in interaction with the reader" (p. 98). On the other hand, hypermedia, then, is presented as the linguistic successor to hypertext, as it "includes interactive videodiscs and other technologies that were designed primarily to present dynamic [my emphasis] content" (10), where "words, graphics, animation, sound, and video can all be disposed as units in a hypertext" (98). Thus, while some scholars have abandoned hypertext because of its supposed limited interaction between static content, and hypermedia is now seen as the interaction between dynamic content, the feature of interactiveness has nonetheless remained consistent. With wampum hypertexts, interactiveness is achieved both between and across the content and media types, and between the "designers" and "presenters" of wampum, the audience for the wampum hypertext, and the material rhetoric itself. Although wampum preserves and communicates the memories of treaties, peace, and alliances, it doesn't just embody this communication, but it presents the memories as well. Wampum presents a hypertext visually and aurally via an accompanying oral story. Whether it is treaty belt, peace pact, a welcome belt, condolence string, or adoption belt, it is presented to all affected parties, and most are revisited on a regular basis and re-"read." Thus, not only is the wampum belt crafted with memories, but it is "read" by memory. 100 The Oneida Indian Nation explains how "[w]ampum was connected to the spoken word. A piece of wampum testified to the truth and importance of a message which was 'read into' the object itself" (n.p.). Thus, the act of speaking into the wampum both presents meaning to the material object itself and impresses the experience into the individual's mind, not to mention for any onlookers as well. For example, the Iroquois women are charged with the task of nominating the Chiefs, and they speak and weave their decisions on who to nominate and their recommended tasks and rules for the chieftainship into the "Women's Nominating Belt" (Tehanetorens, p. 31). Consequently, we can assess that there are two layers of interactiveness between the women who speak and weave meaning into the wampum, between those who present the wampum and those who listen, and between all these interactors and the wampum hypertext itself. This interactiveness is also a requirement for negotiating the different technologies and communication modes necessary for the wampum to continue to be rhetorical. Multi-Modal Web of Meaning. As can be inferred from the section above, wampum is multi-modal in its meaning making. After all, in order for wampum to be communicative, a hybridization of the oral tradition and symbolism is woven into the material rhetoric. Further the technologies woven into the belt have communicative agency, as with the colors of the shells and the design patterns. Further, the cultural context and community where the wampum resides is another source of meaning that gets encoded into the wampum. Thus, wampum is a hypertext of communicative modes——all which contribute to cultural knowledge production and preservation. Extending the Capability of Western Hypertexts 101 The study of wampum as hypertext demonstrates that wampum does not communicate exactly like Western hypertext; however, it works similarly. Consequently, hypertext theory could learn more about "traditional" hypertexts via discussions of wampum hypertextuality. As Bolter (2001) explains, "We use the computer as hypertext to write with symbols that have both intrinsic and extrinsic significance" (p. 27), but the same could be said of wampum—as it has been used for centuries to communicate cultural, communal, and civic information of both intrinsic and extrinsic value. However, Bolter (1991) restricts hypertext to a phenomenon that only occurs on a computer through electronic writing (p. 99). Thus, further discussions on where hypertextuality can take place are needed for future hypertext theory and revisionist history.63 Wampum belts signify a surviving intellectual tradition that communicates living stories of a living culture. The treaties (and other messages woven into the wampum) are renewed by regularly revisiting and re-"reading" wampum vis-a-vis community memory and performance. Although both need to be involved to update the message therein, the messages communicated by particular wampum belts do not change; rather they are remembered and recited. Consequently, they are used to remind us of our commitments and we renew those commitments through reading and performing the wampum hypertext. The same is not true of Western hypertexts, where changes can be made in a moment—or no changes are ever made, and the links therein are broken. Thus, while all affected parties need to tend to the links to ensure the alliances survive, tribal memory keeps the wampum rhetoric alive while individuals need to continuously update hypertexts and their content to keep them relevant. Unless the author notes the latest 102 revision date, we cannot be certain of when the hypertext is "dead"—until we use it. On the contrary, using the wampum belt in the way it is intended keeps it alive. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, the promise of contemporary hypertexts often rests in its ability to reflect an interactive design in order to encourage interactiveness. With wampum, interactiveness is achieved both between and across the content and media types, and between the "designers" and "presenters" of wampum, the audience for the wampum hypertext, and the material rhetoric itself. Although wampum preserves and communicates the memories of treaties, peace, and alliances, it doesn't just embody this communication, but it presents the memories as well. Consequently, one could argue on one hand that wampum is limited in relation to contemporary Western hypertexts in that it requires human intervention to remember the intent and content of the original message; however, one could also posit that such interaction encourages continuous civic involvement instead of an over-reliance on technology. Wampum reminds us that duyuktv (a Cherokee concept of j udicious balance) between technology and humans is necessary—and that the body's interaction is also necessary to achieve this balance. The body remembers the weaving and the performance of wampum. Regular performances of wampum hypertexts suggest that Western hypertexts are relegated to dormancy until the moment we need to recall it. Both conceptions of hypertext require human interaction, but Western hypertext does not require a conscious effort to remember the message encoded in the technology. Thus, human memory (physiological, emotional, mental, and bodily) and material memories are connected—in an alliance to foster hypertextual memory. 103 Finally, the study of wampum as hypertext has the potential to re-imagine a renewed civic responsibility and engagement in the future of hypertext. Although the World Wide Web is touted for its democratizing effects on communication, and the digital divide is purportedly narrowing, there is still a digital divide in Indian country between the haves and have-nots. Consequently, some perceive that a shared, communal responsibility is lacking in contemporary Western renditions of hypertexts, as many American Indians are concerned that the Internet is like the "open" frontier, where individual rights take precedent over community benefit and alliance building. Where dead end hyperlinks are plenty. Where messages of violence and racism abound. Where child predators lurk. Where indigenous knowledges are stolen and appropriated. Unlike some Western hypertexts, wampum remembers shared, community, and civic responsibilities; in fact, it requires it. On the contrary, contemporary Western hypertext does not require it, and the enforcement of it among its service providers and users is one of its most pressing critiques. Implications of Wampum as Hypertext While there are certainly more implications for the study of wampum as hypertext within dig/viz rhetoric studies, what are the implications of this research for AIS? For one, it situates American Indians as techno-savvy, as it demonstrates how American Indians have a long-standing intellectual tradition of multi-mediated, dig/viz rhetoric theories and practices—or theories and practices of communicating via the encoding of information with our fingers and toes using a variety of media. To explain, wampum beads are technologies, just as sinew, hemp, and tree bark twine are—all of the technologies needed to craft wampum belt multi-mediated stories. Such an argument can 104 be extended to the other indigenous sign technologies we employ via an assemblage of other technologies, all which come along with their own set of "literacies," from petroglyphs and pictographs to birch bark scrolls and canoes, winter counts, star quilts, songs, drums, double-wall and double-woven river Figure 3.8: American Progress by John Gast cane baskets. Thus, we must be critical (1872). of the stories we tell ourselves about being technologically "advanced," "proficient," and "literate." Needless to say, American Indian technological literacies should not be measured with a Western yardstick, especially when the yardstick is a yard deep in colonial rhetoric and has been sent contact, as discussed in greater length in Chapter 2 (see Figure 3.8). Although wampum belts certainly demonstrate both a pre-and post-contact technological literacy among American Indian communities, American Indian pictographs and petroglyphs are among the oldest forms of dig/viz rhetoric found in the Americas—worldwide for that matter, given that all continents are home to rock art rhetorics. To breifly explain the rhetoric here: rock art is considered a landscape art that consists of pictures, motifs, and designs placed on natural surfaces such as clifi‘ and boulder faces, cave walls, and ceilings, and the ground surface; the term "rock art" collectively refers to both pictographs and petroglyphs. However, the two are distinctly different in ways that tie closely to the technology and interface employed to impress stories into stone. Pictographs are paintings or drawings, and petroglyphs are engravings 105 and carvings found on rock art panels, or approximately flat surfaces that are the fracture or weathering planes of a natural rock outcrop. Figure 3.9 (on left): Pictograph of a human figure in white pigment (circled) at Steamboat Butte, MT. Figure 3.10 (on right): Petroglyph of an etched tree line with possible moon phases or hoof prints above the trees (squared) at Steamboat Butte. MT. Pictographs are manufactured with a series of technologies and human interfaces. The colors come from common mineral earths and other natural compounds——red, from ground ochre; black from charcoal or other minerals (like manganese); white from natural chalk, kaolinite clay or diatomaceous earth. The pigments are ground with some kind of grinding technology (e. g. pestle and bedrock mortars), and then mixed with a liquid, such as water, animal blood, urine, egg yolk, etc. to use as a wet paint or dried to use like chalk or a pencil. Petroglyphs on the other hand are manufactured with a hammerstone rock that is directly pounded against the surface of a rock panel or by using one hammerstone to pound against another, placed on the face of the panel like a chisel. In fewer cases, incisions into the rock are made (depending upon the era) with a lithic flake or blade or with a metal knife. Although there is much more that could be said about the technological expertise needed to crafi pictographs and petroglyphs, these dig/viz rhetorics are unique in that the information encoded digitally and visually on these rock faces tell stories of culturally- 106 specific symbolic and religious systems, gender dynamics and roles, cultural boundaries, origins of arts and beliefs. Thus, while it is important to recognize the symbolic importance of pictographs and petroglyphs, it's more important to understand that that they do more than fix a culture's iconography. But they tell us about the culture of the rhetor who carved the digital, visual, and material rhetoric. Although archaeologists strive to classify types, iconography, and motifs of petroglyphs and pictographs, I'm not interested in this type of classification, or fixing of meaning of another culture's visual codes that often relies " entirely, if not mostly, on etic, or outsider's interpretations. Instead, I am i more interested in the symbolic and social function of petroglyphs and Figure 3.11: A shield-bearing warrior petroglyph (circled) at Steamboat Butte, MT. pictographs—which is to communicate to others in the absence of the person who created the rock art. I am also intrigued by what the technologies used to create these landscape rhetorics tell us about the landscape's information ecologies and how the images inscribed in stone tell stories about when and where specific ecologies transpired. To explain, rock art with buffalo fauna, horses, wagons, and the like tell us important chronological information, as well as which wildlife and technologies were available to them at specific times. For example, according to Associated Press writer John Flesher (2007), in September 2007, underwater archaeologists stumbled across what appears to be a petroglyph of a mastodon with a spear in its side in Lake Michigan's 107 Grand Traverse Bay, which would date the petroglyph and the rhetor(s) who carved it to be at least 10,000 years old, given that it is estimated that this is when the mastodon became extinct. Thus, between petroglyphs and rock art, it is clear that American Indians have been adept at employing multimedia for at least 2500-4200 years, given the dating of the oldest confirmed (by archaeologists) rock art found in the Lower Pecos River region (South Texas). This multimedia, hypertextual, and dig/viz rhetoric tradition continues today with the continued use and production with indigenous technologies. Further, American Indians are continuing this tradition with contemporary Western media as well, from websites and blogs to instant messaging. Research that recuperates existing and uncovers "newer" American Indian dig/viz rhetoric theories and practices helps to answers Osage literary scholar Robert Warrior's (1994) call to examine "how we can make American Indian discourse more inclusive of contemporary American Indian experiences" (p. 87). And though access to some contemporary Western technologies remain a contentious issue among American Indians, contemporary American Indian experiences include the daily interaction with and shaping of a variety of both indigenous and Western technologies. Thus, while Western society has determined what it means to be technologically advanced, it does doesn't mean that American Indians have to buy into that fiction. After all, as several American Indian scholars have stressed, American Indians have a right to claim our own intellectual sovereignty and to shape what that means. As Warrior (1994) contends, we must critically engage with and reflect on struggles for and discussions of intellectual sovereignty. Leech Lake Ojibwa Scott Lyons articulates what 108 that might mean for the rhetoric studies community. To explain, Lyons discusses the legacy of colonization based on rhetorical modes of naming and claiming (which have ties to identity and literacy) to promote the importance of rhetorical sovereignty, or the claiming of "the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit [of agency, power, and community renewal], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse" (pp. 449-450). Further, Cherokee scholar Daniel Wildcat reminds us of the relationship of intellectual sovereignty to self-determination. He states, "It is essentially a tribal intellectual and moral mandate requiring action, unless we want our current educational system to be like our contemporary political structures and practices, which all too often merely reflect the dominant society's institutions (p. 7). Consequently, building on the work of these scholars, I call that we resist the dominant notions of what it means to be technologically "literate" or "advanced" (with roots in manifest destiny), and to critically reflect on struggles for and engage with discussions on dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty, or the inherent right for indigenous communities to claim and shape their own communication needs (as well as the rhetoric of their identities) in dig/viz spaces. Given all this, AIS scholars are in the position to re-vision how both rhetoric and AIS scholars articulate, study, and teach technology. An Opening of New Intellectual Territory for Digital and Rhetoric Studies Although there are certainly some potential benefits hypertext theory can reap from the study of wampum as hypertext, to be clear, I am not asserting that wampum—or rock art for that matter—fis the origin of hypertext. After all, if I am suggesting that there are other stories that tell tales of hypertextuality that have gone untold, adding the story 109 of wampum alone will not remedy this absence. But it does make one absent story present in our discussions of hypertext. And the addition of this story may lead us to better understand the theory of discovery. Just as Alice Beck Kehoe (2002) admits "[a] perennial problem in archaeology is to distinguish between local inventions and those imported from other societies—'independent invention' versus 'diffusion'" (p. 62), I venture to say the same is true of information archaeology and hypertext theory, or any other theory dependent on the proliferation of technology. Just because an individual names a theory, it does not make it an "independent invention." As Anishnaabe theorist Gerald Vizenor elucidates, "The English language has been the linear tongue of the colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities..." (p. 105). This same language was used by Ted Nelson who named hypertext and claimed to have "discovered" it. Perhaps if we allow ourselves to listen to this story of wampum as hypertext in accord with the other existing stories about hypertext, we might enjoy what Indiana Miami scholar Malea Powell (2004) describes as an emergence of a "new story about ourselves, not a 'prime' narrative held together by the sameness of our beliefs, but a gathering of narratives designed to help us adapt and change as is necessary for our survival" @p. 57-58). Thus, let's treat the history of hypertext as hypertext itself, recognizing the fruitful relationships between stories, the benefit of resisting an imposed hierarchy of those stories, and the dynamic nature of hypertext that allows for endless and centerless stories. Such a hypertext will facilitate a dynamic discussion between these stories on hypertext that will destabilize the current hierarchical information structure in 110 place that insists on stabilizing the origins of hypertext. As Mvskoke writer Joy Harjo (2000) reminds us in her poem, "there's no such thing as a one-way land bridge," "The story depends on who's telling it" (39). Although some of you, dear readers, may not be convinced of my treatment of wampum belts as hypertexts and digital rhetorics, it is hard to deny the significance of wampum belts and rock art to the study of visual rhetoric. To be sure, Mitchell (1994) dubs this the age of the "pictorial turn," and Hill & Helmers (2004) recognize the ubiquity of images and "their importance in dissemination and reception of information, ideas, and opinions—processes that lie at the heart of all rhetorical practices, social movements, and cultural institutions" (p. 19). Further, as Sturken and Cartwright (2001) make clear, The world we inhabit is filled with visual images. They are central to how we represent, make meaning, and communicate in the world around us. In many ways, our culture is an increasingly visual one. Over the course of the last two centuries, Western culture has come to be dominated by visual rather than oral over textual media. . . our values, opinions, and beliefs have increasingly come to be shaped in powerful ways by the many forms of visual culture that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. (p. 1) Interestingly enough, while Western culture has made this "turn" in the last two centuries, many indigenous cultures have a rich history of valorizing the visual over the alphabetic for thousands of years—despite Western culture's insistence that such a rhetoric move rendered these same indigenous people illiterate. Thus, while some look to classical Greek and Roman rhetoric to ground discussions of visual rhetoric, given the occurrence 111 of petroglyphs on all continents besides Antarctica, we are reminded that while the "formal study" or naming of rhetoric may have roots in ancient Greece and Rome, visual rhetoric theory and practice has roots across the globe and with all peoples. However, for the time being, and the purpose of this chapter, it is apparent that American Indian wampum belts and pictographs and petroglyphs are sites of visual and digital writing practices in the Americas that predate our current study of visual and digital rhetorics that often places the computer and the Internet at the center of our inquiry and thus offers a decolonial disciplinary critique of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry that situates its origins in the last 25 years or so. This decolonial approach, then, simultaneously looks back to histories of older technologies while critiquing the present and imagining possibilities for shared futures in dig/viz rhetoric inquiry. One way to imagine this shared future is to better monitor our own rhetoric for signs of colonial impositions that may inadvertently subjugate the technological knowledges and experiences of non-Western cultures. Thus, focusing on the rhetoric of hypertextuality and digital rhetoric—rather than "new media"—places the focus on the rhetorical work that is accomplished via technologies and acknowledges agency as a shared relationships between all actors, not only the technological actors and those with access to the newest, most heralded technology of any given moment. Further, as DeWitt (1996) asserts, "Hypertext disrupts, to a certain extent, our notions of reading: Memory is utilized in tandem with the machine; meaning is constructed still by making relationships, but indefinite choices are possible; connections are made both cognitively and electronically; and all electronic links are audience based" (p. 73). I posit that the same is true of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry, whereas new media inquiry and its rhetoric 112 hinders the technological relationships and possibilities—and thus agency—imagined by peoples without access to the newest media. Ultimately, a decolonial approach to hypertextualizing the stories of American Indian (and other non-Western pe0ples) technological expertise in tandem with Western stories of hypertext and dig/viz rhetoric offer us all a wealth of possibilities for diversifying and strengthening our inquiry and pedagogy. For one, studying wampum belts, rock art, and other indigenous technologies provides us with more robust information ecology theory and practice than we currently enjoy. Next, in a scholarly field where the rhetoric and practices of re-mixing and appropriation are becoming standard practice, American Indian intellectual traditions may give us pause when considering the ethics of these practices and their implications for indigenous cultures with a long, sordid history of colonial claiming and appropriation of—and often profiting from—traditional knowledges. Further, we might further build on the work of Huatong Sun's (2006) Chinese-centric theory of cultural usability to further understand how non- Westem cultures use and produce with Western and non-Western technologies differently that Westemers—and in an increasingly global marketplace that privileges user-centered design, such research might remind us that all our users are not reflections of ourselves. Additionally, this decolonial inquiry may provide us with better ways of accounting for culture and power dynamics in dig/viz rhetoric relationships than current actor-network and activity theory currently provide. Finally, forging these intellectual trade routes provide us with an impetus to begin more conversations of intra- and inter-cultural communication, the relationships between material rhetorics and dig/viz rhetoriCs, the relationships between old and new technologies, and the relationships between Western 113 and non-Western technological production, use, distribution, proliferation, literacies, and representations. 114 CHAPTER 4: INDIANS IN NOT-SO-UNEXPECTED PLACES: WRITING INDIANNESS INTO THE BLOGOPHERE (AND OTHER DIGITAL AND VISUAL PLACES) "I'll manage all right," said Water Spider, "I can spin a web." So she spun a thread from her body and wove it into a little bowl and fastened the little bowl on her back. Then she crossed over to the island and through the grass. She put one little coal of fire into her bowl and brought it across to the people. Every since, we have had fire. And the Water Spider still has her little bowl on her back. MariJo Moore (Cherokee), First Fire By the late 19'h century, Western anthropologists were working swiftly and furiously to save the "vanishing Indian" by collecting knowledges and artifacts from indigenous cultures. This collecting of American Indian cultures influenced the subsequent widespread and steadfast Western phenomenon of collecting all things Indian but forgetting, absenting, or disregarding the specific, historic, and tribal-based contexts for these material cultures. Through colonial oral, textual, digital, and visual rhetoric, decontextualized museum and personal collections of "Indian artifacts" typically reduce the plurality of on—going, contemporary, complex, and diverse American Indian cultures to one uniform, flat, static, pre-historic“, and ancient culture. In turn, these collections and their associated colonial rhetorics endorse and reinforce misunderstandings of American Indians and American Indian cultures, and the pervasiveness of these 115 misunderstandings is still evidenced today in contemporary museum displays, photographs, portraits, sculptures, children's books, movies, television shows and commercials, websites, and more. Thus, misinformation about who American Indians are and what American Indians look like surrounds us everyday. The prevalence of this misinformation begins to shape our understandings of Indianness at a very early age. In fact, Nambe Pueblo scholar Debbie Reese (a specialist in American Indian representations in children's books) shared in her March 2008 talk at Michigan State University that her research indicates that all children in the United States—Native and non-Native—develop their understandings of who American Indians are, how American Indians act, and what American Indians look like even before entering kindergarten and that those understandings are based on the representations put forth by children's books and other media (most of which are developed by non-Natives). Unfortunately, these understandings often play out in ways that parallel the following incidents Mvskoke (Muscogee/Creek) poet, musician, artist, photographer, and blogger Joy Harjo (2007“) describes in her blog“: For most of the world, turkey feathers in the hair and buckskin, equals Indian. Once years back, in a class, we studied images of Indians. One of the students took sheets of paper and markers to a preschool class in Boulder. She asked the children to draw an Indian. They all drew one of two images: a warrior on horseback brandishing bloody tomahawks, or delicate princesses, most of them on horseback. They weren't human beings, rather symbols, and the children had already internalized them. 116 When my daughter was just three, just before she went into Head Start, we went to sign her up at a preschool in Iowa City (where I was attending graduate school). The children surrounded us and danced around doing that Hollywood war whoop, you know the one. Their teacher was embarrassed. I was amazed that children that young had already taken in that false image that had nothing to do with being Indian, or Mvskoke, or Acoma, my daughter's other tribal affiliation. We’re still mostly portrayed in those flat images in art, literature, movies, and not just by non-Indians or three-year—olds. (p. 259) The hypertext woven by these stories demonstrates that not only is "Indian" an ascribed name—a romanticized simulation of Indianness—based on Western ethnographic, anthropologic, and rhetorical discovery, surveillance, collection, claiming/naming, (re)presentation, and commodification; "Indian" is also an ascribed image—a romanticized simulation of visible Indianness—based on Western ethnographic, anthropologic, and rhetorical discovery, surveillance, collection, claiming/naming, display, and commodification. As Yankton Dakota/Standing Rock Sioux historian and scholar Phil Deloria (2004) explains in Indians in Unexpected Places, textual and visual simulations of Indianness in popular culture accumulate into a monolithic fiction of Indianness that the public sphere expects to read and see in subsequent encounters with representations of American Indian identity. To explain, the fugitive poses captured in Western fiction and dime novels of the mid- to late- 18005, Wild West shows at the turn of the 19th century, and first Western films‘57 and art of the early 19‘h century paved the way for future 117 success of consistent stereotyped Indian imagery in radio and television Westerns and Western comic books in the mid-19003, Westem-themed computer games of the late 19005, and most recently empire-building and "playing Indian" video and multi—player, role playing games at the turn of the 20‘h century. Further, contemporary satellite and cable TV companies continue to commemorate this fiction with channels such as the Hallmark Channel, the Western Channel, and the Classic Western Channel broadcasting marathons of Little House on the Prairie, Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and the like. Needless to say, American Indians have consistently been portrayed as what is most wild about the Wild West, outside of the (post)modem world, and resistant of the tools and technologies that have signified Western (post)modernity. In essence, as Deloria asserts, American Indians have consistently been reduced to stereotypical one-dimensional figures in an increasingly in an increasingly multi- dimensional world. Thus, we rarely expect to see Indians portrayed as techno-savvy, as sports or comic book heroes, or in films actually portraying contemporary Indians. In response, Deloria illustrates how Indians work, live, and think in unexpected places through images of Geronimo in a Cadillac and an Indian woman in a beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer and other textual and visual stories of Indians participating in modernity and with technology. Ultimately, Deloria challenges readers to reconsider familiar expectations by forcing us to ask ourselves; why does dominant American culture name vehicles68 after Indian nations but do not expect to see an Indian driving a sports car; why do we have athletic teams named Redskins, mascots like Chief Illiniwek, and fan-spirited "tomahawk chops" yet educated college alumni who ignore the racist rhetoric of their team names and mascot/fan performances; and why do we prefer to "see" 118 American Indians as interacting with the spiritual wilderness rather than a technological world? In reality, the dominant assumption that American Indians are technologically disengaged, inferior, resistant, or primitive clashes dramatically with the real lives of many contemporary American Indians. For example, consider the reality of tribal councilmen who are considering the use of reservation lands as storage for nuclear and medical waste . . . [,] the tribal council that must choose between subcontractors who will design software that will integrate casino/bingo operations with overall tribal budgets—-or the tribal planner utilizing a Geographic Information System to track development of tribal roads and industry. (Baldwin, 1993, up) In addition to this technological expertise, as discussed in Chapter 3, American Indians have demonstrated a rich history of digital and visual rhetoric theory and practices through the creation and use of pictographs, petroglyphs, and wampum belts (as well as other indigenous sign technologies). Moreover, this chapter aims to simultaneously contribute to this highly sophisticated rhetorical and technological tradition by offering another case study of American Indian technological expertise with an emerging technology and consequently establish a "new" place in which we should expect to see American Indians working, thinking, playing, and communicating: blogs. From posting stories, poetry, photographs, recipes, music performances, tribal histories news updates, and information on tribal services powwows and other gatherings to networking with other American Indians and American Indian allies, providing language classes and preservation/revitalization resources, advocating political and 119 activist agendas, offering instructions for and exhibiting American Indian arts and crafts, and much more, American Indians are increasingly blogging and employing blogs in a variety of ways. Given this trend in digital and visual American Indian rhetorical work, this chapter draws upon case studies of sample American Indian blogs and interviews with NDN bloggers to investigate the relationships between how Americans Indians have used older and newer—and indigenous and Western—technologies, as well as the consistency and/or divergence between the rhetorical work of American Indian blog rhetorics and that of the American Indian rhetorical traditions traced in Chapter 1. Specifically, to the extent possible given the scope of this project, this chapter analyzes whether and how—like other Native rhetorics—American Indian blogs challenge dominant essentialized notions of Indian identity and support sovereignty, self- determination, community activism and renewal. In the process, this chapter addresses some of the potential promises and perils of this public sphere writing technology—from community building and cultural preservation and continuation, to cultural appropriation, intellectual property issues, and digital and visual rhetorical sovereignty—in the hopes that such threads of conversations may generate future discussion and possibilities for American Indian bloggers (and non-Indian allies) to address and reconcile the possible risks related to participating in the blogosphere. Ultimately, this chapter positions American Indian bloggers as crucial contributors to the rich intellectual traditions of American Indian technology and visual and digital rhetoric theory and practice and calls for rhetoric and writing and AIS scholars and teachers to further consider our ethical responsibilities in engaging American Indian blog rhetorics in our pedagogy, scholarship, conference planning, and tenure discussions. 120 Research Methods My research began with the "touring" and reading of a number of American Indian created and maintained blogs over the past two years (See Appendix A for a partial list of American Indian blogs I have been reading). After months of reading, I offered an informational and how-to workshop on American Indian blogging at the March 2007 MSU AISP Returning the Gift conference and presented a paper on the promises and perils of American Indian blogging at the April 2007 CIC-AIS conference at University of Iowa. At these events—as well as others, like the May 2007 "What's Next in Indigenous Studies?" Conference at University of Oklahoma and the 2008 Word Craft Circle/AISP Returning the Gift conference at Michigan State University—I was able to speak and network with other American Indian bloggers and readers of American Indian blogs and refine my inquiry. In fact, it was at some of these events that I met some of the research participants cited in this chapter. Although I certainly cite some of the information posted to the blogs I have been readings to support my assertions about what we can learn fiom American Indian blog rhetorics in the way that we cite any electronic source published to the public sphere of the Internet, I rely most heavily on my e-interviews with American Indian bloggers in order to remain consistent with my decolonial research methodology that values the reading of American Indian rhetorics through intellectual transmigrations and alliances. Thus, I resist replicating the dominant cycle established physical and visual spaces of consuming of all things Indian (through discovery, surveillance, collection, claiming/naming, (re)presentation, and commodification) in virtual and other intellectual spaces. However, I must admit that this decision was not based solely on my theoretical 121 framework and activist agenda; the interviews from the expert bloggers included in this chapter are critical to my study because they have far more experience with and thus knowledge of blogging than I do. At this point“, the American Indian bloggers I have interviewed include Debbie Reese, Jim Horn, Cynthia Lietich Smith, and Matthew Shepard. I met both Debbie Reese and Matthew Fletcher at AISP-sponsored events on the campus of Michigan State University; Debbie Reese introduced me to Cynthia Leitich Smith's Jingle Dancer at her 2008 workshop, and I subsequently started reading her blog; I stumbled across Jim Horn's blog while looking for American Indian recipes online. I e-mailed each of them a request for the interview, and upon an affirmative response, I sent a consent form and interview questions70 (See Appendices B & C). Consistent with my decolonial methodology, I insisted on identifying my research participants by name in my write up to ensure they receive credit for their technological experiences, opinions, and expertise. I recognize some limitations to this preliminary study. For one, the sample size is small. In spite of this, I think their answers—when constellated with what we learn from what has been published to their and other American Indian blogs—offer us an opening to better understanding the relationships between American Indian blog rhetorics and other American Indian rhetorical and technological traditions. This understanding is complicated by the fact, however, that all but one of these bloggers are published (in print) writers. Thus, perhaps one could argue that the relationships between writing on/in blogs and elsewhere are understandably more fluid among this population of American Indian bloggers than with others. In acknowledgement of these limitations, 1 position this study as a preliminary one and have all intentions of further developing this research 122 project in order to further learn from more, and more diverse representatives of, American Indian bloggers. Introduction to Featured Blogs & Bloggers To begin, former school teacher and current AIS faculty at University of Illinois- Champaign-Urbana, Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo) writes a prolific blog71 titled American Indians in children 's literature: Critical perspectives and discussion of American Indians in children 's books, the school curriculum, popular culture, and society-at-large. She has been on Blogger since January 2006, and has two other blogs: A . f... . .. __ ..V ‘ . __. __ ..J . u ’ " c wflwflg m , . , . 1 Native Perspective on U] UC 5 Chief v)"- 09" in mg!" n!- I'rlul W nun. Anom'on Ma. ab'flit 9‘" 3: y .. ""'""'"' ""‘" “’ Illiniwek"72 and Images of Indians in I! I1 infertile] to not! my. mm: 90 r16. ‘ MI (an war was Inc-um a mum mod I. 1;;1‘::r"“°'“'°‘"“°‘ Children 's Books. 73 Retired chef Jim Horn ‘: » ~ s 9...?“33 (Pikunii/Blackfeet) has been on Blogger ”tantamount FiQUfl? 4-13 Jim Horn's (2008) Native since October 2005 and maintains several American Food blog. Turtle Talk, blogs, including Native Chefs," Native "UNI: AllUCT IXD’t-LNOl 5' IA“ PROV-IA“ t'tP‘i‘lS . . . 75 . . urcmcan donut manna) vrlorur whim“; vm'nr Amerlcan FOOds, and Natlve Amerlcan MATTHEW L M FIF.T\‘HFI “'chtVA T. MINI-El LATI- Iv'. FORT Recipes76—as well as the website Native American Cuisine.77 Additionally, he is a mow-u "2‘? I?“ 1. o Pokagon Fund Projects Announced '. . . regular contributor to the Chef'ZChef .. " " . 3 ‘ . ' _ Community Blog.78 Next, assistant m ":LWJ‘. Fund irrau :mdmg j'hhl pr whim .. \‘m-mlrr ‘1‘ 1' m» "4‘ v0. “..“”: Figure 4 2_ Turtle Talk bl o g professor of law and Director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University, appellate judge,79 and consultant,80 Matthew Fletcher (Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians) is the most active contributing blogger 123 to Turtle T aIkB 1—the blog for the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law (see Figure 4.2)—with over 609 tags as author since its inception in September 2007.82 Fletcher also contributes to For the Seventh Generation Blog,83 which provides news and views on federal Indian law and tribal governance from law professors who teach in the field. Finally, contemporary writer of young adult (YA) , Native American, fantasy, and gothic fantasy C Y N S A T l O N 8 mi “in an; , 0 rr a. vrn-n a stories, Cynthia Leitich Smith :33?” if???“ w ‘ I.L;,I.'L.':L., (Mvskoke/Creek) is also the author of two wafer-mm: .... blogs related to children's and YA literature and literacy: cynsations'“ (refer to Figure 4.3) and spookycyn.85 On Blogger since . . . . . April 2001, Smith's profile boasts 21,329 Figure 4.3: Cynthia Leitich Smlth's 2008 c nsations bl . , . . ( ) y 09 Views. Furthermore, as aforementioned, in addition to the case studies of these four American Indian bloggers, this chapter will also draw upon some information provided on other American Indian blogs as necessary to make connections between this focus group of American Indian bloggers and other American Indian blogging practices in the blogosphere. Relationships between "Traditional "American Indian Rhetorics and American Indian Digital and Visual Rhetorics As outlined in Chapter 1, American Indian cultural, material, oral, and textual rhetorics have typically support sovereignty, self-determination, community renewal and activism. Although a more thorough treatment of this study could certainly benefit readers, for purpose of garnering some preliminary understandings of the relationships 124 between and across the rhetorical and activist work of American Indian print, material, oral, and dig/viz rhetorics, I will briefly assess how American Indian blog rhetorics (as a representative contemporary American Indian dig/viz rhetoric) are consistent with and divergent from the rest of the American Indian rhetorical tradition discussed thus far in this dissertation. Sovereigng. In sum, from the first wampum belts woven to establish treaties with the settlers and stories of cosmological, lifeway, spiritual processes etched in and painted on stone to the Aztec and Maya codices, Vine Deloria's work on American Indian law, and Craig Womack's work on Creek nationalist literary traditions, American Indian 186, and/or rhetorics have traditionally sought to support sovereignty—legal, rhetorica intellectual sovereignty. Similarly, the American Indian bloggers interviewed for this chapter support a variety of sovereignties. Clearly, both of the blogs to which Fletcher contributes were created to facilitate primarily legal sovereignty for Indian Nations and to educate readers on those sovereign rights. For example, in our interview, Fletcher reveals the purpose of Turtle Talk is "To make legal and political information about American Indians available for easy access, with emphasis on Great Lakes Indians." This process of proving information on legal sovereignty also results in the practice of and advocacy for rhetorical and intellectual sovereignty as well. Fletcher adds that another purpose of TurtleTalk is "To provide information about the MSU College of Law’s Indigenous Law and Policy Center." Thus, Fletcher and the other indigenous bloggers of TurtleTalk by exercise their intellectual and rhetorical sovereignty by informing us about the Center's current projects (such as the Michigan Odawa History Project) as well as other news that supports indigenous intellectual, rhetorical, and legal sovereignty (such as notice of 125 White Earth Band Chippewa, Honor the Earth Director, and 1996 and 2000 green party vice-presidential candidate Winona LaDuke's appearance on Comedy Central's Colbert Report on June 12, 2008 where she spoke about tribal sovereignty, politics, etc.). Additionally, Reese's blogs specifically and strongly support rhetorical sovereignty. Reese's commitment to educating the public about the importance of understanding visual rhetorical sovereignty for American Indians is evidenced in her extensive research on the damaging and healthy renditions of Indianness children's books (and the posting of the images that led her to those conclusions) and the psychological effects of these images. Furthermore, she provides sound pedagogical advice for including more accurate representations of Indianness in our curriculum (such as her "Get---Reject" List, which provides teachers with better reading alternatives to popular children's books with stereotyped Western renditions of Indianness") on her American Indians in Children 's Literature and Images of Indians in Children 's Books. Finally, Horn notes that a benefit to blogging is that it "Allows opinions and ideas to be shared easily without institutional censorship," another form of rhetorical sovereignty. Self Determination. Through the practice of legal, intellectual, and rhetorical sovereignty, American Indians can harness the agency to autonomously claim their own knowledges and histories and determine their own destinies. From the two-row wampum belt that signified separate destinies for Indians and non-Indians to the work of early 19'" century Native writers”, there has been a precedent for American Indian resistance against colonial political control and constructs of Indianness. American Indian bloggers, likewise, share this intellectual, political, and rhetorical trajectory. 126 Reese is very specific about her sense of self; on each of her blogs, she makes clear: "I am tribally enrolled at Nambe Pueblo in northern New Mexico. I'm from the Upper Village (Yates family). A former school teacher, I currently teach in UIUC's AIS program." She adds that her interests include "Teaching!" She has taught in public elementary schools in public schools and in two schools for American Indians: Riverside Indian School (Anadarko, OK) and Santa Fe Indian School (Santa Fe, NM). Further, at the University of Illinois, she has taught: Children's Literature, Social Studies Methods (elementary and early childhood), Politics of Children's Literature, Intro to AIS, and History of American Indian Education. In addition to her rhetorical moves toward her own personal self-determination, Reese demonstrates the importance for self determination for all Native peoples and communities by sharing research on the negative psychological effects of American Indian stereotypes on Native children, maintaining a blog that defends the move to discontinue Chief Illiniwek, and more. Likewise, Smith makes similar rhetorical moves as Reese, in that she exercises self-determination and argues for self-determination for other groups as well. To explain, on her blogs, Smith identifies as Mvskoke/Creek, an author of fiction for young readers, and a faculty member for the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She reminds her readers of her contemporary American Indian-themed writing, such books as Jingle Dancer (Morrow, 2000), Rain Is Not My Indian Name (HarperCollins, 2001), and Indian Shoes (HarperCollins, 2002) and indicates an expansion in her writing interests which now include fantasy, including Santa Knows (Dutton, 2006)——a picture book co-authored by her husband Greg Leitich Smith—and an upper-level YA gothic fantasy novel: Tantalize (Candlewick, 2007). 127 Moreover, she supports self-determination for all underrepresented cultures and communities and links to resources she has compiled children's and YA books that responsibly write about diverse themes and communities, including from underrepresented cultures89 and interracial family themes”. Thus, she fulfills her goal for blogging: "to raise awareness of literature for young people, though reading recommendations, publishing news, writer resources, and interviews with various industry professionals. . . . [And] to encourage writers, to promote literacy, and to keep in touch with the readers of [her] books." Communig Activism and Renewal. Given the importance of community to American Indian cultural survival, American Indian rhetorics historically share the activist agendas of supporting community agency and renewal. Contributing to this tradition, all the bloggers included in this study employ their agency as American Indian writers in the blogosphere in service of their many and varied communities: familial, tribal, racial, intellectual, and professional. For example, in our interview, Jim Horn shared that he blogs "To promote Native Native American Recipes w my: :dqfiullfli :3; “luv A!!!” bum 'Lui I’m in I.‘:« Ind «at mum q tad NIP” rrrur' 1mm ‘6 ud unwed-u. arr-11.: ant-ah. hm- APE-email,“ American food as a cuisine and have it’s All"! Mr All] ‘. mun: \IUII \Imr l.0(‘All0§:llL\'1/L‘|A Hutu: armtl , 'j '1‘ :.-:= _-_v..;-.:_=u.:. 4...; ‘ ' be“ —————.—-— {Km/M (”yak “a; fl....5.n,,. 4. tttg.'._: .l 5251: :9 final ."‘“'n:»'u than: 534-: 5" an Gun 4;." can: .511“ “MAIN-A) intuit-4,100! Cooking “1th Blueberries Elm-ban Barman linden It-num J. turn-en“ 'ilfinh Nun-trim i ' '. (1‘! flaw . 9; . .. I my m-Jie twp-Minotaur .vtlttxlrmrcx) ' , :q ‘p;.p.m‘ miiug 31%le " ' ' i I. L I "an unanimity, ' 6'! ' '1. . ‘ 1*"- him it "when. MnmiL I MM hut-nu can [I contribution to the world cuisine recognized." He continues, "I am a retired chef and find it useful to keep busy and active and like a lot of people vain enough Figure 4.4: Jim Horn's (2008) Native Amen'c R ' I . . . . an OClp es b 09 to think I can make just a little difference." He works to make this difference through several decolonial rhetorical strategies, from the naming of his blogs to the content and sense of community he provides on/in them. 128 To illustrate, Horn positions American Indian food as critical to the understanding of American cuisine via the subtitle to his Native American Cuisine blog: Native Food, the Original American Cuisine. Further, by providing a wide variety of recipes from a wide variety of specific American Indian communities (e. g., Chickasaw Pumpkin cookies, Cherokee Nation Grape Dumplings, Santa Clara Pueblo Norma Naranjo's Pueblo Prune and Apple Pastelitos, and Fond du Lac tribal elder Sharon Shuck's recipe for blueberry bannock), Hom's blogs offers inviting virtual communities for all chefs indigenous to the Americas, as well as non-Native chefs interested in cuisine indigenous to the Americas. Finally, Horn's work also inspires professional and tribal community activism. After all, he asserts that American Indian-operated casinos that fail to share their local American Indian cuisine with their patrons have missed a great opportunity to educate non-Natives. Thus, he encourages these casinos to realize and rectify this misstep and provide historical accounts and geographical and cultural contexts for indigenous foods and recipes (e. g., his post on the historical geography of Southwestern cuisine: "Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, New Mex, or Whose Mex? Notes on the Historical Geography of Southwestern Cuisine"). Ultimately, then, Horn's blog writing works to increase the visibility and understanding of American Indian cuisine for both his professional and indigenous communities. Although each of the case blogs evidences both the practice of and advocacy for American Indian activism, each of Debbie Reese's blogs is especially activist in nature. For example, her A Native Perspective on UIUC's "Chief Illiniwek"91 makes clear that "Through the committed work of many people, UIUC has finally ended its use of 'Chief Illiniwek,’ but much is yet to be done with regard to racism and oppression on our 129 campus, and it will be done by activism and concerted efforts to create a just society." She invites readers to visit the social justice organization links she provides, particularly l-Resist so as "to see how the intemet can be used to document social justice work." Further, in her interview Reese notes that the purpose of her American Indians in Children 's Books blog is To reach the audience that works directly with children and books. As a former classroom teacher, I know from experience that teachers and school librarians have little money to join professional associations by which they’re receive [sic] journals. And, they have little time to track down articles and books that will provide for professional development. They do, however, have access to the intemet, and I developed the blog to take my research to them. The material I post is shorter than journal articles, purposefully, because they have little time. This activist stance not only shapes Reese's content choices and audience, but also the reason why she blogs in the first place: To take info directly from 'the ivory tower' to teachers, librarians, parents, students. In Native studies, we are deeply committed to serving Native populations, and the blog enabled me to reach Native readers. Our leading and most esteemed Native scholars challenge our work in the academy... how is it helping Nation bldg, etc. My blog does that. Finally, Reese also assisted her tribe in developing its own blog for the Nambe Falls 92 n Travel Center, owned and operated by the Nambe Pueblo Development Corporation, of the Nambe O'Ween-Ge, one of the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos in New Mexico." 130 Ultimately, then, Reese practices, inspires, and facilitates digital and visual activism as a Native woman within a number of her intellectual communities: familial, tribal, racial, intellectual, and professional. Summm' of Consistencies. From this preliminary study, we can begin to see consistencies emerging across all American Indian rhetorics and the rhetorical and activist work accomplished therein—from tactics of sovereignty, self-determination, and community activism and renewal. Consequently, we may begin to question the extent to which Western technologies are adopted and utilized by American Indians in contrast to indigenous technologies for similar rhetorical reasons and ends. Reese provides us with her reasoning behind choosing any commmrication technology: "I use anything and everything I can to benefit Native children and Native nations." Likewise, Horn explains that he chooses to use "blogs to disseminate my point of view or illustrate recipes not readily available. To do the same I would have to publish and distribute printed material at a cost to me or the reader. Blogs can fit quite well into our traditions of oral history and storytelling." Thus, given these ties between American Indian rhetorics, technologies, and literacies, it is my hope—dear readers—that emerging paths of inquiry worth interrogating will be traveled in R/W and AIS in order to further and better understand what American Indian bloggers can tell us about digital and visual rhetorics, the relationships between how American Indians develop, adopt, and appropriate indigenous and Western technologies, and the relationships between older and newer American Indian rhetorics and technologies. Potential Promises and Perils of A merican Indian Blogging and Blog Rhetorics 131 Despite these ties between American Indian rhetorics, technologies, and literacies, then, perhaps we should ferret out the distinctive qualities of blogs and blogging that may cause us to quickly adopt this communication technology for our rhetorical and activist ends—or to understandably take pause. Going into this study, I hypothesized some of the promises and perils that may result from American Indian blogs and blogging, including the benefits of challenging stereotypes, building community, and preserving culture and the issues of cultural appropriation and the intellectual property rights infringement. My preliminary findings on these measures follows. Challenging Stereotypes. To begin, this small sampling of blogs alone should underscore the diversity of American Indian bloggers and thus American Indian cultures. Understanding this diversity is key to complicating and dismantling the colonial, monolithic identity that many attach to “Nativeness." Consequently, readers of American Indian blogs should benefit from the alternative and diverse representations of Nativeness expressed therein—all of which have the potential to combat stereotypes, fetishism, and racism which has been established as still persistent in contemporary Western media. For example, from Nambe Falls Travel Center blog, we learn that their services include: regular, flex, and diesel fuel; free wireless Internet; Arby's; Java City coffee bar; convenience store; US. Post Office; Discount Tobacco Shop; and local jewelry, arts, and crafts. Consequently, readers of this blog are forced to confront their assumptions about where they might expect to see Indians and Indian relationships with Western technologies and commercialism. This is the goal for bloggers other than those included in the aforementioned case studies as well. For example, the purpose of the blog The Marigold Trail, written by an 132 anonymous San Juan Pueblo/Mexica writer, is specifically to confront and critique the racist and essentialized portrayals of indigenous peoples of the Americas. In his profile, he proclaims to his readers that he is "showin' up as an urban Indian in the 21St century, so best to check your stereotypes at the door. " In his pivotal text, Custar Died for your Sins, Sioux scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. (1969) claims, "Indian people . . . have a chance to re- create a type of society for themselves that can defy, demystify, and educate the rest of American society" (p. 268). Consequently, similar to other American Indian scholarship, then, NDN blogging can simultaneously serve as an act of resistance to stereotypes and an act of rhetorical sovereignty and self-determination. Although there are certainly limitations in readership to American Indian blogs by non-Native readers, many American Indian bloggers are now learning how to optimize their search engine results—all the while building intellectual communities and alliances—as a way to reach more potential readers. However, regardless of these limitations, by adding up the visitor tickers and profile view statistics provided on these four case blogs, we learn that thousands of people are reading/have read the thousands of posts written by just these four bloggers. Therefore, by extrapolating this known data, we can assume that the dozens of American Indian bloggers about which I know are writing altogether hundreds of thousands of posts—all of which have the potential combat prejudice and racism by challenging dominant essentialized notions of Indian identity and supporting sovereignty, self-determination, community. Building Communigg. As mentioned in the previous analysis section of this chapter, like other American Indian rhetorics, American Indian blog rhetorics work to support community activism and renewal. In turn, unlike other American Indian 133 rhetorics, American Indian blog rhetorics may provide more opportunities for this rhetorical work to result in the building of communities as well. As Reese explains, through my blog, I’ve had opportunities to work with Native librarians, educators, etc. These opportunities were not occurring at the rate they are at present. I attribute that increase to the blog. That means Native people are reading it, finding my research valuable, and want more in-depth conversation; hence the invitations to speak, do workshops, etc. This is very gratifying and validates what I am doing with the blog. Likewise, Smith acknowledges that her blogs offer her the "opportunity to reach teachers, librarians, parents, and young readers, and this includes those in the American Indian community." From these case blogs alone, we witness the building of communities among and across American Indians, teachers, librarians, readers, students, lawyers and other legal experts, chefs, activists, historians, and writers—just to name a few. Thus, American Indian blogs and blogging has the potential to benefit a host of communities to which we belong, be it our immediate and extended families, bands, tribes, Nations—even our intellectual, professional, and scholarly communities—and further complicate and blur our understandings of and the traditional boundaries separating these communities. For example, blogs can connect enrolled and non-enrolled Indians; connect reservation, rural, and urban Indians; connect "isolated" American Indians to their Nations. Thus, although some American Indian scholars like Choctaw Devon Mihesuah (1998) remind us of the importance of writing in ways that will benefit our communities, many of us who are geographically or politically displaced from our 134 Nations can consider other ways of imagining "community" that extends beyond the Nation yet still benefits a community of Native folk and fosters alliances. Preserving Culture. Not only do American Indian blogs provide us with unmatched opportunities for building communities, but they also provide us with another venue for preserving existing ones as well. After all, each of the American Indian bloggers profiled in this chapter are working as agents for social change in one or more of their communities, whether it is to resist or call attention to the ongoing, devastating effects of colonization on American Indian identities, self-determination, and sovereignty or to gain more visibility for American Indian chefs, bloggers, writers, and organizations. Such work, though, is most effective when maintaining strong ties and commitments to these communities. By way of example, when working to assist her tribe in developing blog content appropriate for her home community, Reese explicates, "That means using my training as a researcher to identify and locate items that our tribe may want. Our tribe is small (under 1000 enrolled) and that small size allows me to know our tribal leaders and exchange email with them when I come across items I think they’d want, I write to them and we begin the process of acquiring the item." Appropriating Culture/Infringing on Intellectual Property Rights. During the Q&A session after my talk on wampum as hypertext at the 2007 What's Next in Indigenous Studies? Conference, I spoke about my preliminary research and practice in American Indian blogging. A Cherokee Nation elder approached me after the talk to express his concerns regarding blogs, website, and other information on the Internet (including the Cherokee Nation's online language classes), which boiled down to the assessment that online venues provided more opportunities for ethic fraud and the 135 appropriation of American Indian intellectual property. He cited a case of an enrolled Cherokee Nation basket weaver and her how-to blogs on weaving Cherokee double-wall and double-woven baskets and suggested that subsequent basket weaving by non- Cherokees could undermine both the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation and the profitability of certified Cherokee woven baskets. In response, I agree that the online nature of this cultural information is certainly offers the potential for much wider exposure to a much larger audience that other technologies (e. g., books)—given Technorati's (2008) tracking of 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. However, someone has to go looking for this information; and I suggest that if someone wants to steal and/or appropriate cultural knowledges (including material culture), that someone will access that information regardless of where it is published or publicized. This same basket weaver, for example, has also published books on the same Cherokee weaving techniques and baskets; therefore, she is providing other opportunities for non-Indians to claim and appropriate this cultural knowledge. Further, this same Cherokee citizen and weaver is also a member of the California State Bar and Cherokee Nation Bar associations, so perhaps anyone considering stealing her intellectual property ought to re-consider. Additionally, the elder worries that blogs could be used by non-Indians to play Indian; thus, he is concerned that the opportunity for spreading misinformation may be greater than with other communication technologies. Again, although I agree that blogs do provide a new venue for ethnic identity fraud, I am not convinced that the chances are more or less. Nonetheless, even if the opportunities for ethnic fraud are greater, so then are the opportunities for identifying these frauds and bringing them to justice—as well as 136 the spreading of accurate, responsible information. Furthermore, it is important to note that non-Natives are not the only ones capable of disseminating misinformation or inappropriate information about American Indians. In spite of my personal doubts regarding the extent to which American Indian blogs and blogging encourage cultural appropriation, identity fraud, and intellectual property rights infringement, I expected at least a couple of the bloggers I interviewed to express similar concerns as this elder when asked: "Do you have any concerns regarding blogs and their impact on American Indians and American Indian communities? If so, please describe." Interestingly enough, although Fletcher noted that the Internet in general offers a space for spreading misinformation on any topic, no one American Indian blogger interviewed for this study expressed a concern for cultural appropriation, ethnic fraud, or intellectual property rights infiingements transpiring because of or through the use of blogs. In fact, Reese conveyed not a concern over non-Native bloggers or readers; instead she placed the onus on American Indian bloggers to avoid posting inappropriate cultural content: "If someone were to use their blog to disclose information not meant for an outside reader, that would be a concern." Reading Reese's response to this question, I am reminded of an old counseling mantra: We have no control over other people's actions—only our own actions and responses to those actions. Thus, if American Indian bloggers are cognizant of avoiding blogging on culturally sacred information, through our content choices we have some agency over the information available for distribution and possible subsequent appropriation. Further, as readers of blogs, we have control over which bloggers we deem credible and the information we choose to believe that is posted on these blogs. This may 137 mean extending our research skills and practices employed elsewhere to blog research as well. For example, in contrast to the other bloggers interviewed who either identify their specific tribal affiliation on their blog(s) or in a direct link to a biography fi'om their blog(s), Horn is less specific about his Native identity. On his blogs it is clear that he is of American Indian heritage, but he writes several blogs under the screen name siksikaboy. Both his Windows Live Spaces and Blogger profiles indicate that he is located in Montana, but his Live Spaces profile also notes that he is interested in business networking, has lived in Montana, California, Philippines, and Hong Kong, enjoys obscure humor, country music, and outdoorsy fashion, has pets, and appreciates it when Natives answer "ours" when asked "what do you call this place." Further, in my interview with him, he noted that his tribal affiliations are Pukiini and Blackfeet. Other Concerns. In response to being asked about their concerns related to blogs and their impact on American Indians and American Indian communities, Fletcher notes, "Well, there’s no monetary benefit. I just want the information to be out there. Most bad legal and policy decisions in Indian law and policy are based on ignorance. . . . misinformation can be spread." Also distressed about misinformation, Horn asserts, Like anything that you read blogs must be taken with an eye for the truth. Since our news media seems to have left discernment for truth and reporting of unbiased facts on the editing floor, blogs allow participation and response far beyond the comment column. Some blogs dabble in areas of ideology and fact and or truth blur with the bloggers personal opinions. Finally, in another vein, Smith would "like to see more Native youth publishing on the 138 Web." These additional concerns—as well as the aforementioned promises and perils of American Indian blogging—should consequently serve as points of convergence among W and AIS, as outlined in the next section and last chapter. Summm. I am hopeful that the preliminary promises of blogs are realized by American Indians and our communities. Further, albeit valid concerns, I am hopeful that the aforementioned concerns related to American Indian blogging can be negotiated by NDN bloggers, whether it is spearheading the development of Native-based blogging services, promoting stricter copyright laws that directly protect indigenous intellectual property, mentoring more American Indian youth to blog and working to publish more accurate information related to American Indians and American Indian communities. American Indians and tribes have employed survivance (what Vizenor calls resistance + survival) ever since we have records of indigenous rhetorics, so why not employ survivance tactics for resisting the legacy of colonization and the rhetoric of empire as well as preserving our cultures, memories, histories, and languages in blogs as well? Implications for W and AIS: Toward a Civil Rights Movement and Digital and Visual Cultural Rhetorics Inquiry Given the aforementioned and demonstrated benefits and concerns for American Indian bloggers and communities, there are both ethical and intellectual implications for R/W and AIS that require professional, scholarly and pedagogical action. Ethical Implications. In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) passed a resolution calling for the immediate retirement of American Indian mascots, symbols, images, and personalities used by schools, colleges, universities, athletic teams, and organizations. The APA justified this resolution on the following: 139 It is especially difficult when American Indian peoples are trying to present their tribal identity as accurately as possible, to have the dominant culture employ symbols, mascots, images and personalities that depict American Indians in an inaccurate and offensive manner . . . [particularly for] American Indian children and adolescents whose identities are still in the formative stage of development. . . . For a group that already occupies an ethnic minority status in this country and is not often depicted in a positive manner within mainstream media, literature, books, and education, the display of deni grating symbols, images, and mascots can be very damaging. (p. 2) Furthermore, the APA asserts that such damaging symbology, imagery, and personalities are forms of discrimination because they are inaccurate portrayals of specific cultural groups and thus is an infringement on the civil rights of American Indians. In addition, the APA is concerned that dominant visual rhetorics of Indianness have the potential to teach children and adolescents that the stereotyping of American Indians and other ethnic minorities is acceptable, thereby undermining and infiinging on the rights of American Indians peoples and Nations to self determination. Moreover, the APA urges, "If not attended to immediately, the continued use of such symbols stands the risk of causing serious harm to future generations of American Indian people," as they convey misinformation to American Indians and non-Indians about American Indian cultures, societies, lifeways, and spiritualities, thereby fostering negative perceptions of those cultures and creating an environment in which one group may be perceived as less than another (pp. 2-3). 140 On March 7, 2007, the American Sociological Association (ASA) released a statement that recognized that the use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sports contributes to socially-constructed "racial prejudice, stereotypes, individual discrimination and institutional discrimination . . . that undermine education about the lives of Native American peoples . . . [and] harm[s] Native American people in psychological, educational, and social ways." The ASA continues, the continued use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport shows disrespect for Native American spiritual and cultural practices . . . [and the wishes of] many Native American individuals across the United States [who] have found Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport offensive and called for their elimination. (n.p.) Thus, the ASA joined the host of American Indian advocacy group and academic, educational and civil rights organizations that condemn the continued the use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sports, including but not limited to: American Anthropological Association, American Psychological Association, Association of American Indian Affairs, Modern Language Association, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Education Association, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, and United States Commission on Civil Rights. Given the detrimental effects of stereotyped digital and visual imagery of American Indian identity, R/W and AIS has an ethical responsibility to join in the advocacy for American Indian dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty. All of our professional organizations should join in this civil rights movement to stand up against and eradicate 141 this digital and visual racism. This includes publishing statements much like the APA and ASA, and with our unique areas of expertise, we may be positioned to significantly contribute intellectually to such statements and will certainly reach professionals who may not be aware of such research and activism. Moreover, as scholars of dig/viz rhetoric and AIS, whose intellectual and pedagogical work influences the scholarly, activist, and knowledge work of others, we have an ethical responsibility to include informed discussions of American Indian dig/viz rhetoric theory and practice and related imperatives in our inquiry and scholarship. Likewise, as educators of American Indian and non-Native students and future professionals who will be writing in public, organizational, and professional fields that distribute information that relates to, represents, and reaches American Indian peoples and audiences, we also have an ethical responsibility to include informed discussions of American Indian dig/viz rhetoric theory and practice and related imperatives in our pedagogy. Intellectual Imglications. These American Indian case blogs and bloggers demonstrate that decolonial dig/viz rhetoric inquiry in AIS has the potential to extend indigenous intellectualism to broader technological, digital, and visual spaces—and reminds us that visual and digital rhetoric is always already cultural. Thus, given that we now find ourselves at what Stuart Hall (1997) dubs the "in between" of different cultures, I posit that it is imperative that more scholars of dig/viz rhetoric examine the interplay between power, culture, and technological expertise, agency, and literacies. Likewise, I assert that is essential that more American Indian scholars engage in technological inquiry and practice, including on the World Wide Web where the realities of in- betweenness are ever-present, especially for American Indians. Studying the relationships 142 between privilege, responsibility, history, and culture—such as the Western paradigm of progress and its influence on the adoption of specific technologies and the perception of the technological literacies, or lack thereof, among indigenous cultures—gives context to our dig/viz inquiry and thus should be considered when developing our studies and curricula. Ultimately, then, despite Hill and Helmers' (2004) call, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, to shift the naming of our visual inquiry from "visual culture studies" to "visual rhetoric studies," the reminder of this dissertation promotes the study and teaching of digital and visual cultural rhetorics, where the power of both visual culture and dig/viz rhetoric studies is harnessed, and power and culture are recognized and interrogated. Building on Henry Louis Gates (1985) assertion in "Race, " Writing, and Diflerence that we must "analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us" (p. 15), I propose that we analyze the ways in which dig/viz rhetorics relate to colonialism, race and other cultural studies—and how attitudes toward those represented digitally and visually as less than human generate and structure dig/viz texts by us and about us, which subsequently influence rhetorical practices, social movements, and cultural institutions. However, given our backgrounds and training, doing so may prove to be no easy task. Just as W.J.T. Mitchell (1995) posits, the study of "visual culture is . . . a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines" (p. 540), I posit that so too is digital culture. Thus, dig/viz rhetoric inquiry should forge intellectual trade routes at these inter- and trans- disciplinary convergences and cross roads that support by engaging in intellectual transmigrations across verbal, visual, digital, and cultural discourses. 143 Mitchell promotes not a discipline, but an "indiscipline," which he locates "at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines," or "sites of inquiry characterized by turbulence or incoherence." As Hill and Helmers summarize, "If a discipline is a way of insuring the continuity of a set of collective practices (technical, social, professional, etc.), 'indiscipline' is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the continuity is broken and the practices comes into question" (qtd. in Hill & Helmers, pp. 18-19). This proposed indiscipline would put into conversation the work currently being done by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, from art theory, anthropology, and psychology to rhetoric, cultural, and media studies. However, rather than fostering these conversations in the traditional, linear cross-disciplinary way, I suggest that we collectively build and contribute to a trans-disciplinary field, to which we all can bring our own highly distinctive and irreducible dig/viz expertise. Thus, crafting a dynamic in-discipline through trans-disciplinary inquiry would extend to and engage all intellectuals who study and engage in dig/viz cultural rhetoric inquiry, including, but not limited to: technical writers with intimate knowledges and experiences with creating charts, graphs, and instruction manuals; laborers on the automotive factory floor who train new floor employees and technical writers on assembling a part via performance and engineering drawings; sign language specialists who digitally and visually communicate highly rhetorical and specialized to their hearing impaired client; American Indian bloggers who provide instructions on how to travel to their travel center, how to make the perfect buffalo burgers, and how to make a Cherokee double-wall basket; scholars and practitioners in art history, visual arts, visual communication technology, film studies, women's studies, African American studies, 144 AIS, Chicano/a studies, Latina/o studies, Queer studies, disability studies, and the list goes on. The work of these scholars and practitioners should be incorporated into our dig/viz cultural rhetorics scholarship and pedagogy in responsible ways as the colonized have distinctive and irreducible expertise in being digitally and visually colonized, and colonizers have distinctive and irreducible expertise in (re)eolonizing their subjects in dig/viz modes—in conscious and subconscious ways."3 Ultimately, imagining the study of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry as a trans-disciplinary "indiscipline" and deeply embedded in cultural practices is a decolonial move, in that no one "owns" the inquiry and many can contribute to better understandings of how dig/viz rhetorics signify in culturally-saturated and -significant ways. On What American Indians Can Teach Us about Digital and Visual Cultural Rhetorics Inquiry At this point, it is clear that I employed a trans-disciplinary approach to facilitate my dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry. Drawing primarily upon technological and dig/viz rhetorical theory, practice, and expertise within AIS, W, and cultural studies—as well as the experiential knowledge of American Indian bloggers—I imagined an American Indian dig/viz rhetorics "indiscipline" that could inform AIS, WW, and cultural studies, as well as other fields interested in dig/viz cultural rhetorics. This indiscipline, in turn, has allowed me to build and manage and research project that is unique to all three of these independent fields; however, the results should be of interest to each of these fields and perhaps consequently foster further trans-disciplinary inquiry between and across these fields. After all, thus far this study has—among other things—demonstrated that the history of colonization has and the on-going para-colonial condition in the Americas 145 continues to shape how we see American Indians in relation to technology and that dig/viz rhetorics from and about American Indians signify in culturally-saturated and significant ways. Further, this study mapped preliminary consistencies in rhetorical work across American Indian rhetorics—textual, oral, material, digital, and visual. Finally, this chapter also analyzed the potential benefits and concerns regarding American Indian blogs and bloggers. Nevertheless, there are countless other aspects related to dig/viz rhetorics inquiry about which American Indians can teach us, provided that we are cognizant of the signposts along our intellectual transmigrations. The reminder of this chapter, then, examines some of the signposts I encountered along my decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetorics journey: Blog rhetorics. First, if it was not clear before reading this study, it should be evident now that American Indians can tell us quite a bit about blog rhetorics and blogging theory and practice. Thus, other cultural groups can and should contribute to this emerging scholarship trajectory. Not only would doing so position early adopters of color the chance to shape the blogosphere itself, but the scholarship surrounding blogging as well. Ultimately, then, American Indian bloggers and blog researchers can contribute to both a better understanding of dig/viz implications for AIS and to cultural implications for existing blog rhetoric scholarship in or adjacent to R/W studies, including the future of rational—critical debates in public spheres (Barton, 2005), the relationships between rhetoric, community, and culture of blogs (Gurak, et. al, 2004), the role of blogs in promoting literacy (Huffaker, 2004) and teaching of composition (Tryon, 2006), building community with blogs (Stauffer, 2002), and issues of identity, ethos, and symbolic exchanges in news blogs (MacDougall, 2005). Each of these themes could be further 146 interrogated as they relates to American Indian blogs. For example, when asked about the practice of linking blogs, all but one of the bloggers noted the potential for community building via their blogs. Further, although Horn only links his blogs together, the other bloggers linked to other blogs as a way of social networking, building alliances, and educating the public. Smith explains, My approach is more community-oriented than most, and I make an effort to highlight Native literature (and its principals). Debbie Reese has the best Indian-lit-specific blog on the youth front, for example, and I’m able to steer new traffic her way by my more industry-wide approach. . . . I like [sic] to the blogs of my husband, who also is my sometimes co-author, and beyond that link to a page on the main site which, in turn, lists the more prominent youth literature blogs on the Web. Fletcher links to "Other Indian law and policy-related blogs, tribal newsletters, tribal courts, mostly from Michigan. Blogs that have noticed us and said nice things. Blogs that link to us." Finally, Reese links "Only those maintained by Native writers that have 1 written something for children or teens." Given these initial responses to the question(s) "Do you link to other blogs on your blog? If so, how do you decide whose blogs to link to?," we can learn that American Indians have quite a bit to tell us about blog rhetorics and the cultural and rhetorical work accomplished therein—as do other cultures outside of dominant Western culture. Cultural Usability. Just as American Indians use the Western writing technology of blogs for social networking, building alliances, and educating the public, my research suggests that American Indians have developed and worked with indigenous technologies 147 for the same reasons. Certainly wampum belts were woven, read, and revisited toward the same ends-—and perhaps rock arts, as well. Therefore, these initial consistencies across American Indian development and adoption of technologies should be researched further by educators, tribal personnel, and American Indian technologists. Additionally, beyond the historical and ideologically foundations of technology use and appropriation among American Indians, American Indian bloggers can provide cultural usability scholars (those of us interested in how different people differ in the ways in which we learn and build relationships with technologies—as well as our everyday practices of working with technology—because of cultural influences) with a host of information regarding the everyday rhetorical and technological practices of American Indians. For one, this study tells us which blog providers are utilized by American Indians. The domain names for the Reese, Horn, Fletcher, and Smith case blogs in this study indicate that they are using Wordpress, Blogger, and Live Journal to host their blogs. However, other American Indian blogs cited in this dissertation are designed and published personally and independent from any sponsored blogging service. Further, the process of learning to blog varied somewhat, from "trail and error" (Horn, 2008) and just "doing it" and "reading on-line articles" (Reese, 2008) to learning "By reading other blogs, and with help from our staff attorney" (Fletcher, 2008) and drawing upon past experiences as a journalist (Smith, 2008). In addition, all of the bloggers interviewed for this study noted reasons behind their decision to write a blog over (or in addition to) other online genres (e.g., websites and/or wikis), their choice of blogging service. Moreover, each blogger described the rationale behind some of their color and image choices on his/her blog(s). All things considered, it appears that R/W and AIS 148 scholars are not the only ones who could benefit from such cultural usability insights; indeed, there is much fodder here for professional communicators, technical writers, market researchers, Internet usability consultants, and digital divide researchers—among others—as well. Ultimately, then, this research extends the current literature on culturally-based uses of everyday technologies, like Huantong Sun's (2006; 2007) research on localized uses of cell phone text messaging technology, to other cultural contexts. Intellectual Property (IP). In spite of the fact that none of the AI bloggers interviewed for this study expressed a clear concern for IP violations, it is understandably a real concern among other American Indian populations given the colonial history of non-Indians collecting and naming of indigenous knowledges and material culture and their subsequent claiming of the rights to the indigenous IP. Between some blog hosts claiming ownership over the content posted to their domain and the trends toward culture jamming and re-mixing in dig/viz rhetoric studies, American Indian history, rhetorics, and legal scholars may provide current IP scholars with critical perspectives on current and pending copyright law. From the Crazy Horse Defense Project and the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) position on Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Folklore to Fletcher's blog Turtle Talk (Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law), American Indian rhetorics can and should inform IP scholarship and public perception. Digital and Visual Material Cultural Rhetorics. Hill & Helmers (2004) and contributors to their collection Defining Visual Rhetorics extend discussions of visual rhetorics to popular and political films, political cartoons, captioned photographs, 149 needlepoint samplers, advertisements, and statistical graphs. Further, this collection demonstrates how the visual, verbal, and spatial work together in persuasive discourse and calls for more critical and intellectual engagements with hybrid literacies, gender in advertising, and the influence of the visual on cultural memory and constructed spaces (from sign displays to home design). Although this collection does not underscore the cultural contexts in which these material and visual rhetorics are crafted, delivered, ore perceived, it lays the groundwork for some important discussions regarding the relationships between the textual, material, and visual. Likewise, the research in the last two chapters that evidences how American Indian cultures develop and manufacture dig/viz material culture products. Thus, this research extends the conversations initiated by Hill and Helmers to digital and cultural rhetorics inquiry and highlights how the understanding of digital, visual, and material cultural rhetorics require culturally- and community-specific dig/viz literacies. Cultural/Communng Literacy. In disciplines that espouse cultural sensitivity and responsibility the value of community building and recognition of the literacies within those communities, it should be clear that American Indian wampum, rock art, and blog rhetorics collectively complicate our notions of community building, Nation building, and the need for indigenous cultural literacies in order to access and assess American Indian dig/viz rhetorics. Further, given that we now understand our intellectual communities to include American Indians with rich technological histories and expertise, our own disciplinary communities should recognize the importance of the contributions from American Indian technologists and thus address the implications of Western rhetoric in predeterrnining our understandings about American Indian dig/viz rhetoric 150 theory and practice. Thus, from American Indian rhetorics, we can learn that new literacies within our intellectual communities should require responsible research into the technological histories of non-Western cultures and resistance to and subsequent eradication of the rhetoric and metaphors of pioneering and conquest in our inquiry and scholarship. Digitizing and Seeing Race. The write up of this research demonstrates how cultural and technological literacies can be gained from studying and making intellectual connections across disciplines. By transcending traditional intellectual boundaries and interrogating issues critical to the relationships between American Indian identity, race, ethnicity, and identity, this study offers a way to decolonize the ways in which we approach race, ethnicity and identity in dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry. Consequently, this research builds upon the groundbreaking work of communication and Asian American studies scholar Lisa Nakamura (2002; 2008) and others (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman, 2000; Nelson, Tu, and Hines, 2001), and like their work, this research is both the result of and a model for the trans-disciplinary inquiry of dig/viz cultural rhetorics studies. Intellectual Openings to New Expectations In sum, Hopi photographer and writer Victor Mayayesva (2006) explains that most Western pictorial histories of American Indians are based on "oft-cited purposes of commemoration, veneration, and glimpsing supposedly mystic realms" and have served as a collective spectacle that helped to "foster a categorical belief in the approaching demise and eventual nonexistence of American Indians" and encouraged the trend in collecting all things Indian (p. ix). Further, Mayayesva posits that these dominant 151 pictorial histories have uniquely documented the "national political agenda of systematic destruction of Indians that bound and confined them to reservations, defined them as savages" and the denial of "any realistic understanding of the human lives represented in the photographs," and has resulted in, among other things, the "current trend among Native peoples to control and apportion others' rights to photograph them" (p. ix). Further, this chapter demonstrates that these same colonial histories and (mis)representations of I ndianness extend to other dig/viz spaces and places of inquiry. Thus, this chapter traces another trend among Native peoples to challenge these colonial dig/viz histories by exercising and supporting sovereignty, self-determination, and community building by writing themselves into the blogosphere and its history. Although there are certainly barriers that hinder many American Indians from blogging, such as. lack of computer and/or Internet access and distrust of Western technologies, many others are shaping the blogosphere in meaningful ways for other American Indians—and non-Indians alike. As the Seminole-Creek art historian Mary Jo Watson puts it, “what makes Indian people so unique and so persistent is their ability to take foreign material, or a foreign technology, and make it Indian” (qtd. in Twist, 2000, Four Directions). And, in my opinion, blogs are one of those technologies. As a result, in spite of the long-standing tradition of the stereotypical, essentialized, and fetishized dig/viz media portrayals of indigenous peoples based on the colonizers' ascribed simulations of a monolithic Indian identity, contemporary American Indians are interrupting this hegemonic homogenous fiction by engaging in digital storytelling, where new theories of Indianness emerge in the Native blogosphere. A place for American Indians to draw upon the oral and visual traditions of American Indian 152 storytelling and share their digital voices with the dynamic bricolage of the multiple and varied stories and identities of indigenous peoples. American Indian dig/viz storyblogging, then, may lead to a re-imagining of the colonial expectation of a single indigenous experience and identity—a re-imagined, more diverse and dynamic notion of Indian-ness rooted in specific histories and cultural contexts. Thus, building upon Vizenor's (1998) assertion that traditional American Indian stories have the power to make, re-make, and un—make the world, I posit that so too so dig/viz American Indian stories. Ultimately, by studying the everyday blogging practices and expertise of American Indians, this dissertation contributes to the growing literature” over the last decade in computers and writing and technical communication inquiry that recognizes technology not as transparent things but as cultural artifacts imbued with history and values and subsequently offers research and theory on how different people use digital technologies, how visuals act rhetorically, and the relationships between old and new technologies. This dissertation research reminds us that all cultures (even those which dominant culture has dubbed as technologically inferior or primitive) have rich and complex histories of technological development, use, production, (re)production, articulation, mediation, etc. Thus, through this research, we learn that American Indians have a good deal to teach us about dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry and pedagogy. 153 CHAPTER 5: F ORGING INTELLECTUAL TRADE ROUTES TOWARD A DIGITAL AND VISUAL CULTURAL RHETORICS INQUIRY AND PEDAOGOGY " . . . the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practice." Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori), Decolonizing Methodologies As this dissertation has demonstrated, there are intellectual trade routes that connect AIS and digital/viz rhetoric studies. Some of the disciplinary implications for AIS that will result from this intellectual alliance include new conversations on American Indian media and technology and new directions in existing conversations on wampum in American Indian law studies and on rock art in American Indian anthropology and archaeology studies. The disciplinary implications for R/W include a new critical fi'ame 154 for interrogating colonial rhetorics that shape the ways that we consider ourselves in relation to others and to technologies—a new methodology and way of looking, un- looking, and re-looking at colonial and decolonial influences on dig/viz rhetorics and literacies. In sum, this study contributes to the emerging field of cultural rhetorics inquiry and the growing literature on American Indian rhetorics, dig/viz rhetorics (including blog rhetorics), cultural usability, information ecologies, and institutional critique. Despite the potential of charting these directions in AIS and W, disciplinary shifts rarely transpire without pedagogical strategies that support disciplinary change. Surely our scholarship may inspire the scholarship of others already in the field, but without exposing our students—both undergraduate and graduate—our audiences and thus agency for inspiring change with wide- and long- ranging effects are limited. As such, this chapter makes the case for a decolonial approach to pedagogy and lays some ground work for influencing decolonial disciplinary change by offering a dig/viz cultural rhetorics pedagogy for both R/W and AIS and, in the process, demonstrates how interdisciplinary, decolonial inquiry across two seemingly disparate fields of study can provide opportunities for transgressing the ways in which Western knowledge has been reproduced as a colonial curriculum in schools and society. A Case for Decolonial Pedagogy For centuries, colonization has deeply influenced the ways in which peoples of Americas have been and continue to be educated both informally (experientially) and formally. For example, in his landmark text The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Argentinian theorist Walter Mignolo (1995) traces the role of writing and the politics of language in the colonization of Mexican (or Anahuac) languages, memories, and spaces 155 that began in the 16‘h century—from the re-writing Amerindian histories, privileging Western ways of organizing knowledge, and positioning Western truth as the only truth that mattered by perpetuating the notion that what is different is wrong or deficient."5 Mignolo describes the colonization of Amerindian languages (primarily Nahuatl) by the Spanish/Castilian Crown, friars, and missionaries who used Western literacy against Amerindians to assimilate them and convert them to Christianity vis-a-vis hegemonic ties between alphabetic writing and civility and strategic combinations of grammar, orthography, laws, and edicts with teachings on how to be a good Christian. Further, he ties the celebration of the letter and book to a warranty of Truth and Western assumptions about the necessary relationship between alphabetic literacy and history, essentially dismissing the value of oral traditions and relegating peoples without alphabetic writing as peoples without history—all of which diminished the capacity for a coexistence of languages, literacies, memories, and space with Amerindians. Mignolo (2003) builds on this historiography to demonstrate how contemporary educational reform can tend to colonial histories that continue to affect how we educate and are educated. He offers a case study of educational reform at the Universidad Intercultural in Ecuador to interrupt the linear history of the Western university and demonstrate "that an institution of higher education need not be subservient to the values of the liberal state, the needs of corporations, or hegemonic conceptions of 'universal' knowledge" (p. 98). However, in order to break free from nation, state, and corporate values and hegemonic conceptions of universal knowledges, I assert that we must understand where those values and conceptions come from or we risk unwittingly reinscribing them. In order to intervene in these foundations to dominant thought, one 156 must understand them and the histories upholding them. Given that "[u]niversities, in the Americas since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were created and run by Spanish and British immigrants and . . . their Creole . . . descendants" (Mignolo, 2003, p. 99), we must interrogate how the colonial values of these early educators have influenced and ' continue to influence the values, rhetoric, and practices of contemporary post secondary institutions, our branding, our colleges, our departments, our programs, and our pedagogy. For instance, we might question the values and conceptions that have spurred contemporary pressures to globalize our curricula in higher education. Or how this imperative might be interpreted quite differently from institution to institution, from department to department, and so on. Finally, we might also question whether the values behind and critiques of this initiative might parallel the values and critiques of how multicultural curricular initiatives that have been taken up by higher education. Given the attention to the detrimental results of globalization—such as the displacement and erosion of local cultures“, social disintegration, poverty, injustice, and inequality—we should be critical of what a global studies approach to higher education might look and sound like, and we should be wary when the rhetoric, values, and practices of global studies resembles past instances of the colonization of memories, literacies (information and knowledge work), and spaces. As Mignolo (2003) posits, "global coloniality" is the "reproduction of coloniality at a global scale under neoliberal values and principles of education" (p. 99). To work toward this critical lens, I call for R/W and AIS to take the lead in building and employing a decolonial pedagogy and corresponding curricula. Just as I 157 suggest that decolonial theory, methodologies, and methods can assist researchers in investigating and breaking free from how colonialism has influenced intellectual production and reproduction, decolonial pedagogies can assist educators and students in engaging in this same critical inquiry and activism. A decolonial pedagogy interrogates how colonialism has impacted the experiential and formal education of all learners and teachers of all cultural backgrounds. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy encompasses a wider scope and audience than Red pedagogy, which Quechua scholar Sandy Grande (2004) aptly explains as a pedagogy for indigenous educators that focuses on examining "the tensions between dominant modes of critical educational theory and issues relative to American Indian education" (p. 1). Despite the difference in scope, though, Red pedagogy substantially informs the ideology, politics, and praxis of decolonial pedagogy. Similarly, decolonial pedagogies share some of the activist goals of Afro-feminist, cultural critic and radical educator bell hooks' (2003) progressive education, or "education as the practice of freedom, [which] enables us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connection . . . to create community" (hooks, p. xv). hooks explains that this freedom is achieved by coming to a critical consciousness about the ways in which the hegemony of white-supremacist thought has shaped what we have come to learn about others and ourselves—in other words, decolonizing our ways of knowing. However, hooks' progressive pedagogy and this decolonial pedagogy differ from the democratic or emancipatory pedagogy espoused by F riere, as both pedagogies reject Friere's banking education concept that smacks of the heralding of universal knowledges and understand that all democracies are not fully democratic nor emancipatory. Further, decolonial pedagogies de-center democracy as the primary aim—as it is a myth that 158 cannot be fully realized given the biases of every member of any learning community— and instead reposition the critical inquiry of the relationships between colonialism and power and justice in all culturally-situated learning environments as its goal. Ultimately, a decolonial pedagogy purposefully engages communities of learners in critical conversations about the relationships between power, agency and the colonization of minds (through languages and knowledges), bodies, and lands. Further, a decolonial pedagogy is interested in conceptualizing and reconceptualizing various interdisciplinary projects that treat nationality, race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and ability as an integral part of the inquiry, not just a topic for discussion, and promoting the study of language use, power, and knowledge in relation to the intersection of the aforementioned cultural, interpretive frames. This does not mean, however, that educators building and employing a decolonial pedagogy need expertise in all these areas. On the contrary, it merely requires educators to admit their own cultural influences (biases) to themselves and their students, an openness to engaging cultural rhetorics from our own and other disciplines, and a commitment to respectful conversations across these rhetorics. In practice, a decolonial curriculum reflects attempts to foster non-hierarchical, intellectual transmigrations97 across cultural rhetorics—oral, visual, textual, material, digital, and visual. This commitment to intellectual transmigrations manifests itself in the planning and execution of class lectures, presentations, assignments, and class discussions——remembering that intellectual transmigrations require rhetorical listening and respectful and reciprocal dialogue between and across cultures.” Given this requirement, a pedagogy committed to intellectual transmigrations differs politically and 159 rhetorically from how many rhetoric and writing scholars have taken up Pratt and Anzaldua in their pedagogy and curricula To explain, while some educators may think that fostering "contact zones" and "border crossings" in their classrooms offers "safe spaces" for students from disparate cultures to interact, a decolonial pedagogy remembers the legacy of contact zones and border crossings on the colonial frontier: a history that substantiates that such zones were often not safe, respectful, or reciprocal (and, in fact, violent) for indigenous peoples—and other populations—of the Americas. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy is an active and dynamic pedagogy that understands teaching as a deeply rhetorical act and requires educators to think clearly and coherently about the pedagogical choices we make and the contexts in which we make them. Although the goals of decolonial, progressive, and Red pedagogies differ, subscribers to each achieve these goals by making the same rhetorical and pedagogical and rhetorical choices: teaching to transgress, to support community, and to inspire hope. I will explain each tactical choice in brief here and will provide details on how to follow through in R/W and AIS pedagogy later in the chapter. Teaching to Transgress. According to hooks (1994), a transgression is “A movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom” (p. 12). Therefore, teaching to transgress supports both student and teacher intellectual transgressions. As Grande (2003) explains, "transgression is the root of emancipatory knowledge, and emancipatory knowledge is the basis of revolutionary pedagogy" (p. 5). Decolonial pedagogy by its very nature is a revolutionary pedagogy, as it brings together seemingly disparate areas of inquiry by fostering intellectual transmigrations across diverse areas of thought and peoples in an effort to 160 identify, confront, resist, and subsequently transcend the colonial structures that have traditionally defined and confined our inquiry inside and outside the classroom. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy transcends discussions of whether we can dismantle the master's house with his tools and instead (ala Audre Lorde) and instead intentionally confronts issues at the intersections of colonialism, rhetoric, and culture (race, class, gender, nationality, community, religion, ability, desire, discourses, etc.), acknowledges student and teacher (and author) cultural affiliations, engages these cultural knowledges, and interrogates the ways in which these cultural affiliations that impact the ways in which we make sense of the world around us. For AIS and R/W, then, I suggest intellectual, rhetorical, and pedagogical transgressions that work to forge intellectual trade routes and alliances between our disciplines that offer opportunities for decolonizing our habits of mind that have historically hindered us from informing one another. Teaching to Support Communig. To create a learning environment that diffuses hierarchy and hegemonic knowledge structures, a decolonial pedagogy seeks to create a sense of community. hooks (2003) maintains that the classroom should be "a place that is life-sustaining and mind-expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership" (p. xv). I assert that this partnership can be realized through a pedagogy that fosters intellectual transmigrations and subsequent transgressions. In order to build and tell new stories in AIS and R/W, then, we must engage students with stories and ask them to report on others and share their own stories of stories of colonialism in the Americas (and elsewhere), resistance, and transgressions through dig/viz rhetoric. In this way, a decolonial pedagogy harnesses the power of Red pedagogy, which Grande (2003) explains is "historically grounded in local and tribal 161 narratives, intellectually informed by ancestral ways of knowing, politically centered in issues of sovereignty, and morally inspired by the deep connections among the Earth, its beings, and the spirit world" (p. 35). Although my decolonial pedagogy is certainly grounded in American Indian narratives—given their potential to inform discussions of colonialism, my own heritage, admittance of my own cultural biases to myself and my students, and my experiential knowledges I bring to our learning community—all decolonial pedagogues will: ground their discussions historically, culturally, and politically; value the expression of all local narratives (intellectually informed by their own ancestral ways of knowing) from all members of the learning community; and promote connections across and between these narratives, peoples, and our ontological, metaphysical, scientific, and technological knowledge systems. Teaching to Inspire Hope. A decolonial theory inherently relies on and requires hope, as it is difficult for some people to imagine a decolonial state of mind when they live, work, and think in places that challenge hegemonic claims that we live in a postcolonial world. Further, hope is needed to transgress in intellectual spaces that have historically (and continue to) violated the minds, bodies, and lands of the colonized. Likewise, according to Grande (2003), what distinguishes Red pedagogy is its basis in hope. Not the future- centered hope of the Western imagination, but rather, a hope that lives in contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors as well as the power of traditional knowledge. A Red pedagogy is, thus, as much about belief and acquiescence as it is about questioning and empowerment, about respecting the space of tradition as it 162 intersects with the linear time frames of the (post)modem world. Most of all, it is a hope that believes in the strength and resiliency of indigenous . peoples and communities, recognizing that their struggles are not about inclusion and enfranchisement to the 'new world order' but, rather are part of the indigenous project of sovereignty and indigenization. (pp. 28-29) From Red pedagogy, then, we can learn the importance of achieving our decolonial curricular goals through engaging histories and traditional knowledges, recognizing that all cultures have struggles and projects that have been influenced by colonialism, and inspiring hope for strength, resiliency, resistance and agency in better understanding these struggles and projects in an effort to forge alliances that will inspire a decolonization of these projects. Such transgressions inspired by hope offer opportunities for transforming not only our classrooms but the subsequential experiential learning that will transpire for all of those in our learning communities (including ourselves) outside of the classroom. As hooks reminds us (2003), "Hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness" (p. xiv). Summary. In the end, as hooks asserts in her pivotal Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (1994), “The classroom is the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (p. 12). Possibilities for breaking up dominant monopolies of knowledge by inviting all students to share their theoretical and experiential knowledge, for providing a space where languages other than Standard English are valued, for using intellectual conflict as "a catalyst for new thinking, for growth" (hooks, 1994, p. 113), for acknowledging the colonized, gendered, racialized, classed, sexualized, desired, 163 emotional, erotic bodies in the classroom. Ultimately, Red, and decolonial pedagogies have the potential to realize these possibilities, as each is an engaged pedagogy that is responsive to particular situations of particular students, values praxis (reflection and action), and supports communitiesof resistance. Given the overlaps between progressive, Red, and decolonial pedagogies, then, why choose to build and employ a decolonial pedagogy? To begin, a decolonial pedagogy is a progressive pedagogy that shares the foundational ideologies of hook's progressive, liberatory, democratic education; however, a decolonial pedagogy acknowledges that no pedagogy is truly democratic, as all universities and instructors have their own agendas for the education that will transpire in spaces of higher education—even a decolonial pedagogy. Thus, despite the similar goals and ideologies, these pedagogies essentially differ in their political underpinnings, as a decolonial pedagogy investigates the myth of democracy in the Americas and remembers that the histories of these same democracies were born on the realities of mass genocide and colonialism where not all human beings were (or continue to be) considered equal. Further, certainly, for those teaching at tribal colleges and universities”, a Red pedagogy is most appropriate given the audience and context for the pedagogy and curriculum. However, given that 90 percent of American Indian students do not attend tribal schools (Gallagher, 2000), and the fact that colonialism has affected what and the ways in which we all have learned in the Americas post-contact, I think that not only do we have a responsibility to assemble and employ decolonial pedagogies, but it is the most suitable pedagogy for engaging not only American Indian rhetorics but the host of cultural rhetorics that may be shared any given semester in our diverse higher education 164 classrooms—all the while interrogating how colonialism has influenced those rhetorics. As Tuhiwai Smith (1999) explains, “The curriculum of a university shapes the way knowledge is reproduced as a curriculum for schools and for society” (p. 129). Consequently, I offer a tactic for teaching to transgress, to support community, and inspire hope in R/W and AIS by employing a decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetorics curriculum and corresponding pedagogy that seeks a re~evaluation/re-writing/re-righting of human and civil rights through course offerings, designs, projects, assignments, and discussions. The Transdisciplinary Landscape of a Decolonial Dig/ Viz Rhetoric Pedagogy in R/ W and AIS The historical relationship between Western schooling and American Indian education can be described by three distinct eras according to the systems of power that prevailed at the time: "(1) the period of missionary domination, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; (2) the period of federal government domination from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries; and (3) the period of self-determination from the mid-twentieth century to the present" (Grande, 2004, p. 12). As explained in earlier in this dissertation, however, the centuries of colonial educational systems imposed on American Indians before the current era of self-determination continues to limit individual and community agency among the colonized in actually securing self-determination. Although AIS has been keenly concerned with these limitations in physical academic and social spaces, it has been less concerned with the limitations to securing self-determination in dig/viz academic and social spaces. Further, although critical discussions of gender, rhetoric, and technology have transpired in R/W, discussions of race, rhetoric, and technology have 165 just recently emerged, and there has been little treatment of American Indian dig/viz cultural rhetorics. Given this, in this section, I develop decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetoric courses, describe potential goals for those courses, and offer pedagogical strategies and class assignments to assist in meeting those goals. As indicated earlier in this dissertation, decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetorical theory, methodology, and pedagogy can benefit all populations affected by colonialism, which is all of us. However, in order to realize these benefits, a thorough and active engagement with cultural rhetorics is required. Thus, the following course proposals and sample corresponding curricula are designed to support intellectual transmigrations between and across American Indian and other dig/viz cultural rhetorics and to inspire future and additional and future intellectual transmigrations between and across other cultural areas of inquiry. Decolonial Dig/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Course Desigg. In contrast to traditional add-ons to existing curricula that treat culture as a topic, the mapping of this transdisciplinary landscape begins with the designing of new and revised undergraduate and graduate courses relevant to W and AIS that are informed by and support decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetorical inquiry throughout the course. Although a couple of the following courses suggest a specific educational level or program, most can be adapted for both undergraduate and graduate levels and both disciplinary audiences. I Writing with/Rhetorics of technology in cultural contexts: Like other writing- intensive courses, this course provides students with the opportunity to develop and hone their skills in narration, research, analysis, critique, and persuasion and to better understand rhetorical concepts like purpose, audience, 166 style, form, organization, and so on. However, this specific writing course focuses on drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading technology-mediated compositions (textual, visual, and aural) based on research, readings, and class discussions and activities that engage issues relevant to the relationships between culture and technology. Although this course should confront dominant prescriptions of technology, technological literacy, and the Western paradigms of technological progress, convenience, and control and how these write the technological histories of non-Western cultures, instructors should avoid simply placing non-Western cultural readings of technology in juxtaposition to Western readings or situating Western rhetorics of technology as the benchmark against which all other cultural rhetorics are measured. Instead, the goal of this course is to position all readings of technology as cultural rhetorics of technology and to place them in non-hierarchical, responsible dialogues with one another. Thus, this course should challenge students' and instructors' prior and current notions of technology and inspire future critical thinking and cultural responsibility by: engaging the culturally- situated technological experiences of all of our students; assigning readings, projects, and activities that speak to technological theories and practices in cultural and community contexts; interrogating the assumption that technologies are neutral tools; studying the relationships between older and newer culturally-situated technologies; and thinking critically about how our own personal experiences with technology are culturally influenced and how these subj ectivities relate to the subjectivities of others. 167 Digital cultural rhetorics: This course is based on the understanding that digital compositions and spaces are deeply rhetorical—thus, deeply cultural. To promote this understanding, students will study the rhetorical, social, cultural, colonial, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of digital compositions and spaces. This course attempts to answer such questions as, what is digital rhetoric, who defines it, and what are the cultural influences that shape these definitions and subsequent perceptions of digital rhetoric and digital literacies? In addition, this course will interrogate the similarities, overlaps, and disconnects in the rhetorics of hypertext, digital rhetoric, and new media studies. Within this cultural frame and specific cultural case studies and contexts, like Danielle DeVoss's digital rhetorics course at Michigan State University,1°° this course will study: how reading and writing practices change in digital environments; the hypertextual dynamics (a convergence of multiple, linked, and layered elements) of digital compositions and digital reading and writing conventions; issues of technology and literacy; and performances and representations of identity (including nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, gender, ability, generation, and religion). American Indian dig/viz rhetorics: Although I certainly support the treatment of American Indian dig/viz rhetorics within existing introductory and advanced American Indian rhetorics, American Indian literatures, and dig/viz rhetorics courses, a course (if not two sequential courses) specific and dedicated to the study of American Indian dig/viz rhetorics would benefit R/W (especially those programs that value cultural rhetorical inquiry). The 168 goals of this course are to interrogate the relationships between and across: all American Indian rhetorics and literatures—oral, material, visual, (hyper)textual, (hyper)textile, and digital; American Indians composing in dig/viz spaces and being written in those spaces; the development, use, and proliferation of older and newer American Indian technologies; and the adoption and/or appropriation of non-Indian technologies. Further, this course promotes the study specific colonial, tribal, and community contexts for the reading, composing, and performing of American Indian dig/viz rhetorics. To accomplish these goals, this course asks: how American Indian reading, composition, and performance practices change in digital environments; how the hypertextual dynamics (a convergence of multiple, linked, and layered elements) of digital compositions complement or diverge from other American Indian rhetorical traditions; how to support visual and digital rhetorical sovereignty; and how colonialism has influenced American Indian and non-Indian representations, perceptions, and performances of American Indian cultural, tribal, community, and individual identities (including technological and visual literacies) in dig/viz spaces. Visual cultural rhetorics: This writing-, analysis, and design-intensive course is based on the understanding that visual compositions and spaces are deeply rhetorical—thus, deeply cultural. To promote this understanding, students will study the rhetorical, social, cultural, colonial, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of reading, composing, and displaying visuals. This course aims to study Oglala Lakota architect and anthropologist Craig Howe's (1995; 169 2005) theory of ethnoarchitectonics (in brief, the study and subsequent development of culturally-situated and responsible design) in light of a variety of visual design theories and practices, including museum and other data displays, information architecture, information ecologies, document and web design, slideshow presentations, signage, branding, logos, advertisements, page layout (margins, paper or screen textures, alignment, and headings), graphics (clipart, photographs, diagrams, and alt tags), color, typography (font faces and sizes), and many others. Further, students will study the relationships between visual culture theory (as it pertains to nationality, race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and ability) and: the aforementioned design elements; audience, purpose, and context considerations; visual identity performances and representations; visual rhetorical sovereignty; what it means to see, gaze upon, look at, analyze, and (re)present visual cultural rhetorics; and the effects visual cultural rhetorics have on diverse readers, viewers, users, writers, and designers. Culture(s) + rhetoric(s) + technology/ies: Theories and methodologies: Although this course could engage a variety of cultural and (post)critical theories, a decolonial approach to this course design focuses on the relationships between the colonialism, race, gender, rhetoric, and technology. Engaging theories on the relationships between and across rhetoric and empire (Mignolo, 1995; Pratt, 1992; Spurr, 1993), rhetoric and race (Gilyard, 1999; Villanueva, 1999, 2004), culture and technology (Slack & Wise, 2005), race and technology (Banks, 2006; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Ebo, 1998; Gomez-Pefia, 1996; Kolko, Nakamura, & Rodman, 170 2000; Nelson, Tu, and Hines, 2001), colonialism, power, and technology (Selfe & Selfe, 1994; hooks, 2003), race and computer-mediated pedagogy (Blackmon, 2002, 2007; Knadler, 2001), and race and cyberfeminism (Fernandez, 2002; Leung, 2003; Nakamura, 2002, 2008; Wright, 2002; Undercurrents, 2002) will encourage improved understandings of these relationships in historical and cultural contexts. Issues of access, colonialism, sexism, racism, and technological literacies will be discussed and used as the basis for case study and/or historiography projects that investigate and tell stories of culturally-specific technological expertise, use, design, production, dissemination, proliferation, appropriation, and rhetorics of technological theories, products, and practices. It important to note that this course could also be narrowed to focus specifically on one cultural group, such as American Indians + race + technology: Theories and methodologies. Such a course would allow for more in-depth conversations between and across cultural, ethnicity, tribal, and historical differences within racial classifications. Decoloniaflig/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogical Goals. Essentially, I posit that to support a decolonial dig/viz rhetorics curriculum, teachers of R/W and AIS should ask ourselves and our students questions that promote a type of critical thinking and viewing that contributes to the "indiscipline" of dig/viz cultural rhetorics studies (and related discussions of dig/viz cultural rhetorical analysis, critique, consumption and production), with a clear focus on interrogating the contexts of privilege, hegemony, responsibility, history and culture that influence our dig/viz inquiry. As bell hooks (year) reminds us, 171 "The issue is not freeing ourselves from representations. It's really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations" (p. #). To achieve this, we must begin looking, un-looking, and re-looking at our pedagogy for teaching dig/viz rhetoric—and engage in praxis concerning our own dig/viz rhetoric practices and scholarship. What follows then are suggestions for doing so in our dig/viz cultural rhetoric pedagogy—keeping in mind that my cultural subjectivities certainly influence the examples I offer just as student subjectivities impacted the ways in which they carried out the assignments in my decolonial dig/viz rhetorics pedagogy. Community, cultural, and critical dig/viz rhet literacies: As indicated earlier in this chapter, R/W has historically been interested in studying and facilitating a host of literacies—most recently, technological, cultural and community literacies. No longer limited to only reading, writing, and speaking in Standard English, most R/W scholars and teachers recognize a key to literacy as the ability to critically assess an audience's information needs and meet those needs by ethically communicating the appropriate content, at the appropriate time, to the appropriate audience, in the appropriate mode, in specific cultural and community contexts. Thus, literacy requires a dynamic facility with delivering information to a variety of audiences in a variety of contexts and modes. Given this broader understanding and the variety of technologies available to deliver this information, Sean Williams (2001) asserts that [t]o be literate in the twenty-first century means possessing the skills necessary to effectively construct and comfortably navigate multiplicity, to manipulate and critique information, representations, knowledge, and 172 arguments in multiple media from a wide range of sources, and to use multiple expressive technologies including those offered by print, visual, and digital tools. (p. 22) Although Williams fails to consider oral and aural delivery of information, representations, knowledge, and arguments, his assessment of literacy nonetheless suggests that one's literacy is an ever-shifting amalgamation and multiplicity of critical, cultural, information, technological, digital, and visual literacies. I suggest that a decolonial approach to dig/viz rhetorics inquiry can foster a deeper understanding of these literacies and their community and cultural implications. It is my hope that the following curricular suggestions offer ways to move our in- discipline beyond surface-level multicultural curricular approaches toward a decolonial digital and cultural rhetorics pedagogy that values and engages with multiple and specific dig/viz cultural rhetorics over traditional treatments of technological culture as a monolithic culture—and is student-responsive, culturally-specific, and community-based in its inquiry design. Digital Visibility: In spite of the ongoing proliferation of and subscription to colonial dig/viz constructs of Indianness, American Indian generated dig/viz rhetorics are increasingly penetrating and consequently transforming the cyberpolis, as exemplified by the American Indian bloggers featured in Chapter 4. However, there are pedagogical tactics we can employ to facilitate the visibility of American Indian dig/viz cultural rhetorics that support survivance, sovereignty, self-determination, community renewal and activism, and alliances—as well as the visibility of other dig/viz cultural rhetorics—including: assigning projects that 173 require students to incorporate a dig/viz rhetoric componentlol; creating and maintaining a class blog via a free blog service provider site (e.g., motime.com or blogger.com)l°2; and utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and tacticsm. Student work delivered to a broader audience outside of the class, whether published in an e-zine, displayed in a class exhibit, painted on a poster board, or woven into a wampum belt and read their family has the potential to significantly transform the visibility—and thus perceptions—of the technological expertise of specific cultural and community groups. Further, class blogs will not only contribute to the visibility of dig/viz cultural rhetorics, but it will give the (inter)discipline more visibility as well. Decolonial Dig/Viz Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogical Strategies. Although there are certainly more courses to design and pedagogical goals to establish that support intellectual transmigrations and alliances that allow for richer understandings of dig/viz cultural rhetorics theory and practice (such as Inter- and Intra-cultural Technical Communication and American Indian Technical Communication courses), the following project, assignment, and activity suggestions offer specific ways to support a decolonial approach to teaching dig/viz cultural rhetorics, assist in the realization of some of the aforementioned course goals, and imagine and subsequently open up new possibilities for more diverse populations and thought in dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry. Cultural identity maps: A curricular response to hooks (2003) suggestion that we foster community by considering the interlacing dynamics of race, gender, culture and class in our pedagogy, engaging our students as whole persons, and being concerned about their well being. All members of the class—including the 174 instructor(s)——are to craft visually-rich cultural identity/ties maps that represent the interlacing dynamics of cultural and community literacies and influences that shape our identities. All class members are to brainstorm a list of cultures to which we belong, groups to which we identify or have an affinity, and other factors that influence our sense of self (e. g., nationality, race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, talents, hobbies, sports, interests, etc.). Next, considering this list and using Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, Paint, Photoshop, markers, crayons, paint, pastels, paper, or other technologies, we “map” out these cultural influences in a way that designates the weight of and relationships between and across each cultural influence using place, proximity, space, shapes, size, and balance. Encourage and model specificity of identity influences. For example, instead of designating “ethnicity” or “race” as an influence, specify Japanese, Irish, Thai, German, Choctaw, Italian, Greek, etc.; instead of just noting “class” as an influence, identify which class(es) (e.g., working poor, lower/upper middle-class, affluent, etc.). Finally, a narrative that reflects on how these cultural influences constellate with their personal cultural, digital, visual, technological, and community literacies should accompany the map to emphasize the importance for students to trace their knowledge relationships in order to better assess how these relationships have impacted how they have come to (or failed to) understand themselves in relation to others and the world. Finally, facilitate a small group activity to share cultural maps and then solicit summaries of these group discussions to the class, encourage revisions to the maps if a forgotten or more specific cultural influence is mentioned by a 175 classmate, and highlight the similarities, differences, and overlaps—not to mention the dynamic nature—of identity constructions and agency in self- determination to facilitate a sense of community and demonstrate the value of all student experiential knowledges and cultural backgrounds. Technological/digital literacy narratives: Ask students to reflect on and assess their access to, comfort with, relationships with, and communicative/knowledge work completed with digital technologies———considering their earliest experiences with and attitudes toward these technologies and their identities (e.g., race, nationality, class, generation, religion, sexuality, gender, ability, education, upbringing, etc.)—and any changes in these aspects over time. Encourage students to employ a broader understanding of technology that considers technologies outside of "new media" and to write about their experiences with older and newer technologies, as well as indigenous and non-indigenous technologies—and the environments that surround them physically, virtually, and/or metaphysically when interacting with these technologies. Finally, remind students that this is not a research paper, rather a story about themselves as knowledge workers whose lives have been impacted by technologies. Ask students to compose and share these narratives orally, textually, digitally, and/or visually with multiple new and/or old media. This assignment can be extended to AIS studies by asking students to research the technological expertise of an American Indian individual (including themselves) or community (including their own) and write a narrative about that expertise following the same aforementioned prompts and resulting in the same deliverables. 176 Technology artifact research narratives: Students have stories of culturally- specific technological expertise worth sharing and learning from. The technology artifact research narrative asks students to take on a complex view of relationship between technology and culture and look to the past to better understand the historical usage and proliferation of specific cultural technologies and their impact on those who developed those technologies and other cultures impacted by the use and proliferation of them. To this end, I ask students to choose a technological artifact used at least 150 years ago, which would include a device, tool, machine, or technique for manufacturing or processing something. They may choose a technology that resonated with them during a museum visit, or they may opt to research a technology from a culture to which they identify or affiliate. Some options for this project include choosing a specific technological artifact from a specific culture and: 1) creating a contextualized exhibit for a local or national museum that tells a story about their specific technological artifact; 2) preparing a print, video, or web analysis of the artifact as it was used at the time; 3) preparing a print, video, or web analysis of the technological artifact as it may be interpreted 50 years from now by a specific culture; 4) preparing a print, video, or web story from the perspective of one of the earliest designers or users of the technological artifact. To get started, students might consider answering the following questions: Who, historically, has developed and used this technology? What is the cultural significance of this technology? What have been the cultural, social, and/or political impacts of this technology? What scientific, technical, and practical resources and knowledges are needed to craft such a technology? What 177 methods must be followed to use the technology? What other tools are required for the technology to work? What makes this technology unique? Has this technology changed over time, and if so, how? ‘ Identity matters/ Visual culture video project: Communication studies scholars Jennifer D. Slack & J. Macgregor Wise (2005) posit, "Identity affects how a person is placed in culture: how important they are, how they are treated, and what possibilities are open to them" (p. 149). Thus, this project asks students to take a critical look at culture through the lens of visual rhetoric and identity. There are three components to this project: a paper, video project, and reflection piece. The paper is essentially either a critique of how the media (based on a constellation of technologies) has represented the "identity" of a specific culture in specific ways or a critique of how a specific technology has shaped the “identity” of a specific culture in specific ways. Students should choose a culture to focus on that is specific and is one with which they identify so that they may draw from their own experiential knowledge and examples from the media to back their claims. Students might consider some of the following angles: how the media has inaccurately or inadequately represented a cultural “identity”; how technologies are unequally delegated along identity lines; how technologies are unequally prescriptive along identity lines; how "technologies of identity" create, alter, reinforce and/or challenge particular notions of identity; how technologies can reinforce and challenge the notion of stable and normative identities; and how technologies can change what it means to exist or to be human.1°" 178 For the video response piecem, students are to craft either a visual and aural representation of the argument they posited or a counter-response to the critique they offered in the paper project. Students share their videos with their classmates and are encouraged to post them on the Internet so that they may contribute responsible dig/viz cultural rhetorics to the public sphere. The reflection piece—to be delivered via movie or text—should include: the purpose of the video response piece; the rationale behind the rhetorical and stylistic choices in the video response; what was learned from the entire project (about culture, technology, media, self, community, etc.); a self-evaluation of the student research and development process and the effort involved; and a reflection on how happy the student is with the current rendition of the project—are there any changes they would make if they had the extra time? Some of the projects I have had the honor of reading/viewing include106 a paper analysis of the portrayals of homosexuals in mainstream American television with a companion video piece that offered a visual comparative rhetorical analysis of the civil rights and gay pride movements; the representation of skateboarders as punks with a companion video documentary of a skate board community from Detroit and its practices of community activism and mentoring of city youth interested in skate boarding. Model projects can be found online.107 Identity Matters/ Visual Culture Activities: Examine example logos, brandings, museum and other visual representations of individual and community identities—and how audience perceptions/impressions of these visual rhetorics intersect with power, race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. and. For example, 179 in the graduate course Visual Rhetoric for Professional Writers graduate coursem, Danielle DeVoss assigns the critique of search engine logos and/or branding. Jill McKay Chrobak and I engaged in a decolonial analysis of the visual rhetoric of the font and the branding of Yahoo in completion of this project. Further, showing online videos that discuss visual, cultural, and rhetorical performances, representations, and resistance is a way of inspiring in-class and blog conversations on issues of identity, power, agency, representation, appropriation, and resistance. (See Appendix D for sample online visual cultural rhetorics videos.) Dig/ Viz cultural rhetoric historiographies: Semester-, thesis-, or dissertation- length project that investigates and tells stories of culturally-specific technological expertise, use, design, production, dissemination, proliferation, representations, and appropriation—the collection of which results in cultural rhetorics of technological and/ore visual histories, theories, products, and practices. Example projects include Mesopotamian Cuneiform, Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, Chinese logograms, Aztec codices, and Great Lakes petroglyphs. Suggested readings for model dig/viz cultural rhetorics historiography and case study projects include: Adam Banks' (2006) historiographies and case studies of African American design practices (e. g., slave quilts, black architecture, urban planning); Lisa Baird's (2006) case history of writing practices of Upper Paleolithic cave drawings, visual representations of their world via symbols and pictures; and Damian Baca's (2005) recovery of Aztec codices as evidence of the resistance tactics encoded in the post-Columbian amoxtli to "critique Spanish colonization 180 of the Americas, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the consequences of globalization in the territories of immigration, language, and popular culture" (p. 3) and suggest "Mexicans as the progeny of the first culture to advance an inscription system in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 8). Museum displays of culture: In addition to revising the intellectual history of visual rhetoric via material cultural rhetoric historiographies, we might look, unlook, and relook at the visual rhetoric legacies resulting from museum collections. As can be ascertained from Clifford (1988), extensive museum cultures were built in the 19th century, based on the display of national histories, which gave institutional force to the promotion of a unified national culture. Thus, they promoted the colonial agenda via visual rhetoric, both in art (aka "artifact") choice, placement, display, and textual support, which according to Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) resulted in representations of fragmented indigenous identities—fragmentation caused by imperialism that disconnecting them from their histories, homelands, landscapes, languages, social relations and their own ways of making sense of the world (p. 28). To be sure, museums and people of color have an interesting history, given the tendency for Western museums to perpetuate the collection of "vanishing cultures" or "wards of the state" and the rhetoric of primitive artifact and primitive tribal people versus Western "masterpiece" and civilized culture. Consequently, we should initiate class conversations on and investigations into how museums have historically promoted a colonial consciousness of consumption and nostalgia with the visual rhetoric of museums that typically produce ahistorical, fetishized and simulated 181 rhetorics of Indianness and how these fictions have been taken up by both non- Natives and American Indians are often re—inscribed in culturally destructive ways. In addition, students could research the other cultural groups and investigate their culturally-specific relationships with museiun rhetorics. Technological + identity impact report: This project asks students to research the impact of a technology on the identity of their field of study, community, culture via journals, newsletters, public relations materials, interviews, etc. Students should introduce why identity matters or their field/community/culture, discuss the impact of a technology the identity of that field/community/culture, and provide specific examples to support their claims. I allow the genre to be flexible but ask students to employ visuals to illustrate their points. Decolonial color rhetorics investigation and/or critique: Colors are employed for specific rhetorical purposes, whether it is to portray ourselves or others in specific way, to suggest an attitude, affiliation, or affinity, inform others about our value of specific colors for specific reasons, and more. Assign students to research and critique and/or develop case studies of cultural color rhetorics (e.g. the cultural/community histories, uses, and significances of a color) in a culture/community to which they belong and present it to the class via presentation, video, or web technologies. Who uses it, what does it signify, when it is used, where is it used, why is it used, how is it used, and how might it be appropriated? Remind students to consider these details when designing their presentation content and media. 182 For a model, refer to Mayayesva (2006) who offers us a decolonial critique of Western pictorial histories of American Indians and a case study of self-determination in visual spaces and resistance to color colonization. For example, he exercises both resistance and rhetorical sovereignty as he sarcastically speculates how to make rural Indian country look more Indian: Whenever a black-and-white print of an Indian subject matter does not work, tone it sepia. . . . Sepia resonates in the minds of non-Indians viewing photographs of Native Americans because it creates a buffer where nostalgia blossoms and dulls the ache resulting from misplaced responsibility for another human race. Sepia removes the subject from this world, and when the subject is safely removed, so is the non- Indian's accountability. Poverty is burnished with a warm color. (p. 8) Given this analysis, assignments that ask students to research and critique the contexts of color rhetorics can cumulatively work to transgress Western imagery of nostalgia and decontextualization. Dig/ Viz cultural rhetorical sovereignty performances: Similarly to the activist work of NDN bloggers (as described in Chapter 4), there are other digital venues for American Indian survivance, self-determination, sovereignty, and community renewal—from Sherman Alexie's (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene novelist, screenwriter, and director) October 10, 2001 talk at Rutgers University's Newark Campus shortly after the 911 available on GoogleVideol°9 to Graham Greene's (Oneida) "Lakota Spoof"110 and Joy Harjo's musical rendition of her poem "Eagle Poem" on YouTube to LeAnne Howe's (Chocktaw) cameo in the "Trail of Cheers" skit 183 on Daily Show with Jon Stewart111 that mocks the fear among many non-Natives that Native American mascots are nearing extinction. Students could examine how these and other American Indian digital performances parallel, enhance, transform, and/or extend the rhetorical and activist work of other American Indian intellectual traditions. Blogging cultural and community rhetorics: With the numbers of new bloggers and blog sites increasing by the thousands everyday, there are more opportunities than ever before to establish and join virtual communities with people of similar mind, races, gender, sexuality, reproductive issues, and more. Ask students to: refer back to their cultural maps; research the blogs related to one of their cultural influences; create their own blog dedicated to informing the public on issues important to this cultural group; subscribe and link to other blogs affiliated with this cultural group; sustain weekly dialogues with their blogging community; and write an end-of-the-semester reflection on their participation in and learning that transpired in this blogging community. Similar assignments can be developed that are specific to building community on online social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) and games. Writing culture on wikis: Just as blogs act as and interact with other dig/viz 112 cultural rhetorics, so too do wikis . With the mass proliferation and usage of the ”3 among student populations, it is collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia imperative that we discuss with our students how they are both inscribing cultural understandings and being inscribed. Thus, they must understand the ethical implications of their participation in writing and publishing wiki content. Given 184 the development of NativeWiki114 (a wiki developed by Native Web115 dedicated to information on indigenous peoples form around the world), students are asked to: research American Indian related content on Wikipedia and NativeWiki and assess its accuracy; add accurate American Indian content to incomplete or modify current, inaccurate entries; write and post new entries to facilitate cultural literacy in non-Natives; and reflect on their wiki work and the cultural implications of that work. Although some may assume that this assignment is best suited to AIS curriculum, I suggest that it provides a contextualized learning opportunity for students to realize how their online—and other—writing is read by diverse audiences and thus should avoid writing on the histories and cultures of specific cultural groups. Digital, visual, and material identity performance rhetorics: Assign students to build their own online museums, dedicated to representing themselves, their family or a community to which they belong. Ask them to justify their visual rhetoric approach and choices and/or discuss how they think their representation differs from how they would be represented in a traditional Western model museum. Or request that students bring to class one example of a material rhetoric that signifies something to themselves, their family, or a community to which they belong. Students will share how the material rhetoric communicates meaning for them with the class. Students could also be asked to re-create the material rhetoric in digital form and to reflect on whether the material rhetoric loses or gains any rhetorical force, or anything else for that matter in the transfer. 185 Colonial and decolonial visual rhetoric scavenger hunt: Ask students to collect and research images and texts that signify a support, rejection, and/or resistance of visual representations of the subjugation of peoples outside dominant culture and share with the class an analysis of the rhetorical work they do and the differences in signification based on artist, audience, and historical context. For example, ask students to collect and research images that signify Westward expansion and manifest destiny and discuss the implications of some of the first visual rhetorics that visually represented European and Indigenous contact. Community visual rhetoric scavenger hunt: Assign students to trace the importance and use of a piece of visual rhetoric by a community to which they belong. Is this visual an "original," subversion, appropriation, something else? If it has changed overtime, how and why has it. If not, why do you think it has remained fairly stable? Typefaces, interfaces, and maps as visual cultural rhetorics: Ask students to trace the history and use of a particular typeface and consider its potential rhetorical impact within a specific community. Who uses it, what does it signify, when it is used, where is it used, why is it used, how is it used, and how might it be appropriated? Ask students to analyze the visual rhetoric of a game interface through the lens of visual colonialization and write a report that forges intellectual trade routes between game and learning theory, cultural studies, and visual rhetoric studies, perhaps speculating its impact on a variety of potential audiences. Assign students to locate a variety of maps across time and cultural biases for their state or vicinity. Ask them to decipher the differences between the visual 186 rhetoric of each map, determine possible reasons for those differences, and share their inquiry in small and/or large groups. - Political visual rhetorics: Ask students to construct and/or trace a visual argument that promotes a political agenda. For example, a student might trace the visual rhetoric surrounding the peace movement and construct a visual peace rhetoric that does not employ secular visual rhetoric (i.e., no dove, light breaking through the clouds, etc.) and in a way that advances peace as a concept that goes beyond just the absence of war.116 An Opening and RSVP for Future Work in Support of and Contribution to Dig/ Viz Cultural Rhetorics It is my hope that a decolonial approach will create a learning environment that fosters deeper, more critical, and transgressive understandings of the colonial, rhetorical, social, cultural, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of dig/viz compositions and spaces. Although I could only provide a preliminary sketch of a decolonial approach to teaching, practicing, and learning dig/viz American Indian and other cultural rhetorics, I trust there is enough here to inspire future re-imaginings of dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry and pedagogy that promotes a decolonial trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary consciousness in AIS, R/W, and a host of other cultural studies and rhetorics. Given the shared interests in and concerns with commons, copyleftist positions, copyright infringement, intellectual and cultural property theft, identity fraud and theft among AIS and R/W intellectual communities concerns, I assert that dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry has more potential to discuss the finer points of these controversies than dig/viz rhetoric studies alone. Thus, AIS and R/W scholars should harness and combine our collective 187 agency to promote a decolonial agenda where we work in that in-between space instead of that frontier place. We must use our facility with rhetoric to share what we know about colonial rhetoric with others concerned with ethical dig/viz rhetoric and visual culture studies. And though R/W comes well equipped rhetorically, it is evident that AIS has much to teach us about dig/viz cultural rhetorics inquiry and pedagogy. AIS provides us with a lens for understanding the ways in which colonial rhetorics and notions of literacy shape how Natives and non-Natives alike perceive, learn, adopt, and appropriate American Indian intellectual traditions and thus a model for educators and students on how to interrogate how cultural rhetorics are infused with our understanding and creation of dig/viz rhetorics. For example, with dig/viz re-mixing and culture jamming inquiry and practice ever-present in computers and writing pedagogy and research, we should take note of Mayayesva's (2006) concern with appropriating images without context: "American culture is the main influential export of the United States," that Native America is one of the recipients of this export, and that "this export that we have come to value is content without context" (p. 40). Furthermore, we can learn from AIS about the influence of imperialism and colonization on the history of research and pursuit of knowledgem, and thus realize that the pedagogy we employ will not only impact the research trajectories of our students, but also their research methodologies. Thus, a dig/viz cultural rhetorics pedagogy works to interrogate the colonial constructs that continue to shape our production, perception, and teaching of dig/viz rhetorics and thus responds by providing the cultural and community contexts for and in which dig/viz rhetoric transpires. 188 So I leave this conversation for now with an opening, not a closing. An opening for our students and instructors alike to open our minds and engage in rigorous and responsible intellectual transmigrations with students in our learning communities and to think critically about our responsibilities to advocating for, adopting, and participating in a decolonial pedagogy. Ultimately, a decolonizing pedagogy acknowledges the on—going legacy of colonialism on everyone in the Americas, as it affects all of us, no matter our nationality, race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and ability. It affects both advertently and inadvertently, immigrants striving for “the American Dream,” those of us who have suffered at the hands of colonialism, and those of us who have benefited from colonialism. Moreover, a decolonial pedagogy divests Western forms of dig/viz rhetorical inquiry of its dominance so that all cultural rhetorics may all contribute to—and foster an environment where our students contribute to—the charting of future directions in the mapping of a decolonial dig/viz cultural rhetorical landscape. Thus, a decolonial pedagogy offers shared benefits. And as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says, “sharing is a good thing to do, it is a very human quality” (p. 105). As a result of decolonial pedagogy, all students can be positioned as human beings, as producers of knowledge. Students with histories outside of the dominant culture may finally begin to see themselves in the texts they read/images they view within this curricula, as it will make the absent present. Perhaps such a pedagogy could lead to a collective acknowledgement of the host of humans who have been colonized in the Americas and address what Smith calls the “unfinished business of colonization” (p. 7). Further, a decolonial pedagogy responds to Smith’s call “. . .to decolonize our minds, recover ourselves, to claim as space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity” 189 (Smith, p. 23). This pedagogical transgressive move is also promoted by bell hooks' (1994) call for progressive, engaged pedagogy that promotes self-awareness and praxis from both students and faculty to foster a highly-engaged, non-threatening learning environment, with the following goals: To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin. (p. 13) Consequently, by opening up possibilities for further discussions in decolonizing the emerging Western dig/viz rhetorical canon, the relationships between computer-assisted R/W pedagogy and colonialism, and in collaborating in and contributing to an emerging (inter)discipline based on trans-cultural migrations and the forging of intellectual trade routes, this decolonial project and its proposed curriculum, assignments, and pedagogy support transgressive, collaborative, and community intellectual endeavors that inspires hope among trans-disciplinary, cultural, student, face-to-face and virtual communities. It was trans-cultural migrations and the forging of intellectual trade routes in dig/viz rhetoric inquiry that inspired this dissertation project. Without the decolonial pedagogical moves of my professors at Michigan State University, opportunities for the intellectual transmigrations between and across Western and indigenous dig/viz rhetorics inquiry that led to this project may not have revealed themselves. I may have continued to 190 see my interests in AIS and dig/viz rhetorics studies as disparate intellectual pursuits. Instead, after reading against the grain and re-tooling the ways in which I previously understood textuality and digitality, I now understand that American Indians have always already been hypertextual and hypermediated, as my research on wampum belts demonstrates. Further, both wampum belts and pictographs evidence that American Indians were employing visuals (through both visual and material culture) to communicate meaning long before alphabetic texts were hailed as the premier evidence of literate societies and consequently long before rhetoricians recovered visual rhetoric as a viable (and perhaps now superior, due to the recent touting of the primacy of the visual) form of literacy. I share these decolonial hypertextual stories of indigenous technological expertise as a demonstration as to how technological assemblages are perceived and produced differently in different cultural contexts and as an open invitation for other histories of technological expertise and dig/viz cultural literacies to be told. Just as we have come to understand that written texts are not neutral, nor are our understandings of rhetoric objective, my research reminds rhetoric scholars that dig/viz texts are biased and our understandings of them are subjective; thus, I have connected American Indian rhetorics to dig/viz rhetorics in an effort to prove this and consequently call for a decolonial change in our visual and digital rhetoric inquiry and pedagogy and the ways in which we engage with dig/viz analytical and rhetorical works from non-Westem cultures. As such, this project asks R/W and AIS scholars to suspend prior understandings of dig/viz rhetoric as limited to computer-mediated textual and visual communication and presents an additional, "new" history of dig/viz performances in the Americas—one that traces 191 American Indian dig/viz rhetoric theories and practices over time. Thus, this research ultimately results in a disciplinary critique of dig/viz rhetoric inquiry that situates its origins in the last 25 years or so. It is not uncommon for American Indians to encounter dig/viz stories that misrepresent Indian identities based on non-Native nostalgic fictions of what Indians and Indian-settler relations should resemble. However, this project reveals the hope that with a decolonial approach to dig/viz cultural rhetoric research and pedagogy, perhaps American Indians, American Indian communities, and American Indian allies can further inform dig/viz rhetoric inquiry and present us with techniques for engaging with and incorporating into our pedagogy American Indian dig/viz rhetorics that may differ from or be in direct conflict with our preconceived notions of what Indianness entails. Ultimately, then, dig/viz rhetoricians are positioned to simultaneously answer Scott Lyons call to for rhetoricians to respect and support American Indian rhetorical sovereignty, but in dig/viz contexts (resulting in dig/viz rhetorical sovereignty), and Nancy Allen's (1996) call for us to "reevaluate what we 'see' . . . [and] become especially concerned about the ethical implications of [our] work" (p. 88). And, to me, being ethical about the implications of our work suggests that we should look, un-look, and re-look at the dig/viz rhetoric we have consumed, produced, re-produced, and disseminated to make sense of our world—and to teach our students to do the same. This is a hypertext. 192 NOTES 1 I use professional communication here as an umbrella term that encompasses and extends the coverage of technical writing, science writing, and professional writing. 2As Warrior (2005) explains, "Trade routes, of course, are much older than modernity, and in the Americas they have been the loci of exchange for countless generations. Through them, tools, decorative materials, textiles, and foodstuffs have been moved across mountains, plains, and rivers from tribe to tribe and community to community. Native intellectuals participate in going out from and coming back to the places from which they cam, learning along the way new ideas that inform the creation of new knowledge" (p. xxx-xxxi). 3 Such as Selfe, 1994; C. Haas, 1999; Slack and Wise, 2005; Banks, 2005. ‘ See Monberg (2005) 5 See Powell (1999) 6 For example, MingMao; Matsuda; Silva 7 See White; hooks a See Anzaldua; Villanueva; Driskill), 9 Pratt; Tuhawai Smith; Royster 1° deCerteau ‘1 hooks, "Race Matters"; Anzaldua, Borderlands; Villanueva, “Memoria” ‘2 Perez; Foucault; Vizenor; Anzaldua ‘3 Bhabha: Signs Taken for Wonders; Spivak, "Can the Subaltem Speak?" 1‘ DeCerteau; Sandoval; Malcolm X 15 Some readers may question my affiliation with cultural rhetorics over ethnic rhetorics inquiry in this study, but I share Crow Creek Sioux scholar Elizabeth Cook Lynn's (2006) issue with aligning American Indians studies with ethnic studies: "Indians, first of all, are not 'ethnics' in American society; rather, they are indigenous populations with a particular political, cultural, and historical status different from any other population in the United States. They have signed treaties, reserved lands and rights and resources." 16 For more on the Composition & Rhetoric Ranch metaphor, see Lyons (2000) & Powell (2002). 17 Although there are historical, cultural, and political differences between the naming of American Indian and Native American studies Programs, from this point on, per my preference, I will refer to either program (when not a specific program) as American Indian studies programs. “3 The call for the 1970 convocation, the keynote address, assembly presentations, individual papers, special session presentations, the report on resolutions, and a list of the convocation participants (and their affiliations) are in the collection Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars (1970). 19 Many contemporary scholars agree that Vine Deloria Jr. wrote some of the most significant texts for foundational courses in the discipline, including The Aggressions of Civilization (1984), The Nations Within (1984), American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (1985), Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1988), God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1992), Red Earth, White Lies (1995)— just to name a few. 2° Although the study of American Indians has a much longer and sordid history with anthropology and archaeology, which complicates this history, the best concise background on the American Intellectual tradition from 1890-1990 is Robert A. Warrior's Tribal Secrets (1995), albeit with a focus on Deloria and Mathews' contribution to the intellectual tradition. 21 See Kidwell & Velie (2005) for more details on a history of American Indian studies. 22 Kimberli Lee is an adopted Oglala Lakota. 23 Of course, there is no one rhetoric and there is nothing exact about it. I post this question as an ironic reversal of Western rhetoric on itself to poke fun at Western concepts of categorization, and the resulting reductionism. 2‘ Kimberli Lee (2007) treats songs as texts and analyzes how these texts written and sung by American Indian musical rhetors John Trudell, Keith Secola, Robbie Robertson serve as texts of resistance. Although the rhetoric of each is still grounded in and demonstrates the common trope of resistance, she elucidates that John Trudell's rhetoric also emphasizes our responsibility to the Earth, the power of the spoken word, the power of our intelligence, and respecting women and Robertson's weaves in the importance of recovering voices from the past, storytelling, and cultural survival. 193 25 See Powell (2005; 2007) for more on material rhetorics telling stories and being made of stories. 2" As Warrior (1995) notes, "the success or failure of American Indian communal societies has always been predicated not upon a set of uniform, unchanging beliefs, but rather upon a commitment to the groups and the groups' futures," "come from adjoining generations", and integrate perspectives and experiences that resist critical strategies to "reduce them to narrow stereotypical categories and formulations" (p. xx). See Powell, Vizenor, and Warrior for more on process-centered traditions. 27 Let me take this opportunity to note that an American Indian or Native rhetorics scholar is one who thoroughly, critically, and responsibly engages with Native rhetorical scholarship and may or may not be of American Indian ancestry or citizenship. Just being indigenous does not make one a Native scholar, rather just a scholar who happens to be indigenous. 2" The codex is "an amalgam of typography, typeface and lettering" that weaves "between pictographs, bloodstains, and American cultural icons" (Baca). 2’ For more on the rhetoric of empire, see Powell, Baca, Mignolo, Gomez-Pena, and Spurr. 3° Such as Powell's positioning of Winnemucca's rhetoric as a performance of "Indianness" to meet the expectations of her white readers. 31 See Konkle (2004) for more on the trope of ironic reversals. ‘ 32 The phenomenon is similar to internal racism, where American Indians believe the rhetoric that has been constructed about by their colonizers. ’3 I should underscore the importance of this in recent Native rhetorics and to American Indian studies writ large, but the scope of this dissertation does not allow for details on this. 3‘ In this same book, Driskill also responds to ongoing hatred toward and oppression of Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities. 35 Aimed at reclaiming Anishinaabeg lands. 3‘ A national foundation dedicated to creating awareness and support for Native environmental issues and developing financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. 37 Although Anzaldua's work is tagged on to the end of the Rhetorical Tradition, it is not done so as a tactic; instead, it is done so as a strategy by those in the position and power to tag it on to the end of a continuous story, thereby demonstrating by their placement that her work is not part of the homogenous story, but instead still outside of the story. 3" Mignolo's (1995) work, in particular, reminds us of the "cu ltural assumptions behind the frustrations, misunderstandings, and power relations established between persons with different writing systems, different sign carriers (i.e., vehicle of inscriptions—books, Peruvian quipus, papyri), and, above all, different descriptions of writing and sign carriers" (p. 2). And although people are capable of describing their own social interactions and cultural production, the colonizers' descriptions of the colonized either suppress the colonized own self descriptions, or when the colonized do listen to the colonized, incorporate the colonized self-descriptions into their own. Thus, there is a legacy and a need for self-representation, which has ties to all forms of rhetorical sovereignty as well digital. 39 See http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Literature/wmignolo ‘° Although he also draws on examples from the colonization of Peru and Yucatan as well. ’1 Not to mention that the codices actually more than met the Castilian requirements for evidence of literacy—in two languages no less! "2 Visual Rhetoric (Summer 2005): theoretical and practical approaches to visual literacy, visual design, and visual rhetoric, reading across historical and recent discussions related to visual rhetoric and document design in composition and rhetoric studies, including how visual elements (both verbal and graphical) work within different types of documents; what it means to see, look at, and analyze elements of document design; and the effects visual elements have on different readers/viewers/users. 43 Digital Rhetoric (Fall 2004): inquiry into the dynamics of online, networked reading and writing practices; the rhetorical, social, cultural, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of digital texts; issues of technology and literacy; identity (including gender, race, and ability), subjectivity, and representation in digital spaces. 4" Professional Writing Theory and Research (Spring 2005): histories, theories, and pedagogies of professional writing and inquiry in workplace/organization studies, curriculum development, technologies, usability research, localizations/globalization, networked locations & writing, risk communication, public discourse, and community informatics/literacies. 194 4’ American Cultural Rhetorics (Spring 2005): theories and methodologies useful to American Cultural Rhetorics research and scholarship—from rhetoric & composition, to comparative rhetorics, critical race theory, narrative theory, historiography, American Indian studies, Chicana/o studies, class studies, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial/decolonial studies, and more. 46American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Special Topics In American Studies, Fall 2005): investigations of the multiple forms of material and textual production which constitute an American Indian intellectual tradition—as well as the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have been generated out of that tradition—facilitated by variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses, from historical, to historiographical, literary, legal, and rhetorical. 7III essence, trickster narratives interrupt discourses of power by employing linguistic tricks to manipulate the dominant, sometimes reversing the normal power structures by exposing the "the arbitrary and sometimes self-contradictory rules laid down by the dominant culture" (Terrill, 2004, p. 172). “As well as animal-technology interactions. ”Lyotard explains, ". ..knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge 15, and who knows what needs to be decided" (p. 8)? Foucault asserts that power is "intimately connected to dominant forms of expertise, science, and classification. To 'name the world' is thus to define reality and to establish rules about what validly be known, controlled, and imagined" (New Keywords, p. 276). Thus, just as Foucault argues that history has been based on the continuity of ideas, so has the history 00f our discipline. 50As Hutcheon notes, "There are no natural hierarchies, only those we construct" (p. 253). History 15 not found; it is made. With postmodern theory, "[h]istory Is not made obsolete; it is, however, being rethought—as a human construct" (p. 256). 4 51 An abridged version of this research was published in an article in the 30th Anniversary issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures: Haas, Angela M. (2007). Wampum as hypertext: An American Indian intellectual tradition of multimedia theory and practice. SAIL, 19(4), 77-100. 52 Gary Heba (1997) defines HyperRhetoric as "a form of communication that continually invents and reinvents itself through an ongoing negotiation among users, developers, electronic content, and its presentation in a multimedia” (p. 21). 53 Of which I am a member. 5‘ Notice how these browsers have colonial names, and all are proprietary, while Firefox is decolonial and open source. 55 For photos and more information on the Cherokee Nation's Trail of Tears exhibit, go to http://www.cherokeeheritage.org/Default.aspx?tabid=272 5" Based on Osage writer Robert Warrior's concept of intellectual trade routes, or loci that allow for the reciprocal exchange of intellectual goods and where "intellectuals participate in going out from and coming back to the places from which they came, learning along the way new ideas that inform the creation of new knowledge" (xxx-xxxi). 5' Wampum has also served as personal adornment in headbands, arm and leg bands, bracelets, earrings, etc. 5" This rhetoric is used, of course, in jest. Instead, I assert that a steadfast persistence in preserving an official history of hypertext, multimedia, digital and visual rhetoric and contemporary Western fixations on "new media" merely parallel and reinforce paradigms of progress and manifest destiny that ignore, twist, and silence non-Westem histories of technological experience and expertise. 59 Ted Nelson (1974) is recognized by many as the man who coined the term "hypertext" for "non- sequential writing," yet he credits Vannevar Bush as his main influence and the "grandfather" of hypertext theory. 5° There are other indigenous sign technologies that function similarly to Western hypertexts and have the potential to expand its current limitations, such as winter counts, birch bark scrolls, and the Aztec codices, but for the sake of fully demonstrating a pre-Memex technology that works like hypertext, I thought it more effective to provide thicker description through the use of a consistent example for my hypertextual counter-story. To explain, I assert that the cod ices are hypertextual (as well as digital), in that entry into the codices can vary from reader to reader and requires a "complex visual dance"; as Baca explains, the codex is "an amalgam of typography, typeface and lettering" that weaves "between pictographs, bloodstains, and American cultural icons"; the codex serves as a hypertextual cultural memory; designers employ various 195 and multiple rhetorics (e.g., visual and alphabetic, different languages, etc.); both wampum and codices serve as annals and rituals; and the reading of the codices as a communal ritualistic and ceremonial event also parallels the "reading" of wampum. And the three principle types of codices could also be used to understand wampum: time-oriented, place-oriented, and event-oriented. '51 The significance of the colors and patterns vary from tribe to tribe. ‘2 As Dubin summarizes, "Beads are tools by which people convey information to other people. . . . [and] organize and symbolize their world" (p.19). 63 Further, Farkas & F arkas claim that what makes hypermedia distinct from physical space is the capability to "jump" from one node to the next instantly (p. I 1). Although this may be true for print texts, this doesn't prove to be the case for wampum hypertexts, where the physicality and corporality are required to jump from one node of information to the next. Perhaps we can learn more about the hypertextuality of non-computer based hypertexts, then, from the study of wampum. 6‘ As if history and the peoples living on this continent did not begin until the European invasion. ‘5 Originally written for the Muscogee Nation News and then posted to her blog www.joyharjo.com/news on December 28, 2006, but here I cite the reprint in Erie Gansworth's (2007) collection Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing. 5" According to Technorati (2008), "A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them." ‘7 According to Deloria (2004), more than one hundred films about Indians were released each year from 1910-1913, and instead of communicating the lived realities of well-educated and rhetorically-savvy Indians of the time, such as Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala- Sa, they worked to support the dominant understanding of Indians based on and perpetuated by stereotypes. 6" For example, Dakota pick-up trucks and Cherokee SUVs. ‘9 Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) responded after my write-up, and her participation will be incorporated into future publications of this research; I also have commitments from LeAnne Howe (Chocktaw) and Richard VanCamp (Dogrib), but they have not yet completed the interviews. 7° MSU's IRB deemed my research exempt from review. 7‘ http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/ 72 http://nativeperspectiveonchiefilliniwek.blogspot.com/ ’3 "A place to study and consider images that are—or are MEANT to be—of American Indians. That is, ANIMALS or NON-INDIANS, playing Indian. Dressing up like Indians. With the occasional 'real' Indian, misrepresented" (Reese, http://imagesofindiansinchildrensbooks.blogspot.com/) 7‘ http://nativecuisine.spaces.live.com/ 75 http://nativerecipes.blogspot.com/ 7‘ http://nativefood.blogspot.com/ '7 http://nativerecipes.com 7" http://forums.chef2chef.net/chef-bIog/?author=l6107 79 Fletcher sits as an appellate judge for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and the Hoopa Valley Tribe. 8° Fletcher serves as a consultant to the Seneca Nation of Indians Court of Appeals. 3‘ http://turtletalk.wordpress.com/ ”2 As ofJune 13, 2008. '33 http://tribal-law.blogspot.com/ 3‘ http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/ 85 http://spookycyn.blogspot.com/ 86 Leech Lake Ojibwe writer Scott Lyons (2000) describes rhetorical sovereignty as "the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit [of agency, power, and community renewal], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse" (pp. 449-450). Craig Womack (1999) adds, “ ..Native perspectives have to do with allowing Indian people to speak for themselves, that Is to say, with prioritizing Native voices” (p. 4). F or example "Get Louise Erdrich' s Birchbark House---Reject Laura Ingalls Wilder' 5 Little House On The Prairie" 196 88 Such as George Copway (Ojibwe) and William Apess (Pequot), both of whom endorsed "the prior and ongoing autonomy of Indian nations from subordination to EuroAmerican authority and Native peoples' authority over traditional knowledge, history, and contemporary experience" (Konkle, p. 5). 89 "Referring to American Children’s literature, books published in the US. primarily for the American market, underrepresented groups include: European Americans (as in Irish American, German American, Norwegian American specifically, rather than unspecified “white); all peoples of the African and Australian continents; peoples of the middle east (though this is beginning to improve); Asians beyond Indian, Chinese, and Korean; Latinos (all subgroups, though this is improving); and contemporary Native Americans." (Smith, Exploring Diversity: Themes & communities: http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/diversity/multicuItural/communities.html) 90 Children's and YA Book with Interracial Family Themes: http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/diversity/multiracial/mu|ti_race_intro.html 9' http://nativeperspectiveonchiefilliniwek.blogspot.com/ 92 Physically located north of Santa Fe on Highway 84/285 and exit 177; 4/10 of a mile from exit 177 heading south on the east frontage road just before Arroyo Cuyamungue Road. Virtually located at http://nambefallstravelcenterblogspot.com/ 93 It's also important to note that students will often not fall into one category or the other, but in different categories in different contextualized situations. Further, this discussion doesn't even begin to discuss the effects of internal colonization. 9“ Such as Selfe, 1994; c. Haas, 1999; Slack and Wise, 2005; Banks, 2005. 95 He draws on examples from the colonization of Peru and Yucatan as well. 96 Predominantly Westemization, but the Sinicization of cultures has taken place over most of Asia for centuries. 97 As explained in Ch. 2, this promotion of intellectual transmigrations is inspired by James Thomas Stevens (Mohawk) and Caroline Sinavaiana's (Samoan) Mohawk/Samoa Transmigrations (2005), a book resulting from a collaborative creative project, where these poets engage in non-hierarchical, cross cultural exchanges by first translating songs from their cultures and then writing poems in response. Next, they write poems in response to each other's poems. Stevens also designed pen and ink drawings to illustrate each tri-phased poetic dialogue: from song, to poem, to response poem. These illustrations are relevant to the poem topics and are labeled in its corresponding native language. Songs about canoes, mosquitoes, cornbread, thunderers, rats, funerals, drums, wampum pigeons, and sarongs—as well as the responses to them—give each artist in the conversation and deeper understanding of the song and poem author's culture and a glimpse into ways in which each other's culture make sense of the world. This is a unique project, in that these poets demonstrate a methodology and inspire a pedagogy worth practicing in our profession. 9" After all, for Samoan scholar Caroline Sinavaiana (2005), her transcultural project with James Stevens became a "metadialogue with 'messages' streaming inward and outward, individually and collectively, temporally and spatially; in short: call and response" (pp. 12-13). 99 For the most current listing and map of tribal colleges and universities, see the American Indian Higher Education Consortium website: http://www.aihec.org/ ‘00 WRA 415: Digital Rhetoric. Retrieved 20 June 2008, from httpsz/lwww.msu.edu/~devossda/41 5/ '0' Contrary to the assumption that we must have great facility with the digital technologies we expect our students to interact with in order to meet their course deliverables, I suggest that we allow for a variety of digital technology interaction so that students may successfully communicate their information to their intended audience(s) and share their unique technological and rhetorical expertise. Whether a material, blog, wiki, video, music/audio, photograph, painting, web site, performance, or other hyper-textuaV-textile rhetoric, students should choose a technology and/or forum appropriate for the rhetorical work demanded by the rhetorical situation, share their technological/technical skills with others in the class, and take initiative in seeking out assistance in producing knowledge with that technology—whether from an elder to craft a basket or a digital writing consultant (like at Michigan State University's Writing Center) on,crafting a video narrative. This initiative could be cultivated by inviting technology elders from American Indian communities, other American Indian studies programs, and across campus to class to demonstrate and/or teach American Indian digital and visual rhetorical work. '02 This will provide students with a virtual meeting place outside of class, a sense of audience and purpose outside of writing for the teacher or the rest of the class, and offers other American Indian studies classes a sense of community online. 197 '03 Search results returned on the first display page generally receive the most traffic from Internet users, and American Indian studies has the agency to influence those results in several ways. To explain, although search engines display search results in accordance to ranking algorithms that consider hundreds of factors, and the leading search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, and MSN's Live Search) do not disclose their ranking algorithms, most digital rhetoricians report that search engines generally consider how a given query corresponds to: the title in the header of each webpage, the meta data tags (keywords that describe the data on any given webpage) keyed in the header section of each web page, the text included on each webpage, the relevance of the text on each page to its corresponding meta tags, the keywords used to describe the title and alt (text to be rendered when the element to which it is attributed cannot) attributes of links and images on each page, and who else links to the page. Learning the colonial rhetoric surrounding meta tags and their prescribed agency, then, can actually help American Indian e-writers and designers to better key in meta data so that our work is best positioned to tactically shape American Indian digital and visual rhetoric on the Internet. For example, anticipating the keywords users will type into search engines and tagging those as meta data in our websites and establishing alliances with American Indian technologists and our allies deemed reputable by these search engines and asking them to link to our websites, wikis, and blogs will optimize our chances of ranking higher in the search results, subsequently resulting in increased website/wiki/blog visibility. Furthermore, there are ways to Optimize e-visibility via free optimization tools found on the Internet and paid submissions to search directories. 1°" I caution students to be specific in their analysis. For example, instead of just analyzing how the media represents women, look specifically at how magazines geared specifically toward women represent them as dead, unreasonably thin, as having bad posture, etc.—or consider how women of color are represented differently than Caucasian women, perhaps as primitive, less clothed, or more often as mothers. '05 The video need not be long. I assign a video 2-5 minutes long, and it can be assembled fi'om a compilation of pre-made video, self-made video, still images, audio (narration, song, etc.), animation, text, etc. '06 I have also invited Mike McLeod to my class to present his 2006 CCCC presentation on the over- reliance on the visual rhetorical tropes of the buck, brut, and buffoon in Hollywood character roles for male African American actors '07 For example, many of my former students chose to post their videos to YouTube, some tagging them as WRA 110 and others just as "Italians in the media," etc. Also, Gomez-Pefia's (2006) La Pocha Nostra: Performance art for the new millineum: Crossover jam culture offers a cornucopia of visual ethno-techno critique, such as the "Chica—Iranian Project: Orientalism Gone Wrong in Azatlan," a "photo performance essay on the dangers of ethnic profiling in the post 9/11 era," where the artists dressed each other up in "ethnic drag" to construct a dozen performance personas and offers visual critiques of Hollywood's typecasting and media stereotypes of Middle Eastern "terrorists" and Latino "gangbangers." The "viewers" are asked to match the names of the performance artist with each constructed, gendered persona to see we (the US.) can differentiate between "Latinos" and "Middle Eastemers," as well as Mexicans and Iranians. These digital and visual acts of self-determination helps to open discussions of digital and visual rhetorical sovereignty, as well as visual gender- and culture- bending, counter representations, critiques of post- coloniality, re-enactment, fetishism, tourism, Othering, genocide, and more. '08 https://www.msu.edu/~devossda/vr/index.htrnl “’9 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-67I5652215188621499&hl=en ' '0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyJN iIeJ 054 l ' lhttp://www.thedai Iyshow.com/video/ index. jhtmI?videold=86244&title=trail-of-cheers or http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videold=86244 ”2 A wiki is an assemblage of web pages designed to support collaborative and community work, as anyone with access to the Internet and the wiki can contribute to and modify its content at any time. ”3 http://en.wikipedia.org ”4 http://www.nativewiki.org ”5 Native Web is "an international, nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to using telecommunications including computer technology and the Internet to disseminate information from and about indigenous nations, peoples, and organizations around the world; to foster communication between native and non-native peoples; to conduct research involving indigenous peoples' usage of technology and the Internet; and to provide resources, mentoring, and services to facilitate indigenous peoples' use of this technology." http://www.nativeweb.org/ 198 ”6 I learned this assignment from Nancy Barron's 2006 Computers & Writing conference presentation, "Digital Architects of Peace." She supplements this decolonial assignment with readings from Michael Callopy's (2002) Architects of Peace. ”7 As Tuhiwai Smith (1999) explains, "Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonization is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state)" (pp. 7-8). . 199 APPENDIX A List of American Indian Blogs Joy Harjo's Web Log: http://www.joyharjo.com/news/ Richard Van Camp's blog: http://www.myspace.com/richardvancamp Turtle Talk (Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law): http://turtletalk.wordpress.com/ Rez Judicata: Self-Determination Through Law: http://rezjudicata.wordpress.com/ Tsalagi Think Tank: A Cherokee-centric blog about tribal law, good native governance and education: http://stacyleeds.typepad.com/thinktank/ On the Prairie Diamond: A Miko Kings Weblog: http://mikokings.wordpress.com/ Azcarmen Contemporary American Indian Art: www.azcarrnenindianart.blogspot.com The Digital Rez: http://digitalrez.tribe.net/ American Indian (Native American) Original People Group Blog: http://americanindianoriginalpeo.tribe.net/ American Indian Information in the SLC (Salt Lake City) Area: http:l/aislc.blogspot.com/ American Indian Movement of Colorado: http://colorado-aim.blogspot.com/ Native American Recipes: http://nativefood.blogspot.com/ Native American Flutes & Music: http://cedarmesa.blogspot.com/ Native American Art News: http://www.amerindianarts.info/today.html The Marigold Trail: http://themarigoIdtrail.blogspot.com/ 200 The Unapologetic Mexican: http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/elgrito/ The Angry Indian: http://angryindian.blogspot.com/ Reverse Color Cherokee Double Woven: Weaving a new pattern in the Traditional Cherokee Double Woven Basket: http://reversecherokee.blogspot.com/ Cherokee Basket Designs: Designs used in Cherokee Basket Weaving: http://cherokeebasketdesigns.blogspot.com/ Wampum: Progressive Politics, Indian Issues, and Autism Advocacy: http://wampum.wabanaki.net/ North East Two-Spirit Society: http://ne233.typepad.com/ American Indians in Children's Literature: Critical Discussions of American Indians in Children's books, the School Curriculum, Popular Culture, and Society-at-Large: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/index.htrnl Desert Rock Blog (centers on the proposed building of a new power plant in the Four Corners of New Mexico): http://www.desert-rock-blog.com/blog American-Indians—R-Real: http://americanindiansrreal.blogstream.com The Native Blog (Potawtomi author, Larry Mitchell): nativeblog.typepad.com Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship (a caucus of the National Council for Teachers of English): http://aicaucus.wordpress.com/ 201 APPENDIX B Research Participant Information and Consent Form You are being asked to participate in a research project. Researchers are required to provide a consent form to inform you about the study, to convey that participation is voluntary, to explain risks and benefits of participation, and to empower you to make an informed decision. F eel free to ask any questions you may have. Study Title: A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us about Digital and Visual Rhetoric Researcher and Title: Angela M. Haas, PhD candidate Department and Institution: Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us about Digital and Visual Rhetoric is my dissertation research project, the purpose of which is to develop an understanding of historical and contemporary technological expertise of American Indians—from rock art and wampum belts to blogs. This research includes interrogating the relationships between how American Indians have crafted and used pre— and post- contact (and indigenous and Western) technologies. I would like to ask you some questions that will allow me to further understand these issues. You have been selected as a potential participant in this study due to your technological expertise as an American Indian with wampum and/or blogs. Your participation only involves the completion of the attached questionnaire, and it should only take 15-30 minutes of your time. Simply download the attachment, open the file, answer the questions, save the file, and e-mail it back to me as an attachment. Your participation is completely voluntary. You have the right to say no and to change your mind at any time and withdraw without consequences. You also may choose not to answer specific questions or to stop participating at any time. You will not receive money or any other form of compensation for participating in this study. At the end of my study, I will provide you with a draft of my findings, and you will be given the opportunity to review the draft and offer suggestions. There are no known or foreseeable risks associated with participation in this study. Instead, your participation in this study will contribute to the understanding of American Indian technological expertise; thus, this project should prove to be effective and beneficial for American Indians, American Indian communities, American Indian studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. I will share what I learn with digital and visual rhetoric inquiry to develop more effective ways for understanding specific cultural implications of technological progress, innovation, use, and representation and with American Indian studies inquiry to restore historical precedents for technological expertise in American Indian communities. I will also use what I Ieam in research articles, presentations, and book chapters. 202 Because I will gain a better understanding of American Indian technological practices through your participation—and American Indian knowledges have historically been stolen without acknowledgement—I would like to give you credit for your responses. Therefore, I plan on citing your responses in my study, thereby revealing your name. Completing this survey will indicate that you give me permission to disclose your identity in my research report(s) and/or presentations. Thank you for your time and consideration. 203 APPENDIX C American Indian Blogger Questionnaire Name: Tribal affiliation: l. 10. 11. What is the purpose of your blog? Why did you choose a blog to fulfill this purpose (over other online genres, like a general website or wiki)? If you use a blogging service to host your blog (e. g., Blogger, LiveJoumal, MySpace, Wordpress, etc.), why did you choose that blog provider? OR If you do not use a blogging service and host your own blog, why did you choose to do so? Why do you blog? . How did you learn how to blog? How would you describe your relationship with your blog? Is there a purpose behind the color choices on your blog? If so, please describe. Is there a purpose behind the image choices on your blog? If so, please describe. Do you link to other blogs on your blog? If so, how do you decide whose blogs to link to? Are the benefits of blogs for American Indians, American Indian communities, our allies, and/or others on the Internet? If so, please describe. Do you have any concerns regarding blogs and their impact on American Indians and American Indian communities? If so, please describe. 204 12. Do you see any relationships (differences, similarities, overlaps, etc.) between how you use blogs and other indigenous and/or Western technologies? If so, please describe these relationships. 13. May I include a screen capture image of your blog in my research findings (with the appropriate citation)? Please note any stipulations for including a visual of your blog, if any. (To check box, double-check on the desired box, wait for the pop-up window, select "checked" as the "default value" for the box, and then click on "OK.") 1:] Yes 1:] No Initials 14. Please feel free to include any additional information you would like to share: Thank you for your participation and sharing your blogging experiences. 205 APPENDIX D List of Visual Cultural Rhetoric Videos Representation & the Media: Featuring Stuart Hall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTzMqussOY Race, the Floating Signifier: Featuring Stuart Hall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMo2uiRAf30&mode=related&search= Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Villifies a People http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko_N4BcaIPY Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjije3RhIo bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQUuHFKP-9s Culture Shock—"Identity"—Unraveling "Asia America" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW4rFV5EJJ g Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_prGwP3yzE Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eszPT4nGI&mode=related&search= Margaret Cho: "Asian Chicken Salad" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLYfoqurc Lakota Spoof http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyJN iIeJ 054 206 The Arab World: As Seen on TV http://www.otherart.org/media/arabs.mov Appropriate My Culture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LZmeFAll_w 207 REFERENCES American Indian Higher Education Consortium. 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