Using the 1957 Oklahoma Semi-Centennial statehood celebrations and the rhetorical practices used in the ephemera created for visitors to the state as a focus, this archivally-informed dissertation is about stories told by the artifacts, and stories that are left out. It is about the stories of Oklahoma, and about the cowboy and Indian tales that are told about the state. It is about the stories of my home and my life living between two cultures in Oklahoma and in my own body. This is a story about events in Oklahoma and the stories that the events and the land they took place on can tell. This is a story about history and progress, and it is one that I have been wanting to tell for a long time.By looking at these artifacts through a Cultural Rhetorics lens and methodology, I will show the ways that specific acts of curation and composing can shape an understanding of a people and of a place and how those people and places shape the stories that are told, and how an Indigenously informed Cultural Rhetorics archival approach to data collection can facilitate the untangling of stories from curated bullshit. Further, I will show how storytelling can be used as a decolonial method for conducting an object analysis on archival materials to draw out the underlying meanings behind damaging and ongoing narrative histories.
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