Wicazo Sa Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/207
"Wicazo Sa Review provides inquiries into the Indian past and its relationship to the vital present. Its aim is to become an interdisciplinary instrument to assist indigenous peoples of the Americas in taking possession of their own intellectual and creative pursuits. Each issue contains articles, essays, interviews, reviews, literary criticism, and scholarly research pertinent to Native American Studies and related fields."
Writing 1. What do you learn about Lewis and Clark's expedition that you didn't know before? Didn't consider before?
Writing 2. These essays do rather than study rhetoric specifically. What moves, tactics, or strategies do you see an author or a couple of authors using to make their point? How are they like or unlike the rhetorics of survivance we've been reading/discussing?
Work with discussion questions.
A number of the histories that Yellow Bird relates about contact with Euro-Americans have a mythic quality to them (in that they feature elements like shape-shifting etc.). It’s clear from this essay that Clark and others saw these stories and beliefs as superstitions, viewing them through a lens that prevented them from seeing them for what they were. How can a non-Sahnish audience work with these stories in a critical way? Should “critical” be defined in a particular way, and what questions are useful here?
1. Clarissa Confer makes the following observation: “Anglo- Europeans have never been comfortable with the dispersed leadership style characteristic of many indigenous groups. The history of Anglo-Indian relations is replete with incessant attempts to identify and deal with one paramount leader within a group” (16). What rhetorical challenges are presented when two groups of people engage during which one expects a centralized “paramount” rhetorical authority, and the other operates with a more defused sense of rhetorical spokesman ship?
"When people become uncomfortable attempting to pronounce her name, they become silent, and little by little the story becomes lost to
us. Remember how often you used to hear of her. Now I have people correcting my pronunciation and insisting on a glottal stop—but how can that be—when the Lemhi Shoshone still call her Sacagawea? I fear it is another way to make native women disappear" (Earling). We have so far seen a near systematic removal of women throughout rhetorical history, and it is safe to say throughout most of history in general. Why has there been such a fear of women and how can we keep working to reverse the gendered course of history?