Native American Rhetoric

Edited by Lawrence W. Gross
University of New Mexico Press (2021)
304 pages

Review by Edison Cassadore

Native American Rhetoric presents important voices on indigenizing the Western-based idea of “rhetoric.” The book explores this process with various writers and styles, ranging from academic to more conversational. Each writer in this anthology grapples with how to transform rhetorical approaches to be more Indigenous based in interpretation and explanation.

The book begins with the Thanksgiving Address from the Haudenosaunee and then moves to the use of digressions in Anishinaabe rhetoric to relevance and survival in “Chicana/o/x Rhetoric” to “Nahua Rhetoric and Worldview in the Glyphic Codex Borgia” to speaking to rattlesnakes to “Sounding Navajo.”

The last six chapters consist of continuing the conversation with an analysis of Apache rhetoric to “Decolonizing Salmon Rhetorics and Governance” to “Rhetorics of the Lower Coast Salish” to two-spirit Tlingit film rhetoric to “Think Kodhamidh!” to, the last chapter, “Coyotean Rhetoric.” What links these compelling analyses regarding indigenizing rhetoric is the inclusion of relationships that are beyond just human-to-human. The Thanksgiving Address (in both Mohawk and English) is allencompassing because it acknowledges not only people, but “The Earth Mother,” “The Waters,” “The Fish,” “The Plants,” and “The Sun.” Relationships are key here, and this collection emphasizes that it is about respecting those relationships. Gross asserts that “the goal of Native American rhetoric is . . . the creation of harmony, consensus, and unity.”

As a Native scholar teaching Native American literature, it reminded me of Holm’s Peoplehood Model, which is rhetorically Indigenous because of its use of an indigenized Venn diagram in understanding the relationships of land, history, ceremony, and language in terms of Native American identities. What the scholars here are expressing relates to that model in many ways because of its integration of key areas of experiences vis-à-vis the Peoplehood Model. That integration is indigenizing rhetoric because it conveys persuasively a range of Indigenous experiences based on maintaining harmonious, holistic relationships that serve to heal and to restore balance. These chapters convey what it means to present, rhetorically, that balance in relationships.

Much like Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Storyteller, this collection is a holistic composite of understanding Native American rhetoric wherein narrative analyses of rhetoric are synthetically related to other narrative analyses. It is synthetic, and, yet, analytic. We begin with the somewhat formal Thanksgiving Address and come full circle with the profound teachings of the trickster coyote who teaches us in rhetoric about the profoundness of life itself.

That holistic approach represented in the collection, furthermore, is what counters the ongoing violence of colonization and its negative effects. The crossing of boundaries in this collection of these fine scholars is what allows for true healing to occur because it counters the divisive legacy of colonization and thereby indigenizes rhetoric.

Edison Cassadore, PhD (Apache) is a professor of literature and humanities at Tohono O’odham Community College.