By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America

Abstract

For countless ages Nature had been preparing Amm'ca for her new tenant. Stores of metal and beds of coal had been laid down; inland seas had deposited jkrtile plains; riuer vallqs and mountain chains h a d j x e d highways for settlement; forests had stretched over the land, and waterfalls foretold the rumble of mills. All was ready for sentient lije.-Fredrick Jackson Turner, "American Colonization"'Much like the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner, famed wordsmith William Safire understands the power of language in public affairs. His widely admired Sujire's New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics not only delineates our political vocabulary, but also announces its own presence with authority.2 No self-respecting Euro-American can resist such a title; new is, after all, better than old and nothing could be better than a new dictionary for a new language. The name plays upon the quintessential Euro-American desire to begin again, to leave the Old World and make of the New a "shining city upon a hill," and to disdain that city, in turn, and "light out for the Territory." Inhabiting Safire's "new" language, however, are the same peoples that populated Frederick Jackson Turner's America, John Winthrop's City, and Huck Finn's Territory. Safire discusses sachem, a term used to connote political power among the nations of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse-often called the Six Nations Confederacy or the Iroquois League), as follows:

Written Out of Their Own Story: The Rhetorical Colonialism of Journalistic Practice

“…Communication scholars have interrogated those injustices and the various discourses that serve to extend or resist them. 2 Stuckey and Murphy (2001) offer the concept of rhetorical colonialism, which Black (2012) interprets as ''the ways that American Indian pasts, presents, and futures are symbolically controlled by Western interests'' (p. 636). Shome (1996) argues that contemporary communication scholarship of American Indian issues must be alert to the neocolonial context of discourse, for while colonists of the past emphasized territory, contemporary powers ''[subjugate] the 'native' by colonizing her or him discursively' ' (p. 42).…”

Native American Values and Management Education: Envisioning an Inclusive Virtuous Circle

“…For thousands of years before contact with Europeans would change the trajectory of their destiny, hundreds of groups of people who inhabited the landmass now known as the United States of America had their own names for homelands and themselves as peoples (Brown, 1971;Stuckey & Murphy, 2001). For our kin, these names were Bodewadmi, Pikuni, and Aniyvwiyai (also known as Potawatomi, Blackfeet, and Cherokee, respectively).…”

“…"American Indian" is a socially constructed racial category. It originated with Columbus, who thought he had reached the Indies (Stuckey & Murphy, 2001). His appellation was one of myriad misunderstandings that followed.…”

Rhetorical Counterinsurgency: The FBI and the American Indian Movement

“…Mark Meister and Ann Burnett extend the concept of rhetorical exclusion by showing how language strategies, particularly at work in the trial transcript of United States v. Leonard Peltier, were a part of a strategic order to "interpret the social order so that power is legitimized" (2004,723). Similar to rhetorical exclusion, John Murphy and Mary Stuckey (2001) argue that the colonization in North America was largely a rhetorical process that primed people and land for colonial violence. Furthermore, focusing on its roots in early American iconography, rhetorical critic Jeremy Engels connects the rhetorical maneuvers of colonizing discourses to demonstrate the "relationship between violence, nation-building, rhetorical invention, and the colonization of Native Americans" (2005,2).…”