plateau indian ways with words - national council of teachers of

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m o n r o e / p l a t e a u i n d i a n W a y s W i t h W o r d s

CCC 61:1 / september 2009

Barbara Monroe

Plateau Indian Ways with Words

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’—and not just Pla-teau students’—“rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

When you see my Boy working for the Whites ask him “Did your Father send you?” if he says no, send him home; for, when he comes home at night I will say to him “My son I am thirsty, go and get me some water to drink,” and he turns around and says “You God damned Indian how much will you give me”; or if you see my daughter prostituting herself for money, ask her,

“Did your Father send you to earn money in this manner?”, then take a whip and drive her home, for when she comes back, her

Mother will tell her to get some wood to cook her Father’s supper, she will turn around and say, “You damned old Bitch pay me for

my trouble.” All this they have learned from the Whites. —William Parkhurst Winans Papers

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Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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Thus spoke Wee-ah-pe-kum at a tribal council in the Washington Terri-tory in 1870. This excerpt speaks to the power of Plateau Indian oratory in the nineteenth century; it also epitomizes many principles of an indigenous rhetoric that, I argue, still animates Plateau Indian student writing today in school and college. The anthropological label Plateau Indian includes dozens of tribes who have resided for thousands of years on the plateau drained by the Columbia River in what is now eastern Washington and Oregon, northern Idaho, and western Montana.

I started this study nine years ago in collaboration with teachers who maintained that there is something special about the way their Indian students write and speak, but they could not say how or why. My study focuses on the arts of argument and persuasion because these are the modes most often required in school and college—sites dominated by Euro-American rhetorical traditions. Not coincidentally, Indian student writing consistently scores low on standard-ized tests and on school and college assignments. To determine how Indian student writing today is distinctive, I collected and analyzed over 1,500 student papers at Plateau reservation schools; to determine why, I looked for possible historical and cultural roots. Turning to archival sources, I traced the evolu-tion of Plateau rhetoric in the apocalyptic century after contact 1855–1955, examining speeches, letters, and meeting minutes. I then fast-forwarded to contemporary materials, including reservation newspapers, Sherman Alexie’s essays, and RezKast (an Indian YouTube hosted by a Plateau tribe), among other artifacts, ending up with student writing in reservation schools. This article looks at just the beginning and end points of that trajectory: a speech from 1855 and then several student papers written in 2000–2004.1

As exemplified in Wee-ah-pe-kum’s speech at the beginning of this article, the Plateau rhetorical tradition privileges personal experience as supporting evidence and high-affect techniques, such as hypothetical dialogue, humor, and sardonic tone. Contrary to popular stereotypes, this indigenous tradition also places high value on speaking plainly, rather than poetically, and on de-liberating at length and recursively, rather than laconically and directly. These culturally marked features run counter to Euro-American academic argument, which values secondary expert sources, analytic logic, explicitness, and defini-tive theses—and, conversely, distrusts “subjective” support based on personal experience, “emotional” techniques, and “shifting” positions.

This binary, however, is more apparent than real. My investigation aims to break down monolithic notions of academic discourse and offer fresh insights

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into how we can teach writing at all levels, making our classrooms, in Scott Lyons’s words, “more relevant to and reflective of actual populations of this land” (“Rhetorical” 465)—including, but not exclusively, Indian populations, recognizing and honoring all students’ rhetorical sovereignty.

Embedded ValuesWhen immigrants come to this country, they usually lose their native language within one generation, but their communication style persists for many gen-erations (Tannen 236; Scollon and Scollon 276). These styles prevail largely because they are embedded in larger belief systems of a social group and encode a people’s epistemology and ontology (Nesbitt, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan 301). Because discourse and identity are mutually constituent, involuntary minorities are even more likely to actively maintain their traditional ways with words as acts of resistance against cultural erosion and loss. That is certainly the case with the Plateau Indians, who have maintained a distinctive com-munication style in their arts of persuasion for seven generations since late contact—and counting.

In brief, Plateau discourse speaks to one overriding value in Plateau In-dian life: the primacy of experience-based knowledge. This emphasis reflects a complex belief system that can only be properly understood on its own terms. Why and how would a collectivist culture privilege “personal” experience, and to what rhetorical consequence?

Just as the concepts of “directness” and “face” take on culture-specific meaning in Chinese American rhetoric (Mao 434–41), what constitutes “per-sonal” hinges on Plateau understanding of personhood. While much has been written on Indian collectivism generally, less attention has been given to the Indian concept of the individual, which is, in fact, highly variable across tribal groups. To a lesser degree perhaps than the Ute or the Lakota, who highly value what other Indian studies scholars have termed “self-dependence” or “social independence” (Leap 228), Plateau Indian culture also holds a profound re-spect for individual intuition and initiative. As a logical extension, individuals are expected to accept responsibility and pay the consequences of their own actions—but not for others. Those trying to exert control over another’s ac-tions or opinions only put that responsibility, and the onus of consequences, on their own backs. Unsolicited advice, however persistent, does not overstep that boundary. A story often told among one Plateau Indian tribe neatly en-capsulates these principles. A man refuses to eat and isolates himself in his room. His wife prepares him a meal that evening, but he refuses to eat or even

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respond to her call. The next evening, she again prepares him a meal, but again he refuses. And so on for three more nights. On the fifth night, the wife finds him dead (Philips 66–67). His wife’s good advice was ignored, and experience taught the man the undeniable truth of ages: eat or die.

At the same time, the Plateau Indian self is also a relational, interdepen-dent self, a construct that also manifests in many ways, often simultaneously with the independent self. For example, when a Plateau Indian introduces her-self, she typically identifies her lineage on both sides of the family tree, which does double duty of honoring one’s ancestors (Novinger 31)—and establishing her own connections, an oblique form of self-promotion. The native languages of the Plateau peoples reflect the importance of these identifications in its rich, expansive vocabulary for personal connections by birth and marriage. For example, in the Sahaptin language, there are over forty words for classifying relatives, including four kinds of grandparents, six kinds of siblings, six each for uncles and aunts, nephews, and nieces, as well as nine kinds of in-laws (Hunn 201). Identity is relational not only in terms of people but also in terms of the land. Tribal, clan, or band names are usually names of places where the tribe lived or traditionally congregated in their seasonal migrations, that is, “tall fir people” or the “people of the rocky defile” (qtd. in Hunn 58). Even the many varieties of Sahaptin are identified typographically, such as the mountain variety or the river variety. Thus selfhood is an intimate, coterminous weave of personal autonomy, family lineage, and ancestral land.

This abiding respect for the individual, not just the collectivities of which that individual is a part, deeply informs what kinds of supporting evidence can be convincingly brought to bear in Plateau argument and persuasion across many formal and official, not just informal and community, domains. “Speak-ing straight,” a phrase uttered numerous times during treaty negotiations in Walla Walla in 1855, means not only speaking truthfully but also directly from one’s own personal experience, one’s “heart.” Speaking straight from the heart, like knowing one’s path, is something only one person can do, based on his own experience-in-the-world. Embodied arguments may take many discursive turns, reflecting individuals’ rhetorical choices while working within cultural parameters for artful and convincing persuasion. Even given the unbounded nature of discourse, academic discourse with its emphases on writing from sources, “enthusiasm constraint” (Tannen 232), and analytic logic potentially presents particular difficulty for many students—not just Plateau Indians—in college classrooms. I discuss the implications for the teaching of college writ-ing in closing.

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Embodied Arguments: Walla Walla, 1855A True Copy of the Record of Official Proceedings of the Council in the Walla Walla Valley is “a unique rhetorical artifact” (Scott 6). It was one of the few treaty councils where complete verbatim transcriptions were kept; it was also the longest, the largest, and the most heterogeneous Indian gathering in U.S. treaty history. The translation process, torturously slow, nonetheless lent itself well to accurate minutes of the event, giving military secretaries and other eyewitnesses ample time to record everyone’s words. Each sentence spoken by the U.S. officials was translated by interpreters to Indian criers, who then shouted it to the approximately two thousand Indians sitting in a semi-circle on the ground, the chiefs in front; the process was reversed for Indian speak-ers addressing the U.S. officials (Nicandri 13; Scott 20). Military secretaries kept separate sets of notes, which they compared each night to produce one definitive version.

This tedious process surely affected syntactic choice, both sides undoubt-edly keeping their syntax simpler to accommodate the other. Still, even given flu-ent, able translators, much was lost in translation at all linguistic levels: syntax, semantics, and—most important to this study—pragmatics (Leap 7). Indian language syntax encodes all kinds of information, such as speakers’ confidence in their statements (as indicated in complex tense/aspectual markers) (183); degree of formality (as indicated by complex syntactic choices without paral-lel in English) (78); and the relative points of thematic stress as well as agency (as indicated in topicalization and left-branching syntax) (56; 77–78). The semantic nuances of a speaker’s vocabulary choice, intonation contours, and figurative language may not be fully appreciated by outsiders (183). With this much missing information, matters of pragmatics—discursive features such as the use of irony, figurative language, and even questions—also run the risk of misreading, incomprehension, or under-appreciation—or over-appreciation, as is often the case with Indian oratory—of the inferences and aesthetics involved. A full consideration of linguistic processes that map discursive choices remains outside the scope of this article; nor will space allow, unfortunately, for multiple examples of nineteenth-century Plateau Indian oratory. But examination of just one short speech will nonetheless exemplify key discursive features that recur throughout the Indian speeches at Walla Walla in 1855—and in student writing today, as a more in-depth treatment will later show.

Under examination is the first Indian response to the reservation plan laid out by the U.S. officials over a two-day period. Because darkness was falling, and because it was a Saturday, Governor Stevens of the Washington Territory

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asked if the Indians would rather wait until Monday to respond. To this ques-tion, Peo-peo-mox-mox, Walla Walla headman, spoke up:

Why not speak tomorrow as well as today? We have listened to all you have to say, and we desire you should listen when any Indian speaks. It appears that Craig [the Nez Perce interpreter] knows the hearts of his people, that the whole has been prearranged in the hearts of the Indians, that he wants an answer immediately without giving them time to think, that the Indians have had nothing to say so far it would appear that we have no chief. I know the value of your speech from having experienced the same in Califor-nia, having seen treaties there. We have not seen in a true light the object of your speeches, as if there was a post set between us, as if my heart cried from what you have said, as if the Almighty came down upon us here this day, as if he would say, what are you saying? Look at yourselves: your flesh is white, mine is different, mine looks poor. Our languages are different. If you would speak straight then I would think you spoke well. We have come together to speak about the earth and not of God. You were not afraid of the Devil! You see this earth that we are setting on. This country is small in all directions. Why should you fear to speak on Sunday? Should I speak to you of things that have been long ago as you have done? The whites made me do what they pleased, they told me to do this and that and I did it. They used to make our women to smoke. I suppose there they did what was right. When they told me to dance with all these nations that are here then I danced. From that time all the Indians became proud and called themselves chiefs. On another subject I have something else to say. Now how are we here as a post? From what you have said I think you intend to win our country, or how is it to be? In one day the Americans become as numerous as the grass. This I learned in California. I know that is not right, you have spoken in a round about way. Speak straight, I have ears to hear you and here is my heart. Suppose you show me goods, shall I run up and take them? That is the way we are, we Indians, as you know us. Goods and the Earth are not equal; goods are for using on the earth. I do not know where they have given lands for goods. We require time to think, quietly, slowly. I see Americans in all countries, it is not the country to think about, we may think about another. There is the Mission (Catholic Mission). It is right there and it is right it should be there. You have spoken in a manner partly tending to Evil. Speak plain to us. I am a poor Indian, show me charity. If there was a chief among the Nez Perses or Cayuses, if they saw evil done they would put a stop to it and all would be quiet. Such chiefs I hope Gov. Stevens and Gen’l Palmer are. I should feel very much ashamed if the Americans should do anything wrong. I had but little to say. That is all. I do not wish you to reply today. Think over what I have said. (Stevens 55, 57)

Most evident in Peo-peo-mox-mox’s speech is its high affect. He opens with a direct challenge, his anger barely disguised (“Why not speak tomorrow

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as well as today?”). Clearly insulted, he criticizes the interpreter William Craig, but his real target is Governor Stevens, whose words Craig is merely translating (“It appears that Craig knows the hearts of his people”). His use of indirection is intentionally artful, rather than politically expedient, for Peo-Peo-mox-mox builds up to a blunt assertion just a few moments later (“You were not afraid of the Devil!”), apparently unafraid to state his views, the build-up from under-stated irony to a direct hit dramatic and suspenseful. Such indirection also pays lip service to the Plateau value of modesty—as do overt remarks such as “I am a poor Indian, show me charity” and questions, rhetorical or real.

In terms of content, more striking and less expected perhaps is the deep distrust of ancient history, in large part because it can be appropriated without verification of one’s personal experience.2 Peo-peo-mox-mox openly rebukes one U.S. speaker in particular for using a five-hundred-year historical overview to back his claim that Indians and Americans cannot get along and therefore the Indians need to remove to reservations for their own safety (“Should I speak to you of things that have been long ago as you have done?”). He goes on to relate his own experience with Americans in California (“I know the value of your speech from having experienced the same in California, having seen treaties there”). Well known to his listeners was the fact that his son Elijah had been murdered in California, and that his killer, an American, had never been brought to justice (Brown 101–2).

Peo-peo-mox-mox continues, announcing that he is moving to another subject but actually picking up on the post analogy mentioned earlier (“On another subject I have something else to say. Now how are we here as a post?”). Once again he draws on his devastating personal loss in California, castigating his hosts for not speaking straight. He concludes this passage by appropriat-ing the stereotypic image of Indians as eager for gifts and then turning that image on its head by asserting that exchanging land for goods is impossible as well as unprecedented in his experience. Peo-peo-mox-mox closes with a mixed appeal. On the one hand, he seems to ask for mercy and to appeal to the Americans’ better nature, reminding them of their Christianity, which they have also brought to the Indians. Counterbalancing this submissive posture, however, is his closing reference, which can only be read as bitter sarcasm: “I should feel very much ashamed if the Americans should do anything wrong.”

“You have spoken in a round about way. Speak straight,” Peo-peo-mox-mox implores. Although he speaks recursively by Euro-American standards, he does speak straight by Plateau standards, for he speaks from his own embodied experience. Six months later, after war broke out but under a white flag of truce,

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Peo-peo-mox-mox was murdered by Oregon volunteers, and his body was hor-ribly mutilated (Brown 148–49). Although the Plateau Indians were ultimately defeated, both politically and militarily, and their way of life was forever altered, their way with words prevailed, keeping intact a discursive legacy that is still legible today in reservation schools.

Embodied Arguments: Reservation Classrooms, 2000–2004Of the 1,500 pieces collected at two reservation schools (one public with approxi-mately 30 percent Plateau Indian, 60 percent Mexican-descent, and 10 percent white and Filipino enrollment; the other tribal with 100 percent Plateau Indian enrollment), about 940 were authored by Plateau Indian students. Almost all of these were very short summaries of reading assignments (sometimes including reading in other subjects, such as chemistry) or short-answer responses to a list of questions or, occasionally, narratives (both personal and fictionalized). Of these 940 pieces, then, only about 200 pieces had an argumentative or persua-sive edge to them, meaning anything from a full-blown academic argument to a journal entry expressing the student’s opinion, no matter how ambivalently expressed. As this low percentage suggests, argumentative and persuasive writ-ing was infrequently assigned, probably in keeping with Plateau child-rearing practices: young people are taught to listen and watch, not to speak and offer their opinions in public settings, unless explicitly asked.

At the tribal school where journal writing predominated, students gener-ally read newspaper articles and wrote summaries, with only a minority of them offering personal insights, support, or refutations, but those few generally did so on a regular basis, mainly at the insistence of their teachers, who returned their papers with a comment such as “And what is your opinion?”, which re-quired them to respond and resubmit. Most teachers, however, did not require students to express their own opinions, and students opted for summarizing. The journal-writing assignment typically yielded a single paragraph. Time was clearly a factor in these short productions, tailored to be finished within one 55-minute class period, in part because of the high absentee rate from day to day (largely due to family obligations, such as attending funeral ceremonies, which typically last several days). Finding, reading, and then writing about a newspaper article or sometimes a set of generic topics, like “education” or “goals,” could easily take an entire class period.

Even given the obvious pedagogical and cultural limitations at these two schools, many students—although certainly not all students—(re)produced discourse that bore resemblance to their forebears’ oratory at Walla Walla in

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1855. That resemblance might be summed up as personalization, most often in the form of supporting evidence.

In the following excerpt, the writer uses her personal experience in open-ing her argument against teen pregnancy:

There’s a lot of teen mothers who are left alone, with no partner. Why are teens becoming single parents? I know from experience how it is or how it’s going to be, I’m going to be a single teen parent. Teens become pregnant and than there partner leaves them, for many reasons or excuses, for example, my boyfriend told his mom “I don’t even know if that’s my kid,” And then he left me for another girl who already has a baby and a boyfriend. Many guys use that excuse, you hear it everywhere, on t.v., talk shows, your friends. A lot of the guys are immature. And don’t want to take responability for their ac-tions. It’s almost been a month since my boyfriend broke up with me and now he’s saying “I still love you.” And he says he’s going to take my baby away. How can he take my baby away when he drinks? [emphasis mine]3

Such arguments are not strictly personal narrative arguments. Although in the example above the writer does weave her experience throughout the paper (which I have not quoted in full), she does not tell her complete story, as a story, and then analyze its import, as the genre usually presents itself in college writing. More commonly, students do not weave in their experience so much as they simply insert it, without missing a breath, often to powerful effect precisely because it is jarring. In the following paper arguing against legalizing marijuana, the writer does just that: “Another reason for not legalizing weed is it’s not too healthy. . . . I think cigarettes ruined my lungs just from second hand smoke think what weed can do. Some people with asthma can’t even talk without coughing or using their inhaler. If you have asthma and use marijuana it’s not really helping, it’s just another problem” [emphasis mine].

In the absence of firsthand experience, secondhand is the next best sup-port, as long as the person is known. “My friend got charged with statutory rape after he had a baby with a girl whose parents thought he was too old for her,” one writer compellingly opens her paper. She continues, boldly stating her thesis in very specific terms, weaving the example of her friend through the first paragraph:

The thing of it was the parents never said anything until the baby was here so they were able to take the baby away by saying the mother was not responsible enough to take care of here. I think they would have done just fine without their parents because they chose to have a baby together and they obviously felt they were ready by bringing the child into this world. I feel statutory rape should not be

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charged in a situation where the partners are over 16 and less than 3 years apart in age. So in this case, he should not have been charged.

This same paper also demonstrates that tribal youth sometimes question re-ceived wisdom. Their own lived experiences are important, too, as the writer of the statutory rape paper goes on to argue: “Parents also believe that their teens are not emotionally ready. If their parents don’t allow them to have emotions such as loving emotions, or sexual emotions they will never really be able to tell what emotion is what. I think they should experience these kinds of emo-tions so they will be ready for the real world as they get older and be prepared for pain, hurt, and guilt.”

In other instances, however, student writers call on the authority of their parents, citing their parents’ opinions for supporting evidence, as in this journal piece responding to the news article on the space shuttle disaster: “My parents think they were cooked before they crashed down in Texas. Because the tem-peratures got to be what!? 35,000 degrees inside of the ship. I maybe wrong about that but don’t know.” Here numerical specificity (“35,000 degrees”) is overstated for comic effect. At the same time, the writer admits that he does not know himself and therefore cannot attest to the accuracy of the information. He goes on to write: “Now they’re searching inch by inch looking for space shuttle part plus body parts of the remaining seven Astronauts. NASA orderly told people not to pick up any parts because some maybe toxic. Do they listen? NO!” While the morbid fascination about body parts might be found in any teen’s journal entry, the sarcasm and high affect (“Do they listen? NO!”) are common features in the writing of Plateau Indian students—just as it was at Walla Walla in 1855.

Frequently, students apologize up front for their lack of experience-based knowledge, but then they go on to state their views in compelling and vivid ways. Notice the opening apology (“I did not see the performance but . . . “ ), the high affect (as evidenced by the exclamatory punctuation), and the use of non-rhetorical questions in this journal entry in response to a news article on an OutKast performance:

I did not see the performance but I know the Dine Nation needs the apology the most for Outkast using one of their sacred songs for hip-hop music. That is really disrespectful and a representative should have asked permission to use the song. How did they get the music of the Dine Nation in the first place? Pretty much every-thing they said about the feathers and stuff is how I feel. It is all true and why did they choose to dress like us Natives? But they made their regalia look stupid. Real Natives don’t dress like that. If they didn’t like the look then they should not have

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changed it! When NonNatives see fake stuff like this on t.v. they really think that is how we are! I still get asked by Non-Natives if we still live in teepees and I take it as a joke or if I get asked too much I get angry. The only thing that bothers me is not everyone is apologizing that is responsible for this action. [emphasis mine]

But students consistently reserve judgment when only “rumors” or un-specified people can be cited. In a historically oral culture, information without attribution is generally suspect. “People say that Tupac and Notorious Big hate[d] each other,” one student writes. “Rumors say, Tupac murdered B.I.G. Years later Notorious or people that hate Tupac killed him. I don’t know that’s what the rumors say. I don’t know what caused him to be so violant. I sometimes wonder what happen to him in the past.” Another writer responding to an article on Big Foot duly notes that she finds the motives of researchers suspect: “[They just want] to get rich or famous.” She also points out that she herself does not have firsthand knowledge but nonetheless wonders: what if eye witnesses have conspired to not share their knowledge? “I have never seen Bigfoot myself. but I have heard that if you do see Bigfoot you do not tell on him of where he is at. I don’t have to much to write about Bigfoot because he is a mystery and don’t really know if he exists. Nobody does. I don’t want to sound negative about his existance but I don’t think he does but I hope so.”

The tendency to personalize and put one’s self into the situation may be a feature of oral culture generally (Tannen 234), but such a generalization (besides replicating the ersatz oral/literate divide and implying the latter term is superior to the former) fails to account for variations in doing so and in what rhetorical situations. In these students’ papers, as in their forebears’ words, “personalization” manifests as performance cues, such as direct quotes, non-rhetorical questions, and emotive punctuation and capitalization (i.e., exclamation marks, all caps to indicate shouting, and so on). Dramatization solicits interpersonal involvement with the audience, allowing them to experi-ence this situation, too, creating the effect of “you-are-there” through artful narration. These personalized inserts sound story-like, reflecting perhaps a cultural propensity for storytelling.

In the following example, the writer uses some of these strategies to re-spond to an article on Emmitt Till. The writer makes dramatic use of selective detail and non-rhetorical questions. He goes on to put himself in the mother’s shoes (cross-gendering is a common motif in Plateau storytelling and joke telling)—so much so that the mother’s words become indistinguishable from the writer’s. And instead of simply describing Emmitt Till as depicted in the

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photograph, the writer inserts himself toward the end of the description as the one seeing Emmitt’s smile in the photograph:

I think it was wrong for them to do to this boy. He probably didn’t even commit any sin yet and he died. Also where was the family in all this [?] No one tried to stop this. If they took one of my family members I’d go after them for sure. They shot him and beat. His tongue was choked out. They chopped his nose in several places. His mother asked the undertaker not to do anything to him. She asked him not to fix his body so that the world could see what they did to him. I would be the same way. Don’t touch him let the world know so Americans can see what it is really like. see this boy’s picture. He look’s happy as the day he was born. I see a smile on his face. This was only beginning for all black Americans. It got worse. [emphasis mine]

For another assignment, students were asked to write about how technol-ogy played a role in 9/11. The following paragraph, taken from a larger paper, reads like a private conversation between the writer and the teacher. The writer dramatizes with a hypothetical quotation, with considerable sarcasm, the plight of the people in the World Trade Center. She goes on to argue point-edly that she cannot take a position on the issue because she did not have this experience and cannot speak for others, objecting almost on epistemological grounds: how could she possibly know with any certainty if she did not have this experience directly?

The 9.11.01 was very sad for other people. To me don’t know what I feel about that day when the airplanes crashed. Way back in history people couldn’t rely on technology. People rode horses, carts. Don’t know what are you telling me to type here. You need to be more clear on what you want me to write about. You saying if it wasn’t for the technology the Twin Towers would be still standing right now. And the people that are working in Towers would also still be alive. Like if the towers were a little stronger and the planes just crashed into them people inside the build-ing would be like saying, “Oh my goodness the plane has trouble controlling I hope the people in the flight is alright.” I don’t know. Something like that can’t read other peoples minds you know I’m not a psychic can’t predict the future. [emphasis mine]

At least one other student protests that writing a paper for persuasive purposes is an absurd request, not because he does not have an opinion but because the medium is wrong. On the check sheet for the paper, to the question “Did you persuade your audience?” the writer responds, “We didn’t speak!” For this student at least, persuasion is an oral art, not a written one—the oral art of persuasion requiring interpersonal interaction in real time.

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Like their forebears in the 1800s, students may show a strong disinclina-tion to speak for others, but they are not similarly disinclined to quote them, again in keeping with the importance of attribution in oral culture but also in keeping with performing and allowing the audience to experience the text along with the author/speaker. In a paper on Nightmare on Elm Street, the stu-dent writes, “Spencer doesn’t want to be like [his father] never! . . . Like what Jason M. [a pseudonym] tells me, ‘Its your life you live it your way.’” Students also quote themselves, as in this journal entry where the writer imagines ad-dressing the Iraqi suicide bombers: “I just got one [thing] to say, ‘Wake up and look around. There’s a whole different world out there. Not many things can’t go your ways. If you can’t face it or deal with what do you do? you just attack. Then become hero’s at your home state. But there’s a price for wanted and will pay for homicides.’”

This writer closes with this remark: “Don’t know what else to say so guess I’m finished.” And like the writer of the paper on the role of technology in 9/11 cited above, students do not hesitate to make up dialogue to dramatize their points. In a paper on the positive and negative effects of marijuana, the writer states, “Now you’re probablly thinking ‘why don’t they just make a pill that is associated with marijuana?’ They do make a pill it’s a synthetic THC.”

The rich variety of humor in Plateau Indian oratory and writing—from understatement to overstatement, from sarcasm to scatological references—might be seen as another form of high affect that also involves an audience, requiring more work from them than “speaking straight,” so highly valued and much referenced in Walla Walla in 1855. In a journal entry, a student sarcasti-cally criticizes the U.S. congressman from her district who “described United Nations inspections in Iraq as ponderously slow and part of a ‘clever job’ by Saddam to fracture the U.N. and isolate the United States. Yeah yeah yeah it’s like that man. Clever job’s by Saddam I don’t think so.” In another entry, the same student bitingly critiques race relations as reflected in NASA decisions and the local newspaper op-ed piece, contrasting these reflections against her own experiences on her home reservation, which tell her otherwise (although her own views and those of the op-ed piece are difficult to distinguish):

This native this indian is going into outer space. Which is kind dumb I think I mean think man he a half breed he don’t even look indian. Maybe that why they picked him. because he looks more white than indian. I bet he didn’t know untill now then made it a big thing. Also A Spanish guy is going up geezs man [name of local newspaper] said. It’s like putting a German and a Jew together. That’s Bullshxx. Natives and spanish people have been getting along for years. On the Rez

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we have half breed Spanish Native. (I call them indian tacos) and he’s got to take all that stuff with him arrow heads pottery fluts sweet grass all kindas of natives stuff which he’s not part of well I said and written what I’ve done on this paper.

Also notable is this student’s use of performance cues (e.g., the parenthetical remark) as well as the explicit sign-off typical of oral discourse, signifying that her turn is over, and she is relinquishing the floor.

Humor is used in Plateau Indian student discourse not only to involve readers but also as a form of persuasion in and of itself—often without aid of abstract facts favored in academic discourse. One student points explicitly to this culturally marked distinction in his reflective piece: “I personally believe the Persuasion [in my paper] is very effective. Not because I was very convinc-ing as in terms of facts or examples, but indeed my piece was colorful in the sense it was humorous. . . . I was pleased with myself when I heard my teacher response because I accomplished what I intended, to get a laugh.” Thus, per-sonalizing and performing are used as persuasive techniques—not unlike the way the Indians at Walla Walla sought to argue their points.

As this student’s comments also suggest, the “convincingness” (Nesbitt, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan 301) of an argument is culturally contingent, in large part because culture affects one’s preferred cognitive orientation “indi-rectly by focusing attention on different parts of the environment and directly by making some kinds of social communication patterns more acceptable than others” (294). While school discourse clearly works from an analytic logi-cal framework, at least some student writers in this study exhibit a decided preference for holistic thinking. By definition, holism holds that all things are interdependent and that change in one thing has a ripple effect on the entire ecosystem in which the one thing resides. Holistic thinkers rely on empirical observation and the spontaneous insights that come with direct perception of the whole. Further, holistic computations generally operate on the principle of dialectic, a cognitive model that has a high tolerance for change, contradic-tion, and multiple perspectives—while analytic logic operates on the laws of noncontradiction (294).4

As might be expected, holistic thinkers find experience-based knowledge more convincing than do analytical thinkers. Less expectedly perhaps, differ-ent cognitive orientations also affect how thinkers process arguments and counterarguments as plausible and therefore convincing. The dialectic process animating holistic thinking allows for multiple perspectives, while the logical process underlying analytical thinking might view multiple perspectives as

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irreconcilable, illogical contradictions: one cannot hold contradictory posi-tions at the same time. For example, in one study, when subjects read written scenarios involving mother-daughter conflicts, analytic thinkers came down on one side or another, whereas holistic thinkers saw merits in both sides (“both the mothers and the daughters have failed to understand one another”) (qtd. in Nesbitt, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan 302). More disturbingly, in other studies analytic thinkers felt their own position became more plausible when presented with an opposing viewpoint, while holistic thinkers found their own position less plausible in light of the contradiction. Some even found the counter proposition had more merit than their original position or found both propositions equally plausible and worthy of merit. In other words, analytical thinkers responded to contradiction by polarizing their beliefs, while holistic thinkers responded by modifying their beliefs (302).

Holistic argument is evident in at least some of the student writing samples. Sometimes student writers soften their position by the end of their papers. In the following example, the high school writer states her position adamantly in the first paragraph: “[school name] ought to have an open cam-pus.” She opens the second paragraph with her main reason: “so we can get some good food at lunch time.” Here is the second paragraph quoted in full:

We ought to have an open campus so we can eat some good food at lunch time. For example McDonalds is only a few blocks away and so is that Chinese restraunt [name of the restaurant]. On some days the students are stressed out from school work so at lunch time they want some real food. And on other days we will have a craving for a hamburger and we can just walk to McDonalds and get one. Plus the students can take care of their personal business. If a student had a headache and since the school doesn’t give out asprin they can go to the store at lunch time on buy some. We deserve to have McDonald’s because we get tired of school lunches.

Although she mentions another reason for having an open campus—so “stu-dents can take care of their personal business”—and another restaurant other than McDonald’s, it becomes clear that going to McDonald’s for lunch is what this writer really wants.

In the third paragraph, however, the writer goes on to present opposing viewpoints, responding in turn to each one, point by point, thereby ostensibly strengthening her argument—as one arguing from an analytical framework might do. In the first sentence, she directly quotes what the school staff would say; by the last two sentences, however, the hypothetical statements of those holding the counterargument become indistinguishable from her own voice:

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The school staff would say, there is no use for an open campus because the school provides the lunch and its free. But sometimes the students want some good food but we can’t have it since the school is a closed campus. If the school doesn’t want an open campus the school store should make hamburgers McDonald style. And just because some of the students are trouble makers doesn’t mean they can ruin it for the others. Well just don’t eat then, the school pays for it and the students act like its free and waste it. It is a privalage to come here and you should appreciate what the school does for you. [emphasis mine].

It is in the fourth paragraph that the writer brings both sides of the argument in tension, given both equal time, both arguments presented using the same stylistics: the same sentence types, the same use of concrete details, each par-alleling the other. She moves from one side to the other, without transition, a jarring effect for the reader, who must discern that the sentences starting with “The students” to the end of the paragraph are those of the opposing viewpoint:

If we had an open campus the students can take care of personal business. They can make phone calls, buy some magazines, and to talk to people, and other personal things they need to take care of. They can call their parents, talk to friends on the phone, or go buy stuff on their spare time. The students would be irresponsible and would be late all the time and smoke and get high. The students would be late repeatedly and they would skip. They would take off and get into trouble and go get in fights. So an open campus might not be a good idea. [emphasis mine]

The writer maintains this tension between the two sides in her conclusion, recognizing that each side has but a partial view of the issue: “So maybe the open campus idea is not a good idea to the school staff, but the students would enjoy it. They can go and take care of personal business and do talk to friends and enjoy some McDonalds.” The writer does hold her position, largely by plac-ing it second—and last—in the reader’s mind, but softens it at the same time, as if allowing that others’ views are valid, too.

Back to the FutureThe student author arguing for an open campus finds herself in a bind that is at once rhetorical, cognitive, and cultural. She works from the discourses of discussion and deliberation she has seen and experienced on the reservation—in newspapers, at the long house, during powwow—in trying to accommodate the demands of academic discourse introduced at school and tested for by the state. Her attempt at what Lyons calls “mixed-blood literacies” is much less successful than that of some of her peers who have had more practice or

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exposure to white ways with words, or whose parents have been educated or have worked in a white system before moving to the reservation.

In fact, most Indians of the twenty-first century already practice what Lyons calls “mixedblood literacies of negotiations” (“Captivity” 107). What they need is “spaces [in the university] to practice them” (107). I want to suggest that those spaces are already there. The problem is that those who most need to practice writing in those spaces—basic writers who, not so coincidentally, happen to be working-class students or students of color—are generally disal-lowed those opportunities, at least in most freshmen composition programs charged with teaching academic discourse as prerequisite to success in college. This goal too often drives an overfocus on correctness and formulaic writing, diverting attention from the real reason these students fail: social and economic inequalities systemically maintained. A degree of proficiency with academic discourse may be necessary for success in college, but it is not sufficient (Gee 94). How then do we prepare students to be proficient in academic discourses at the same time we honor their rhetorical sovereignty?

In response to that question, three trends have emerged, more or less in this order historically, each with its own assumptions about students, their needs, and the corresponding goals of writing instruction (Bizzell, “Basic” 4–5). The deficit model, which sees basic writers as linguistically unsophisticated or even cognitively impaired, aims to remediate and cure students of their verbal ills. The acculturation model, which sees basic writers as simply unfamiliar and unversed in academic discourse, aims to initiate students into the discursive practices of the university. The third trend questions the unitary, reified notion of academic discourse itself, with the goal of bridging communicative gaps between home and university literacies, encouraging students “to experiment with their own forms of hybrid discourses” (Bizzell, “Hybrid” 17). I clearly stand in this third camp—but only with one foot, the other just as firmly placed in a fourth camp usually not invoked in conversations about basic writing, at least not for a long time: the computers-and-writing camp. Literacy instruction for basic writing needs programmatic inclusion of multimodal writing with new media and over networks.

These trends in literacy instruction might be succinctly contrasted this way: the first asks students to reproduce the university; the second, to invent it; the third, to reinvent it. The fourth, a little-discussed option, seeks to “remediate” the university—“remediate” in the way Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use the word in their book Remediation: that all media derive

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and evolve from earlier media: such as photography remediated painting, film remediated photography and theater, and television remediated film. Rather than narrowly preparing students for traditional essayist literacy, and bearing in mind that writing on paper and writing in electronic spaces are not compet-ing but complementary competencies, we need to more broadly prepare them in mixed media, for at least three reasons. These spaces more readily allow for and even require mixed forms of discourses. These mixed forms more closely align with many students’ own homegrown literacies of negotiation. Finally, we need to prepare students not just for college writing but also writing after and outside of college.

As Bizzell has pointed out, mixed forms are emerging and gaining le-gitimacy in the academy, as evidenced by scholars and students alike. The work of Victor Villanueva and Helen Fox, for example, has demonstrated the effectiveness and eloquence of blending personal experience and scholar-ship. Increasingly visible in today’s composition classrooms is “a generation of discourses that are themselves mixed, reflecting linguistic and rhetorical resources from many and varied cultural archives” (Bizzell, “Hybrid” 112). These new developments might be chalked up, in part, to greater diversity but, in larger part, to the ability of mixed forms to do new kinds of intellectual work (Bizzell, “Basic” 11). I would argue that new media and popular culture have accelerated this blending process, exerting pressures on both home and academic discourses, separately, even before they intersect in the classroom. The Web, MTV, advertising, the visual—all are leaving their fingerprints, and at least some composition textbooks acknowledge their collective impact. For just one example: They Say/I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein devotes a section on mixing academic and colloquial styles, blending in popular expressions and sayings (116). Informal questions, the authors recommend, can introduce objections to one’s argument (80). And if one is not sure about one’s own position, expressing ambivalence may not necessarily be viewed as indecisiveness but as the writer’s “deep sophistication” (61); Graff and Birken-stein go on to offer a template for showing agreement and disagreement at the same time. The authors even mention the “satiric summary” as a way for a writer to give her own spin on someone else’s argument, in the same way that Jon Stewart does on the parody news show The Daily Show (35). Rather than approaching the teaching of argumentation by focusing on principles of logic (e.g., syllogisms, claims, warrants, inductive and deductive reasoning), their text takes an experiential approach, actually trying out one’s argument with people who then respond (xvii).

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Interestingly, these “new” directions in composition textbooks echo back to the future, as it were. For arguing from multiple perspectives, expressing ambivalence, using questions to develop refutation, and satirizing others’ modes of expression—these discursive features coincidentally align with those favored in Plateau Indian rhetoric for seven generations. Experiential, embodied learning is the preferred learning style of the Plateau peoples, and contextualization, the distinguishing feature of holistic thinking. Drawing on scholarship in cognitive psychology, Gee argues:

Learning does not work well when learners are forced to check their bodies at the school room door like guns in the old West. School learning is often about disem-bodied minds learning outside any context of decisions and actions. When people learn something as a cultural process their bodies are involved because cultural learning always involves having specific experiences that facilitate learning. . . . [H]umans understand content, whether in a comic book or a physics text, much better when their understanding is embodied, that is, when they can relate that content to possible activities, decisions, talk, and dialogue. (39)

New media have opened up other pedagogical possibilities that may also be culturally compatible, even if only coincidentally so. “Personalization” not only describes Plateau rhetoric; it also describes Web 2.0. Knowledge-displays in the academy—traditionally confined to the individualistic, competitive “re-search paper” and the essay exam—which are no longer as constrained as they once were, as portfolios, presentations, and field projects now complicate the mix. While communicating over networks is not necessarily the equalitarian enterprise early practitioners once believed it would be, peer-to-peer interac-tion is the key communicative competency of Plateau Indian students, like many other groups who share similar childrearing practices and socialize their children to listen to adults but talk freely to their peer group. Monitored by adults, blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions may seem to be too public and too self-promotional for young Indian adults to express themselves at length; yet the forms themselves allow for personal expression based on experiential knowledge (sometimes embarrassingly so, by mainstream standards), and the public yet collaborative nature of generating these forms might prove to be an effective threshold for young people on the cusp of adulthood otherwise taught they were to be seen and not heard. Using email as a response medium between teacher and a single student, too, honors another preferred interac-tion channel in Plateau culture specifically, and probably other cultures as well, including working-class cultures. Email conferencing might be less intimidating

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for such students than a face-to-face conference, even as the genre is another mixed form, remediating the old forms of the office memorandum and the personal letter.

Certainly, academic discourses are not monolithic. Nor are they strictly or necessarily oppositional to the home literacies that students bring to the university. The problem is that we often portray them as if they were mono-lithic and oppositional in basic writing classes and programs, even though such positions belie our scholarship and betray our practice in other writing classes for mainstream students and at later stages of the program. Thus, we engage in “rhetorical imperialism” (Lyons, “Rhetorical” 458) when we do not allow first-year students to participate in the great flowering of academic dis-courses, confining them to traditional essayist forms and formulas, such as point-counterpoint argumentation, instead of conveying a sense of argument as evolving from a complex process of “agonistic inquiry and confrontation cooperation” (Lynch, George, and Cooper 61). We engage in rhetorical impe-rialism also when we naturalize academic discourse as superior, stable, and definitive, instead of advancing an understanding of the values it embodies and the people it endows (Royster 25). If we really want to prepare all students to be proficient in academic discourses, we will honor their rhetorical sover-eignty, allowing them to engage their own powers of negotiation with academic discourses—plural—in all their richness.

Notes

I have omitted the use of sic throughout this article for the sake of readability.

1. For the full examination of this evolution, see my Plateau Indian Ways with Words, under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press.

2. I have re-appropriated Bizzell’s term “appropriative history,” which she has identified as a common feature of hybrid academic discourses and defines as “a creative retelling of traditional history in which the writer’s agenda for needed new research is highlighted” (“Hybrid” 14). I have altered that name and notion from appropriative to appropriated to highlight that in this context, it was the white Americans, not the Indians, who creatively retold history to support their points.

3. In quoting from student work here and elsewhere, I italicize parts relevant to my argument to aid the reader. Also I randomly re-assigned gender pronouns when discussing student authors in another effort to protect students’ identities.

4. Nesbitt, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan specifically argue that Asians think holis-tically, while Americans think analytically—clearly an overgeneralization. I have

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Bizzell, Patricia. “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness; or, What to Do with ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourse.” Journal of Basic Writing 19 (2000): 4–12.

. “Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How.” Composition Studies 7 (1999): 7–21.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.

Brown, William Compton. The Indian Side of the Story. Spokane, WA: C. W. Hill, 1961.

Fox, Helen. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.

Gee, James. Situated Language and Learn-ing: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Aca-demic Writing. New York: Norton, 2006.

Hunn, Eugene S. Nch’i-Wana, “The Big River”: Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990.

Leap, William L. American Indian English. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1993.

Lynch, Dennis A., Diana George, and Mari-lyn M. Cooper. “Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation.” College Composition and Communication 48 (1997): 61–85.

Lyons, Scott. “A Captivity Narrative: Indians, Mixedbloods, and the ‘White’ Academy.” Outbursts in Academe: Multiculturalism and Other Sources of Conflict. Ed. Kath-

leen Dixon. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Heinemann, 1998. 87–108.

. “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 447–68.

Mao, LuMing. “Rhetorical Borderlands: Chi-nese American Rhetoric in the Making.” College Composition and Communication 56 (2005): 426–69.

Nesbitt, Richard E., Kaiping Peng, Incheol Choi, and Ara Norenzayan. “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic versus Ana-lytic Cognition.” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 291–310.

Nicandri, David L. Northwest Chiefs: Gustav Sohon’s Views of the 1855 Stevens Treaty Councils. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1986.

Novinger, Tracy. Intercultural Communica-tion: A Practical Guide. Austin: U of Texas P, 2001.

Philips, Susan. The Invisible Culture: Com-munication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Research on Teaching Monograph Series. New York: Longman, 1983.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Academic Dis-courses or Small Boats on a Big Sea.” Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Acad-emy. Ed. Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Heinemann, 2002. 23–30.

Scollon, Ronald, and Suzanne Wong Scollon. “Athabaskan-English Interethnic Communication.” Cultural Communica-tion and Intercultural Contact. Ed. Donal

retained and cited their distinctions between analytic and holistic logic, but I have dropped their cultural assignments to these two cognitive orientations.

Works Cited

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Carbaugh. 1981. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1990. 259–86.

Scott, Darrell. Introduction. A True Copy of the Record of the Official Proceedings at the Council in the Walla Walla Valley, 1855. By Isaac Ingalls Stevens. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon P, 1985. 5–25.

Stevens, Isaac Ingalls. A True Copy of the Record of the Official Proceedings at the Council in the Walla Walla Valley, 1855. Ed. Darrell Scott. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon P, 1985.

Tannen, Deborah. “Indirectness in Discourse: Ethnicity as Conversational Style.” Dis-course Processes 4 (1981): 221–38.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an Ameri-can Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: Na-tional Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Winans, William Parkhurst. Manuscript. William Parkhurst Winans Papers, 1815–1917. Cage 147. Holland Library, Washington State U, Pullman.

Barbara MonroeBarbara Monroe is an associate professor of English at Washington State University, where she coordinates the English Education program. Her scholarship focuses on cultural rhetorics, critical pedagogy, and technology. Her previous field work in inner-city Detroit, in reservation schools in the inland Pacific Northwest, and in Mexican migrant communities resulted in her first monograph, Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom, published in 2004. The book-length version of this article, Plateau Indian Ways with Words, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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plateau indian ways with words - national council of teachers of

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