Readings for June 3 Mihesuah, King and Awiakta

5/30/2014

Kutaputash (thank you) for the thoughtful responses to the last set of readings, After reading these, I am sure we will have engaging discussions. I hope you enjoyed the trip to Plymouth and I very much look forward to seeing and interacting with you on June 3.

No other ethnic group in the United States has endured greater and more varied distortions of its cultural identity than American Indians. (Mihesuah 9).

I get frustrated when my friends send me links such as this one about a “powwow party” a mother designed for her little girl because she wanted to be like Tiger Lily in Peter Pan (http://elizabethkartchner.com/2012/06/04/birthday-party-pow-wow/). The mother made a teepee, feathered headbands, arrow and fox party favors—sigh. Or now that football season has started, there is a photo on social media with a football fan holding a severed head of an Indian with headdress---horrific. One of these seems benign in light of the other, but neither is appropriate. Then there is the issue of using Natives as mascots, especially for the Washington DC football team. Thus, Mihesuah’s lists of stereotypes are important to help begin to critically analyze such behaviors.

Mihesuah is probably more of what one would call a nationalist in the field of Native Studies, yet her points throughout are ones that provoke awareness. I call her a nationalist because as an enrolled member of a federally-recognized tribe, she often holds a bias against unenrolled people. But that is a longer discussion we will have at a later time. The important contributions are bringing awareness about misrepresenting and misappropriating Native cultures as well as restoring dignity to Native peoples. This introduction works nicely with Thomas King in that Mihesuah briefly touches on issues that King raises in his book.

First, I love King, and I especially love this book. That is not to say that you must also love it, but I do think it is an important book to read. I appreciate his use of story and how he sets up his audience to understand stories. Then he tells several which intertwine with one another. These stories raise issues not only about Native peoples, but of all the kinds of –isms out there and playing out in our world. He comments on how he/we become “chained to these stories” (9), how they are “wonderous and dangerous” (9-10). He points to the differences between Western and other world views. He becomes particularly pointed about issues that Native peoples face including racism, being placed in the past, and sovereignty.

I’ve known Malea Powell for a long time, yet each time I read this work (or hear her speak on it) my intellectual self is re-awakened. While both of us have been engaging story as theory, I am stunned by her work here in which she re-thinks her own scholarly endeavors and takes them to a different. I saw her speak at an Octalog two years ago. She began by displaying a wampum belt made by one of her graduate students, and said, “this is not a thing.” We have both been pushing against, as she writes, “our discipline’s inclination to fetishize the text above the body, combined with a narrowness of vision that insists on connecting every rhetorical practice on the planet to Big Daddy A & the one true Greco-roman way” (2). I’m sure you have had experiences with seeing everything as a text, and this, too, has been an approach I’ve used. It has had its value, but as someone who also engages in practices of her ancestors, I appreciate the work Malea is doing here.

Thus in my classes, I bring this self to my teaching. Students not only gain knowledge from readings and discussions, but also learn how writing and makings were important to the transmission of knowledge. In my classes, I have also been engaging students in thinking about things and practicing making. These makings, as Malea Powell writes, “are significant for understanding Native rhetorical traditions is because as things they provoke, create, and prompt the stories that tell us who we are in relation to one another. They instruct us about our responsibilities to each other, and to the land” (Rhetorical Powwows). However, they cannot merely be treated as just things, but as rhetorical practices which can speak about themselves. Such a teaching model also grounds our course in local Native space and honors Indigenous peoples because every university must recognize that it is built on what were once and are still Native lands.

Selu marks the Cherokee telling of a Corn Mother story, inviting us to learn how and why Ginitsi Selu is honored and continues to be “practical advice’” to maintain balance. As Wilma Mankiller writes, “How can we possibly keep our world from spinning out of balance if we don’t have a fundamental understanding of our relationship to everything around us?” (ix). Awiakta points out throughout Selu that it is continually more difficult as we get further and further from the land through our machines: cars, faxes and now computers, cell phones…and on. And as the human race supports these machines, we destroy the mother which sustains us, namely the Earth. One only needs to turn on the news today to see the ravages of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—weeks of oil spewing into the ocean now coming ashore and destroying habitats of wildlife. Our greed has done this, our centering on the self rather than living in balance. A lack of respect, a lack of giving back. I cannot help but feel that Mother Earth is pushing back with all the earthquakes, floods and tornados—we must be more aware and treat her with respect. As Awiakta speaks of corn, I am also reminded of the interventions of humankind to alter that corn with genetic modification (same with soy). In doing so, we have created an unhealthy product. While genetic modification has occurred naturally, these new procedures take from “the seed, the spirit” of the Corn Mother. Yet, Awiakta speaks to the destruction in her own upbringing, the Tellico Dam, the “atomic wastelands,” and her own experiences with prejudice. Within her telling of the Selu stories and how she came to know them, she provides insights to issues Native peoples, particularly Native women, face.

The multigenre nature of Selu is interesting. Awiakta uses story, poetry, the drawings of Mary Adair and other voices to comprise her text. Some might argue that this form and presentation is not scholarly, yet I would argue it challenges the shape of scholarly discourse. It reminds me of what Lee Maracle has said (to paraphrase) there is theory in every story—the difference is that Indigenous peoples have known that. One only needs to look at Awiakta’s discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony to understand further. Not only does Awiakta tell us that “through poetry, we make a quantum leap into the essence of the story” (161), but she takes us into a theoretical discussion of story, of how these ideas are “unsettling” and disturbing” causing a critical engagement of the person (mind and body) with the text. This is important when confronting Native writing.

10 Comments

Stephanie Vaz

6/2/2014 01:26:34 am

I really enjoyed reading "Rhetorical Powwows," by King and Awiakta. The overall concept and supportive points were very interesting and made me view approaches to teaching in various ways. I like how the author started off by giving credit to the ancestors because if it wasn't for the ancestors setting traditions and discovering things, there would be nothing to teach and continue with today.
He mentions how American Indian Rhetoric taught him about scholarship, mentorship, teaching, and discipline of Rhetoric and writings specifically. A concept that I believe is discussion-worthy is the concept of engaging in practices towards "things" rather than being directly tied to the traditional teachings of the classroom. As King and Awiakta state, "We have to move our conversations towards things" (3). The emphasis on this topic was very eye-opening to how this approach to teaching can also be beneficial. This article demonstrates good support by explaining how tasks such as bead-work and basket-making are examples of rhetorical sovereignty. A significant quote can be found on page 6 that supports this theory; "What I've come to understand is that textualizing 'things' makes them institutionally recognizable and useful to 'us' academics, but this process of transformation frequently allows us to miss the point of how these things are used, how they mean elsewhere." This demonstrates a more personal level of engaging with the learning material; not only reading about what people did , but seeing, feeling and even experiencing hands on how they did it. This article does a successful job of convincing me that these practices of making are theoretically and methodologically central to building a more complex and flexible understanding of all rhetorical practices.
On more of a book-taught level, they describe how fire first came to the Cherokee peoples. The writers stress that it is not the basket that tells a story, but it IS the story. This can be used as another example of how things such as baskets are significant for understanding native rhetorical traditions because as "things," they provoke , create, and prompt the stories that tell us who we are in relation to one another, and most importantly, where we came from. Moreover this article underscores the importance of studying objects and how it is the guide to showing us how our ancestors helped create the world we live in today.

6/2/2014 11:41:48 pm

Awiakta is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist and in her reading she attempts to create harmony and healing through pointing out the connections that we all have with the world and with each other. She explains how her heritage is made up of Cherokee and Celtic or Scot-Irish. On the second page of this reading, she states what these have in common; "From fi rst contact centuries ago the Celt and the Cherokee
got on well together because of what they shared: devotion
to family; love of the land; reverence for the Creator and
the natural law; the egalitarian relationship between men
and women; the sense of fierce independence and outrage
at foreign invasions . . . [and] the love of ceremony and
symbol." I enjoyed how she incorporated the use of senses into her poetry, for example in her poem that begins with the line, "like most mountain people," describing that everything that she hears, smells, tastes, and feels, she puts on paper. She touches base on earthly issues such as environmental pollution, abuse, and social disorder. "Awiakta looks simultaneously backward and forward as she expresses her unique form of feminism, one reflective of the multifaceted and multicultural faces of feminism today" (9). Although she mentions social issues, I like how she celebrates the positive components of life such as the untamed, the innocent, the child-like, the mythical magical, and visionary. Overall Awiakta revisions the potential for a world of harmony.
In the Thomas King reading, King tells tales of Native people and their lifestyle while going against the traditional outlook on Indians. He mentions the importance of stories as he says, "the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2). I enjoyed reading the different stories that he uses to incorporate not just storytelling, but analysis, allowing people to learn from the Native American. He gives a subtle warning about the telling of stories, how stories are "wonderous things and they are dangerous" (9). His stories have purpose; not just for engaging and deriving interest from the audience, but to search for Native identity. King emphasizes the importance of stories by saying how they make us and tell our history, therefore they cannot be forgotten or we may forget who we are.
I really enjoyed reading "Rhetorical Powwows." The overall concept and supportive points were very interesting. I like how the author started off by giving credit to the ancestors because if it wasn't for the ancestors setting traditions and discovering things, there would be nothing to teach and continue with today. This reading discusses basket-making and it stresses that it is not the basket that tells a story, but it IS the story. This can be used as another example of how things such as baskets are significant for understanding native rhetorical traditions because as "things," they provoke , create, and prompt the stories that tell us who we are in relation to one another, and most importantly, where we came from. Moreover this article underscores the importance of studying objects and how it is the guide to showing us how our ancestors helped create the world we live in today.

Angela Skrabec

6/2/2014 02:45:20 am

“Rhetorical Powwows” strongly impacted the way I view artifacts and cultural objects because Powell shatters the belief in seeking written text as the only source of meaningful cultural discussion. Viewing wampum and basket weaving as texts in their own right is reminiscent of Jill Lepore’s definition of a ‘document.’ Documents should not be limited to literary texts, but should include a variety of artifacts, pictures, maps, and the like. A much richer, more in-depth understanding of the world’s diverse cultures can come from seeing that a basket “is MADE of story, it IS story” because it “provoke[s], create[s], and prompt[s] the stories that tell us who we are in relation to one another” (10). A woven basket having stories infused and interwoven through each piece of its substance is a beautiful thought. The basket becomes so much more than just an object because it takes on cultural significance. What an amazing experience it would be to unravel the stories held within the basket. Overall, this article has taught me that the ‘making’ of rhetoric is equally important to the ‘writing’ of rhetoric.
King draws on a recurring point that has been discussed in several of the articles we have read for class. He reflects on the work of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis and comes to the conclusion that even though Curtis manipulated his portrayal of the Indian, “I [King] am grateful that we have his images at all, for the faces of the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles…who look at you from the depths of these photographs are not romantic illusions, they are real people” (37). As an Elementary Education-English double major, I am inclined to look at this idea from both disciplines. On the English side, students are introduced to very few literary works written from a Native American perspective and when these texts are presented, they typically are written by authors of the past not contemporary Native Americans who are living in modern times. The vision of Native Americans becomes skewed if not for classes such as this one which explores a plethora of modern Native texts. On the Elementary Education side, young children are introduced to Native Americans as people of the past who existed hundreds of years ago like the pilgrims. Most likely a majority of American students would not have an understanding of Native Americans as “real people” who live in millennial society. The voices of King and other authors that I have read for this class are encouraging me to be conscientious of how I will present Native Americans in my future classroom.
In the Awiakta reading, her poem “Mother Nature Sends a Pink Slip” makes a bold statement against the human race, who unlike Native Americans, exploit the land and its resources that the earth has so graciously provided. The balance of a comedic yet serious tone chastises humans for being so inconsiderate of nature’s well-being and essentially fires them from their position as ‘land curators.’ The poem highlights the contrast between Native Americans who view the land as a living creature that needs to be cared for and protected and the Anglo-Americans who look at the land as an expendable resource that yields economic gain. As I read Awiakta’s poem, I was reminded of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land because both the poem and Cronon’s book explore the Native American-Anglo-American tension over the land that has lasted for centuries. The poem expresses how even to this day, Native Americans are frustrated with the havoc humans are wreaking on the sacred earth. The repercussions are devastating for everyone, but the Anglo-American self-satisfying attitude remains the same. Overall, this poem helps me to better understand the serious consequences that conflicting viewpoints of the value of land from the eyes of Native Americans and Anglo-Americans are causing.

Jackie Henry

6/2/2014 12:52:30 pm

King begins his piece by discussing the creation of the earth making reference to the turtle analogy. His point here was that even though different aspects of a culture can change over time, there is one common factor: each culture shares a common ground. This common ground is ultimately what helps to create a foundation for our world, one story at a time. I really appreciated the line, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2) simply because of it’s accuracy. It’s true- for much of our world’s history we don’t have any formal proof that even half of the things happened the way that we believe they did. Creativity is something that never tires, as is spoken word and literature. We are indefinitely a bunch of stories, and much like the turtle analogy, we share a continuous base. King then goes on to mention An Okanagan storyteller names Jeannette Armstrong.
I found Malea Powell’s “Rhetorical Powwows” speech to be very thought provoking for me, particularly her analysis of non-alphabetic text. I feel that often times people become so engrossed in primary sources- and by ‘primary,’ I mean that the focus is strictly textual, when in reality, text is only a portion of it. Native American’s practiced a wide variety so artful skills such as embroidery, beading, and quillwork- all things that we still commonly use today. We’re rather ignorant in the sense that we often neglect to remember where it is that these ‘texts’ [not just simply, “things”] originated.
In Shurbutt’s article, Awiakta is portrayed in a way that makes it seem that her own blended heritage allows her more freedom when making comparisons and exploring other cultures. It essentially helped her to stray away from appearing closed-minded and having an inevitable centration on the Native viewpoint. What I especially enjoyed about Awiakta is that she stresses the idea of writing being a matter of listening. Her brief poetry helps to project such feelings, She points out how one must use all five of their senses to become fully in-depth with being a writer. By using things such as personification within her poems, she furthers the belief that creativity and an open imagination are things to have when attempting to write.

Jocelyn Bettencourt

6/2/2014 11:41:01 pm

Jocelyn Bettencourt
Professor Anderson
Native American Writing/ Rhetoric
3 June 2014
Journal 2
Rhetorical Powwows: What American India Making Can Teach Us About Histories of Rhetoric’s
This essay really got me excited to get into the classroom and be able to have a say in the way I am teaching the required material. As the essay opens up I noticed that the author is thanking the land, the space, the people of her past, and their teachings and encouragements. This is very interesting to me because the indigenous people did this with everything they killed and sacrificed. They always thanked someone for what they were given. One line really stood out to me, “what I do well is to their credit, what I do badly belongs only to me” (1). This was a very good point, it happens all the time today. When someone does well everyone talks about it and they say what a good job the family did with raising that person and so on. When someone dose bad, the people still talk just as much but they don’t look so much on the family but on that individual or the group in which they hang around with. That being said, we all have our own story to tell and we make our own story whether that be good or bad. This article at times reminds me of Thomas King’s book The Truth About Stories.
Everything around us has a story and tells a story. Everyone has a different story, but never the less; they have a story a story, “Some of you will have heard me tell parts of this story before, but I won’t apologize for my repetition because they are part of the story too, part of the traditions that have carried each strand forward” (1). Every moment in life is a piece of a story that you live through every day. Your actions are a part of your story whether positive or negative. I love this concept because I believe in the phrase “everything happens for a reason”. This phrase goes hand in hand with having your own story that you are making for yourself.
When thinking of writing my own story and creating my own future, I think of how I can shape the world we live in to open the eyes of our future generations. In schools today, like we learned on our tour of Plymouth, are very “one sided” when it comes to teaching about the discovery of the colonies. These teachings are one sided because the way the teacher is teaching:
That theory can’t always be tied to classroom practices that are, again, usually an outgrowth of a paracolonial ideological state apparatus. We need to theorize, and that theory can’t engage in textual fetishism- neither by relying on alphabetic print texts nor by textualizing non-alphabetic objects. We need, in fact, to move out conversations and out practices toward things, to a wider understandings of how all made “things” are rhetorical, and of how cultures make, and are made by, the rhetoricity of things. (2-3)
I plan to teach my future classroom the truth about what actually happened during this time period. This also explains how we can’t just use the alphabetical text to teach students. In order for students to understand the things we are teaching we must have conversations and work through projects to understand. I want to get my kids up out of their seats and get them making and thinking on their own about what we are learning about. This is one of my biggest goals.
When using strictly textual evidence it helps us on the tests and other exams, but not really understanding of what we are learning, “Textualizing ‘things’ makes them institutionally recognizable and useful to ‘us’ academics but this process of transformation frequently allows us to miss the point of how these things are used, how they mean, elsewhere” (6). By just using the text the students will learn how to answer the given questions on an exam, but will they really understand what is happening in the text? For this reason as a teacher I hope to bring the kids out of the text book and into the world of hands-on learning. I will do this so the students can fully understand, and maybe even remember, what they have learned throughout their schooling. The connection they make is there’s for the taking as stories are, “this connection is there for time immemorial—it can’t be broken, only forgotten and remembered” (11). The students can do with this lesson what they please, they can forget it or remember it, but either way they took something from it.

Rebekka Eiben

6/3/2014 01:04:17 am

Thomas King’s book, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, really spoke to me and I couldn’t stop reading it. The way that he uses indigenous stories and his past experiences to highlight important issues is remarkable. I loved the native creation story because it shows a lot about the native people and how they perceive the world. This story is one of teamwork and selflessness, drastically different from the Christian creation story that I have grown up with. The way that the natives are always respecting and taking into consideration the nature and world around them is something that most of us are not used to. Another story that King tells is one of the ducks and coyote. This is a story that expresses the dangers of giving too much trust to a stranger and the consequences of that. This directly represents the initial relationship of Indians and Englishmen. King tells these stories, not only because he wants to share them, but because he wants to educate on the act of storytelling, reading, and writing. King states, “For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told” (10). This statement is very powerful because it encompasses a lot of meaning. Most people take stories for granted, we are accustomed to reading stories and watching stories from such a young age that we begin to lose sight of what a story is. The native people tell stories to warn or educate about a certain subject. This is why most native stories are oral, because it is the act of telling the story that is most important, and as King mentions, writing them down and reading them does not nearly do them the justice they deserve. The whole point of King’s book is to enlighten the reader to a broader spectrum of what stories are. King writes:
But then who will sing for us? Who will dance for us? Who will remind us of our relationship to the earth? Who will tell our stories? The one about the Coyote and the Ducks, for instance. Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to your children. Turn it into a play. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now. (151)
King is not only talking about the stories that he has shared with the reader but also all stories in general. As a society, we should start reading more closely and carefully. Each story, whether it be a book, movie, poem, or orally shared, has a deeper meaning that is trying to be expressed. As a culture we have gotten lazy with trying to reproduce a meaningful story and instead recreate classics. King’s book has really brought insight to why I am an English major in the first place, because I love discovering stories and their meanings.
“Rhetorical Powwows: What American Indian Making Can Teach Us About Histories of Rhetorics” by Malea Powell also explores stories and their meanings. In Powell’s speech she focuses on the different objects that native people make and how they are related to stories and rhetorics. Each basket or wampum made is the same as telling a story. These objects have rituals and specific steps to how they are made and there is great care in the making of these objects. The way in which these are made, in a way, mimic that of creating a story and for the most part there is a story dedicated to each creation. This again shows how important stories are to the native people and the way in which they take such pride in their work is something to be desired. Once again, the indigenous people are teaching us how to be more aware of our surroundings and more thankful for all that we have.

Katie Kirkpatrick

6/3/2014 01:25:05 am

The introduction to American Indians Stereotypes and Realities by Devon A. Mihesuah, really opened my eyes to all of the stereotypes there are for American Indians all over the world. I knew there was a controversy in the news recently saying that some people were pushing to get the name of the Redskins changed because of its racist nature against American Indians. This introduction also made me think about when I was in elementary school learning about Indians and pilgrims. We had a big Thanksgiving lunch at school with some dressed as pilgrims and some as Indians. This is the kind of thing that Mihesuah rejects about curriculum and teachers in grade school. She says that teachers aren’t educated enough about Indians to incorporate them correctly into the curriculum so they revert back to what they were taught in grade school so that the cycle never ends. I agree with Mihesuah that teachers should be fighting for a more inclusive curriculum. That way we can get rid of a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions.
The chapters in A Truth about Stories by Thomas King discuss stories like the American Indian creation story and the story of his own upbringing. These stories are a part of his argument that stories are incredibly important because “The truth about stories is that’s all we are” (2). After this, he tells us a story about stories. King also talks about how evil came into the world because of witches. One witch told a terrible story about disease and death and once the other witches heard it, they told her to call it back. “But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world” (10). This relates to what Mihesuah was saying about teachers in elementary schools. It is almost like the teachers are telling a false story but because the story is already out there, the stereotype of Indians cannot be taken back.
To go even further with what King discusses in his book, Powell discusses how stories are not just written or told but they are made through basket weaving and other forms of creation. In Rhetorical Powwows Powell discusses the stories that are told through making and just through writing. “We don’t have to turn this wampum strand into a text in order for it to have meaning – its presence invokes meaning, it’s part of an entire structure of meaning that isn’t necessarily textual but that is nonetheless a discourse available for us to learn from” (6). This doesn’t only go for wampum but for all things made by American Indians. Everything tells a story starting from how it was made, to what it gets used for in ritual and in society.
It is very interesting that Awiakta incorporates Indian beliefs with science and technology. It really creates a unique perspective on the world. Especially since Awiakta believes that everything is connected by the earth. Every atom and every mountain are connected. The major difference between the American Indian perspective is that their beliefs are sacred whereas science has no underlying meaning other than to prove right or wrong.

Jordan Berry

6/3/2014 03:00:10 am

The differences between Westerners’ view of life and Native American’s views on life became quite clear through Malea Powell’s “Rhetorical Powwows” and Awiakta’s poems and her recorded commentary. Powell argues against “the war of the alphabet” (7) in her article and offers an alternate outlook she calls looking for the “rhetoricity of things” (6). Awiakta, an award-winning writer, discusses her feelings of the world through her poetry which recognizes the world has become unbalanced. Both writers can arguments that intertwine with each other’s. Westerners look to categorize everything and search for economic gains in things like the land and artifacts instead of appreciating it the way Native Americans do.
Malea Powell’s argument that not everything can be given an exact definition, at least that is what I understood from her article, really fascinates me. She notices that “‘visible speech” (7) is very important to Western culture and as an English major I agree with that statement. I still think visible speech is important or else I would not be able to write this reflection because the language would not be properly translated. The world needs certain definitions and categories that certain items from every language can sorted into and Powell understands this, in fact she once a strong advocate in this towards Native American artifacts (6). But as she thought more and more about it, her opinion began to change. Powell now argues that one cannot simply rely only on visible speech because when has happens artifacts, like the burden basket, begin to lose meaning. I like how she categorized this fight by using Walter Mignolo’s phrase “the war of the alphabet” (7). From this point she moves on to giving examples of how this can happens through her stories of the burden basket. In visible speech, a burden basket would be translated into a structure than “can be as large as 3 feet high with a square base and a circular, flaring rim, commonly holding the equivalent of about 3 bushels of corn” and place on a woman’s back to “evenly distribute whatever is being carried” (9). However if one moves away from that they can learn more about the origin of the basket through a Native American’s spiritual tale which involves a spider. Powell’s point is that while burden baskets “can certainly be textualized and ‘read’ in the same manor we ‘read’ texts, they should not be held to the narrow affordances of texts”.
Awiatka also has opinions on the Western perspective of the world. She says, “Europeans came to America and saw the landscape in terms of natural wealth and how it could be utilized to create personal economic wealth, with ownership of the land tied to its ‘efficient’ use” (Awiakta 198). Even from the first colonization, the Western viewpoint has always been naturally greedy. Landownership was seen as a statement of class and when then Europeans came, “the term ‘manifest destiny’ became the driving forces behind the transformation of the American landscape” (198). Awiakta points out that this is different from the Native Americans; they have always viewed themselves as part of the land. Moving away from colonial times, she grows darker when and observes “‘Poison is invading the ozone layer, the forest, the waters, the food chain—perhaps even the very heart of Mother Earth’” (Awiakta 1993, 181) This is her view of the world. She believes people are too greedy for wealth, causing them to define Earth. However, not only have they succeeded in this deadly penetration, Awiakta fears something worse has happened—it has bled into their souls. She wishes people could be more grateful for what the world already provides offers instead of focusing on the race for wealth around them.

Devon DiMartino

6/3/2014 03:39:02 am

“I love you, God could have said, but I’m not happy with your behaviour. Let’s talk this over. Try to do better next time.” (King 27)
As a child, my mother admitted to me that although she did not entirely believe all that the Catholic religion expressed, my siblings and I did not have a choice in the matter of attending CCD and fulfilling the expectations of a Catholic child. For a while I felt she was such a hypocrite. How dare she make her children sit through Sunday school when she did not attend church regularly? Why did I have to be a “child of the Lord” and she had the choice not to be? However, I now have an understanding of why my mother stuck to her word. She wanted us to experience the religion for ourselves and make a decision on how we felt towards these beliefs. Had she not, how would I know if I agreed with the Catholic religion or not?
Thomas King’s book reminded me of Sunday school class. While I do not intend to make this a religious debate and I feel everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, I really felt hit made a brilliant point about how “we are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” (25) The entire time that I was reading the story of Charm and the Twins, I was thinking of how ridiculous that story seemed. How could anyone actually believe in that creation story? However, the whole point of him telling the story was not to make his reader believe one story verses the other, he was simply trying to explain the differences. I started my blog with my favorite quote from the first chapter because to me it really expressed how I felt when I was being taught the creation story. If God was all loving and forgiving how could he cast Adam and Eve out without understanding?
Malea Powell made a great point when she talked about repetition. “I learned how repetition, overlap, accumulation, and remembering formed the community in which I lived through everyday tellings of the stories of who ‘we’ were” It made me think of how these stories could be altered to make a better more positive light on life. I never liked the way in Genesis, Eve seemed to be portrayed as the one to blame for humans fall from Eden. What if the Catholic Church decided to change it, made it so Adam and Eve agreed together to eat the apple? Who says that story isn’t true?
In “Where Mountain Meets Atom, Within the Healing Circle: The Writing of Marilous Awiakta” S. Bailey Shurbutt quoted Awiakta, “’Writing,’ she says, is a matter of ‘listening,’ and listening ‘means using all the senses to commune with the cycle of sound” (197) I think it touches on a great point of how we only know our ancestors lives based off repetition of stories that we have been told. Could we have missed something or changed something? I wish we knew the answers to our own questions.

Kate Pallis

6/4/2014 04:23:49 am

In Malea Powell's reading “Rhetorical Powwows: What American Indian Making Can Teach Us About Histories of Rhetorics,” She confronts a common neglect for broad conceptualization of Native American practice. Practice is definitive of the improvement in the art of discourse; in reference to the American Indians rhetoric is utilized to strengthen the connectivity that can result from a variation of discourses. Because it has been propagated that only one story, the perseverance of Europeans colonizers in over coming the obstacle that was the indigenous people of America, many are inclined to textualize objects that are not intended to produce articulation. American Indian “making,” more specifically basket weaving, pertains to a rhizome philosophy that maintains imagery in thought as being infinitely interconnected; thought being the result of image (or “thing”) and image being the result of thought.
One must venture into the space between textualization and discernibility can interpret the absolute significance of an object as it is connected to its creation. European Colonizers established visible speech as the ultimate truth, whereas American Indians delineated that words were not the ultimate possession of meaning, rather that meaning is a process that words can either facilitate or eradicate. The stories told by the American Indians are woven into the baskets during the process of their creation; in turn the process becomes a story in itself. The imbrications of the basket weaving process is indicative to the way American Indians theorize the world around us, the nature of relation and connectivity. This can theoretically apply to what connects physical and metaphysical development to one another in the growth of a person.
Akwiata raises awareness of the discourse between corporeal and spiritual as well, rendering in her poetry the cyclical relationship between both mind and body. She utilizes the elements of nature and its necessity in completing the life cycle. S. Bailey Shurbutt further delineates in "Where Mountain Meets Atom, Within The Healing Circle: The Writing of Marilou Awiakta" that the life cycle is allegorical for the centrifugal force that guides the universe; Shurbutt argues that this force is present in the fabric of our being and guides us on our journey.
Thomas King proposes that "The truth about stories is that that's all we are," (2) stories in themselves consist of our virtue, all we can truly call our own in the present moment of life is our body and the stories we have experienced in our bodies. Because a part of us can never move past our history, our stories hold significant control on our lives. King explains that the course of oral tradition is indicative of the forces of time, "For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. once it is told it is loose in the world," encapsulating past, present and future at once during their telling, a story mirrors our physical existence in that way.

Readings for June 3 Mihesuah, King and Awiakta

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