Jason Edward Black examines the ways the US government’s rhetoric and American Indian responses contributed to the policies of Native–US relations throughout the nineteenth century’s removal and allotment eras. Black shows how these discourses together constructed the perception of the US government and of American Indian communities. Such interactions—though certainly not equal—illustrated the hybrid nature of Native–US rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Both governmental, colonizing discourse and indigenous, decolonizing discourse shaped arguments, constructions of identity, and rhetoric in the colonial relationship. American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric through impeding removal and allotment policies. By turning around the US government’s narrative and inventing their own tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own identities as well as the government’s. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indians lobbied for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934, changing the relationship once again. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the US government retained an undeniable colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal—as the conclusion of this book indicates—are emblematic of the prevalence of the duality of US citizenship that fused American Indians to the nation yet segregated them on reservations. This duality of inclusion and exclusion grew incrementally and persists now, as a lasting effect of nineteenth-century Native–US rhetorical relations.

For thousands of years, American Indian cultures have recorded their truths in the narratives and metaphors of oral tradition. Stories, languages, and artifacts, such as glyphs and drawings, all carry Indigenous knowledge, directly contributing to American Indian rhetorical structures that have proven resistant—and sometimes antithetical—to Western academic discourse. It is this tradition that Kimberly G. Wieser seeks to restore in Back to the Blanket, as she explores the rich possibilities that Native notions of relatedness offer for understanding American Indian knowledge, arguments, and perspectives. Back to the Blanket analyzes a wide array of American Indian rhetorical traditions, then applies them in close readings of writings, speeches, and other forms of communication by historical and present-day figures. Wieser turns this pathbreaking approach to modes of thinking found in the oratory of eighteenth-century Mohegan and Presbyterian cleric Samson Occom, visual communication in Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, patterns of honesty and manipulation in the speeches of former president George W. Bush, and rhetorics and relationships in the communication of Indigenous leaders such as Ada-gal’kala, Tsi’yugûnsi’ni, and Inoli. Exploring the multimodal rhetorics—oral, written, material, visual, embodied, kinesthetic—that create meaning in historical discourse, Wieser argues for the rediscovery and practice of traditional Native modes of communication—a modern-day “going back to the blanket,” or returning to Native practices. Her work shows how these Indigenous insights might be applied in models of education for Native American students, in Native American communities more broadly, and in transcultural communication, negotiation, debate, and decision making.

An investigation into one of the largest and most lucrative mineral mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto, Extraction Politics reveals how the company constructs a presence in the places it operates and shapes meanings and orientations toward the environment. Taking readers on a “rhetorical pilgrimage” across the American Southwest, Nicholas Paliewicz shows how Rio Tinto creates adaptable corporate identities. From Ronald Reagan’s frontiersman advertisements for the Borax Mine in California to the pioneer Mormon persona at Bingham Canyon Mine in Salt Lake City and the folksy, paternalistic perspective toward the San Carlos Apache at the proposed mine at Oak Flat, Arizona, the company appropriates local history to embed itself as a valued member of the public—without having to settle in those ecological communities and bear the costs of extraction. This does not occur without resistance, however. Paliewicz also shows how activists use these same tactics to expose Rio Tinto as an exploitative, colonialist polluter. In an era of surging demand for dwindling supplies of minerals and metals, this book previews what the future of extractivism may look like. Extraction Politics will appeal to scholars and students of environmental communication and activist politics as well as general readers interested in the climate crisis.

The issue of Native American mascots in sports raises passions but also a raft of often-unasked questions. Which voices get a hearing in an argument? What meanings do we ascribe to mascots? Who do these Indians and warriors really represent? Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black go beyond the media bluster to reassess the mascot controversy. Their multi-dimensional study delves into the textual, visual, and ritualistic and performative aspects of sports mascots. Their original research, meanwhile, surveys sports fans themselves on their thoughts when a specific mascot faces censure. The result is a book that merges critical-cultural analysis with qualitative data to offer an innovative approach to understanding the camps and fault lines on each side of the issue, the stakes in mascot debates, whether common ground can exist and, if so, how we might find it.

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

In this wide-ranging and carefully curated anthology, Daniel M. Cobb presents the words of Indigenous people who have shaped Native American rights movements from the late nineteenth century through the present day. Presenting essays, letters, interviews, speeches, government documents, and other testimony, Cobb shows how tribal leaders, intellectuals, and activists deployed a variety of protest methods over more than a century to demand Indigenous sovereignty. As these documents show, Native peoples have adopted a wide range of strategies in this struggle, invoking "American" and global democratic ideas about citizenship, freedom, justice, consent of the governed, representation, and personal and civil liberties while investing them with indigenized meanings. The more than fifty documents gathered here are organized chronologically and thematically for ease in classroom and research use. They address the aspirations of Indigenous nations and individuals within Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska as well as the continental United States, placing their activism in both national and international contexts. The collection's topical breadth, analytical framework, and emphasis on unpublished materials offer students and scholars new sources with which to engage and explore American Indian thought and political action.

Providing an indispensable overview of the American Indian Wars, this book focuses on Native American tribes and warriors and their varying responses to the onslaught of European colonists and American settlers in the centuries following contact. This work provides an overview of the Indian Wars from the arrival of Europeans until 1890. The work focuses primarily on Native American tribes and warriors and their role in battles and campaigns against other Native Americans and Europeans/Americans, while also including key European/American leaders and soldiers as well as treaties between Native Americans and Europeans/Americans. The introduction provides a broad overview of the Indian Wars and also considers whether the Indian Wars should be considered genocide. The bibliography focuses on the most important works published on the Indian Wars. Each entry also includes a list of references for readers to consult. The work also includes a collection of primary source documents that span the entire time period.

An outstanding resource for contemporary American Indians as well as students and scholars interested in community and ethnicity, this book dispels the myth that all American Indians live on reservations and are plagued with problems, and serves to illustrate a unique, dynamic model of community formation. City-dwelling American Indians are part of both the ongoing ethnic history of American cities in the 20th and 21st centuries and the ancient history of American Indians. Today, more than three-quarters of American Indians live in cities, having migrated to urban areas in the 1950s because of influences such as the Termination and Relocation policy of the federal government, which was designed to end the legal status of tribes, and because of the draw of employment, housing, and educational opportunities. This book documents how North America was home to many ancient urban Indian civilizations and progresses to describing contemporary urban American Indian communities, lifestyles, and organizations. The book concentrates on contemporary urban American Indian communities and the modern-day experiences of the individuals who live within them. The authors outline urban Indian identity, relationships, and communities, drawing connections between ancient urban Indian civilizations hundreds of years ago to the activism of contemporary urban Indians. As a result, readers will gain an in-depth understanding of both ancient and contemporary urban Indian communities; comprehend the differences, similarities, and overlap between reservation and urban American Indian communities; and gain insight into the key role of urban environments in creating ethnic community identities.

In How to Belong, Belinda Stillion Southard examines how women leaders throughout the world have asserted their rhetorical agency in troubling economic, social, and political conditions. Rather than utilizing the concept of citizenship to bolster political influence, the women in the case studies presented here rely on the power of relationships to create a more habitable world. With the rise of global capitalism, many nation-states that have profited from invigorated flows of capital have also responded to the threat of increased human mobility by heightening national citizenship’s exclusionary power. Through a series of case studies that include women grassroots protesters, a woman president, and a woman United Nations director, Stillion Southard analyzes several examples of women, all as embodied subjects in a particular transnational context, pushing back against this often violent rise in nationalist rhetoric. While scholars have typically used the concept of citizenship to explain what it means to belong, Stillion Southard instead shows how these women have reimagined belonging in ways that have enabled them to create national, regional, and global communities. As part of a broader conversation centered on exposing the violence of national citizenship and proposing ways of rejecting that violence, this book seeks to provide answers through the powerful rhetorical practices of resilient and inspiring women who have successfully negotiated what it means to belong, to be included, and to enact change beyond the boundaries of citizenship.

"John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit to West Berlin, with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, is seared into the national memory as a powerful image of a U.S. president on the world stage. When thinking about key presidential moments in international relations like Kennedy in Berlin, we often focus our attention on the speeches themselves. Professor Allison Prasch wants to treat us to a wider view-one that places these speeches in their physical context and allows us to grasp the intentional embodied nature of these carefully orchestrated international trips. In The World Is Our Stage, Prasch takes us along for the ride as Cold War U.S. presidents travel the world to assert power and influence. Drawing on extensive archival research, Prasch examines five representative moments that reveal how the "global rhetorical presidency" evolved during the Cold War: Harry S. Truman's 1945 participation in the Potsdam Conference, Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1959-60 "Good Will" tours, John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit to West Berlin, Richard Nixon's "Opening to China" in 1971-72, and Ronald Reagan's 1984 commemoration of D-Day in Normandy. Prasch uses these key events show how multiple presidential administrations and other government agencies designed these global tours as dynamic persuasive campaigns. As the body of the U.S. president traveled through and encircled the globe, it symbolically extended the spatial reach of U.S. ideology and elevated the nation's place in the Cold War world order"--