McDougall and Nordstrom’s piece demonstrates
an interesting form of rhetorical resistance to colonization. The different
individuals discussed in this piece have an advantage against those attempting
to oppress them- they are aware of this oppression and its tools, and so they
can find ways to work against them. The authors mention the “native awareness of
the colonial ideologies intended to ‘remove, reserve, assimilate, acculturate, abrogate, and un-see
us’ (428), which can be exploited, overturned, challenged, and used as
rhetorical artillery” (113). The very ideologies being used to repress the
Hawaiian culture are what can then be turned on their wielders, becoming the
weapons that will protect the threatened Hawaiian rhetorics.
There
are several examples of this throughout the text. The queen used the colonists’
ignorance to say opposing things to the Americans and the Hawaiians, appearing
to adopt Christianity while still maintaining her native religion, conforming
to American ideals while using her own culture’s rhetorical techniques to speak
to her people. Trask resists American colonization as well, “She dispels
stereotypes of Hawaiians by situating her poetics within a long literary
tradition of Hawaiian intellectualism that predates western contact,” (113).
Rather than succumbing to negative stereotypes of native peoples being ignorant
and in need of western education, Trask uses Hawaiian intellectualism in her
work. And since it predates western contact, no credit can be given to western
influence.
Rhetorical colonization is not
necessarily as physical as other forms. It doesn’t have to involve war, there
doesn’t have to be bloodshed, but it does involve the oppression of cultures. At
best, their rhetorics are altered and twisted by the colonists, and at worst
erased altogether, but McDougall and Nordstrom’s essay demonstrates that there
are ways to resist, to use the colonizers’ methods against them, and preserve
cultures' unique rhetorics as a result.
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