Random responses to Redfield

The first thing I found interesting in Redfield’s piece was when she discusses Zitkala-Sa’s experience with the word “no” in boarding school. When the older classmate taught the children to answer “no” to everything, the fact that the teacher could not see through the fact that the child didn’t know English and didn’t understand the rhetorical implications of the word, was hard to believe. It seems like common sense to consider language barriers. The overall fact that the curriculum in boarding schools did not accommodate for language and culture barriers absolutely fascinates me.

The way Redfield explained the shift from external to internal rhetoric was useful for me. External rhetoric was necessary to deal with colonization, but now that Native Americans have regained agency and now hold a place in society, it makes sense for them to shift back to internal rhetoric. They still have to exercise external rhetoric because of the interaction with the rest of the world that still remain, but really, why should they worry about appealing to white audiences in their own, everyday communications. Redfield says of her own experience, “My storytelling template was, I realized, based on an ethnographic model of preservation, rather than a rhetorical model of dynamic communication” (150).

The rhetoric surround Native American’s decisions highlights the idea we’ve come across before, where dire situations have a major effect on the rhetoric being employed: “Some Indian speakers and writers felt that the key to survival on many levels was to show Euro-Americans how capable of adaptation Indian people were” (151).

This left me wondering how conscious these choices were. Did Native Americans authoring texts actually consider the rhetorical affect itself, or did they just realize that the best way to cope with the situation was to prove to colonizers that they were intelligent? When we were discussing Winnemucca, this came up. One text suggested that she chose to use the rhetorical strategies she did not because she necessarily wanted to, but because it was the only way she could work toward accomplishing her larger communication goals.

Redfield’s own rhetorical strategy for describing internal rhetoric is also worth noting. She says, “The rhetorical form that is the most “internal,” it could be argued, is parody. At first I didn’t understand how parody could describe internal rhetoric, but I now am getting the “joke.” This use of “inside jokes” definitely shifts the rhetoric to the internal realm and excludes other audiences. This seems like an effective strategy within a culture, but I also wonder how this will effect Native American communications and relations with other people.