Shootout at the OK Corral

I've read this piece many, many times before, and each time I read, I mark. The underlinings, notations, stars, ink colors, and lead types bear witness to pieces and parts and phrases that struck me as important from reading to reading. So imagine my surprise this go-round when I realized that I had missed the main point in my previous readings. Lyons isn't advocating rhetorical sovereignty for individual students, on a parallel of the Cs' "Students' Rights to their Own Language." Rather, he's arguing for rhetorical sovereignty of a peoples... and by extension other peoples, like African Americans, disabled, etc. (I can't find that one line where he extends this call to other groups... but he did mention these groups specifically.). He uses the term rhetorics of sovereignty, specifying these rhetorics have a commitment to place, or land. These rhetorics too should be "more relevant to and reflective of actual populations of this land."

In other words, he seems to be arguing for institutionalizing comparative rhetorics (he uses this term once in the article—can't find it now, tho')-- at least at the graduate level. As for Indian rhetorics, Lyons calls for going beyond the "accounts of the wars and more of the statecraft, legends, languages, oratory, and philosophical concepts." He also points out that previous scholarship has dealt mainly with the oral Indian—as if writing Indians didn't exist in the 19th century. Lyons also recommends that universities look around and see what people are being removed or were removed from the land on which the university sits.

These recommendations bring to mind our own institutional situation and the comparative lack of knowledge about the Plateau Peoples, on whose ancestral land this university sits. Just this past week, the Washington State Magazine did an article on the Plateau Center Conference—and the main spread was about . . . food. I'll scan the article with its images for discussion this week...

All of Lyons' recommendations are curricular and at the graduate level. In another piece we'll read by Lyons later in the semester he'll offer us more about teaching undergraduates and using popular culture—based on one of his own very negative teaching experience: a class of predominately Native American students basically turned on him when he tried to get them to take action on an Indian mascot debate. I see now that I should have paired that reading with this one. The other piece really problematizes much of what he says here.

One more thing: just as we noticed that Mao used some features of Chinese-American rhetoric in his piece (along with academic discourse), so does Lyons. I love his gentle humor especially: "Rhetorial sovereignty at the C & R Ranch." Nice parodic echo of "Shootout at the OK Corral"—and parody, as we know from Pratt's essay way back in Week 2, is one of those rhetorical arts of the contact zone.