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After years of colonization, oppression, and resistance, American Indians are making clear what they want from the heretofore compromised technology of writing. Rhetorical sovereignty, a people's control of its meaning, is found in sites legal, aesthetic, and pedagogical, and composition studies can both contribute to and learn from this work.
In My People the Sioux, Luther Standing Bear recounts the moment when he and other children arrived at the Carlisle Indian School and received for the first time the European implements of writing. "Although we were yet wearing our Indian clothes:' Standing Bear writes, "we were marched into a school room, where we were each given a pencil and slate. We were seated at single desks. We soon discovered that the pencils made marks on the slate" (Sioux 136). Pulling their blankets over their heads to conceal both slate and the marks they would make upon them, a child's act of modesty, the children's first impulse was to draw scenes from their recently departed home life-"a man on a pony chasing a buffalo, or a boy shooting birds in a tree, or it might be one of our Indian games"-and when finished, "we dropped our blankets down on the seat and marched up to the teacher with our slates to show what we had drawn" (Sioux 136). Picture these children withdrawing into their blankets with a curious new technology, concealing their texts from each other and the teacher until just the right moment, then emerging from their blankets proud and eager to share the fruits of their labor. They were, at least until this point, the same children, and the marks they made were earnest representations of their lives. Shortly thereafter, however, this same technology would be used to change them:
One day when we came to school there was a lot of writing on one of the blackboards. We did not know what it meant, but our interpreter came into the room and said,'Do you see all these marks on the blackboard? Well, each word is a white man's name. They are going to give each one of you one of these names by which you will hereafter be known.' None of the names were read or explained to us, so of course...