Rhetorical Colonialism

“Rhetorical colonialism” as used by decolonial rhetorical scholars is helpful for talking about the purposes and effects of settler cultural productions. As settlers dispossess Indigenous peoples of water in the arid American West and globally, settler cultural productions ease settler guilt and ensure settler futurity. For example, “Native American names, figures, spiritual practices, and diluted or stereotyped identities populate our land- and media-scapes,” write Rowe and Tuck.[1] These traces of indigeneity show up in strategically repeated narratives of conquest, scenes of dispossession, as well as the naming and the mascotting of Indigenous land, animals, people and places. For rhetoricians Kelly and Black, such cultural productions represent an instrumental force—rhetorical colonialism—which “entails the discursive and imagistic subjugation of indigenous people controlling their likeness, silencing their voices, and eradicating their culture and replacing it with a perverse simulation.”[2] Scholars point out the implications of this perverse simulation as “transforming the chaos of the frontier into neatly mapped territory”[3]; instructing to forget settler invasions[4]; erasing Indigenous people as modern, coeval subjects[5]; and seeming to affirm Black and Indigenous life but in fact veiling violence.[6] Overall, write Rowe and Tuck, the settler imagination is “reminding settlers that they belong, that their place in the social order has been hard-won through the taming of savages, and confirming their status as rightful inheritors of pastoral landscapes.”[7]

So far as I can tell, rhetorical colonialism does not show up in everyday discourses about water in the Arid American West. Here I see an opportunity for conversations about water politics to more robustly delink from cultural productions that romanticize the Arid West as a place for settlers to “go native” or “find themselves.” In my own environmental oral histories of water in the Snake Valley, I am tempted to use discourses of settler love of place as a strategy to protect water resources in the West from exploitation. However, this love of place can simultaneously rhetorically colonize if it constructs settlers as innocent victims of capitalism. In my interview with settler Deanna Alder, for example, she talks about her “roots going deep” in the Snake Valley. She does not mention that Goshute Indigenous “roots” go much deeper in the Snake Valley. In these situations, I suggest presenting settler stories with qualifications that establish the need for more humane relationships with water without sponsoring Indigenous erasure and settler moves to innocence.

Two ideas for making this move: The first idea I have is to link settler struggles with the broader process of Marx’s primitive accumulation as it is qualified by Glen Coulthard.[8] Primitive accumulation violently transforms non-capitalist ways of life into capitalist ways of life. This practice emerged in Europe through the process of enclosure and proletarianization of peasantry; however, when Europeans brought the practice to the US, primitive accumulation required the elimination of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands. Genocide is not the same as proletarianization. The second idea is to link settler struggles to becoming “naturalized” not “Indigenous/Native” to a landscape. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.”[9] To talk about settlers as “naturalized” could increase responsibility to landscapes and, I think, open the door to broader conversations of settler responsibility and accountability. 

[1] Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” 4.

[2] Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black, “Introduction,” in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, ed. Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2018), 5. See also Mary Stuckey and John M. Murphy, ‘‘By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,’’ American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73􏰀98. 

[3] ME Stuckey and JM Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal25, no. 4 (2001): 73–98, https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.25.4.m66w143xm1623704.

[4] Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[5] Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” 4.

[6] Jane Griffith, “Hoover Dam: Land, Labor, and Settler Colonial Cultural Production,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (n.d.).

[7] Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” 4.

[8] Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.

[9] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, First, Book, Whole (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 215.