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This article examines the intersections between Gerald Vizenor's theories of survivance, postindian, manifest manners, and transmotion, and some longstanding rhetorical concepts that shape the teaching of writing. It also examines how Vizenor's terminology may inform our understandings of these terms and help reshape the canon that informs our teaching of writing and rhetoric.
The indian is a simulation, the absence of natives; the indian transposes the real, and the simulation of the real has no referent, memories, or native stories. The postindian must waver over the aesthetic ruins of indian simulations.
Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses
And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives
Although some might see the authors of the epigraphs above-Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) and Kenneth Burke-as an unlikely pair, I would suggest those of us in rhetoric and composition could learn a lot from this kind of partnership-not by merely comparing these two wordmasters, but by looking for ways in which their seemingly disparate fields can inform each other. In fact, this kind of partnership might be a defining move of what is called comparative rhetoric. Some instances of comparative rhetoric (i.e., George Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric) have looked to map absence in Native rhetorics with concepts from the classical tradition, but what if we were to take the move in a different way? That is, what might it do if the canon that informs rhetoric and composition were refigured by the work of Native writers? More specifically, what if the above quote from Burke were read by way of Vizenor? A methodology for such refiguring would require a shift in terms and terminology, and it is this kind of shift that drives this project.1
George Vizenor is author of more than twenty books of poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and critical theory. Often, his scholarship uses postmodern theory to describe and complicate notions of representation and misrepresentation of Native people. At the heart of Vizenor's work is the proposition that there is no such thing as an indian. In fact, indian, in Vizenor's view, is...