New Book! - American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment

Jordan Nettles, jnettles@ihl.state.ms.us

Good afternoon,

I wanted you to know about a new book from the University Press of Mississippi. Attached is the news release. If you know of others who may be interested in news of this title, don’t hesitate to pass this release along.

If you no longer wish to receive news of our books, please drop me a note at jnettles@ihl.state.ms.us, and we’ll remove you from the list.

Thanks for taking a look at the release below.

Sincerely,

Jordan

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American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment

By Jason Edward Black

University Press of Mississippi

ISBN 978-1-4968-0973-5, paper, $30

For Immediate Release

How the United States government tried to define, displace, and control indigenous peoples while American Indians refused to surrender their voices

American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (University Press of Mississippi) demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric in terms of impeding the removal and allotment policies. Author Jason Black examines the ways the U.S. government’s rhetoric and American Indian voices contributed to the policies of Native-U.S. relations throughout the nineteenth century’s removal and allotment eras.

Black shows how these discourses co-constructed the perception of the U.S. government and American Indian communities and contributed to the relationship. Such interactions—though certainly not equal between the two —illustrated the hybrid nature of Native-U.S. rhetoric in the nineteenth century. That is, both governmental colonizing discourse and indigenous decolonizing discourse added arguments, identity constructions, and rhetorical moves to the colonizing relationship.

By turning around the U.S. government’s discursive frameworks and inventing their own rhetorical tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own and the government’s identities. During the first third of the twentieth century, Native decolonization impacted the Native-U.S. relationship as American Indians urged for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934.

In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the U.S. government retained a powerful colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal – where this book concludes – emblemize the prevalence of the identity duality of U.S. citizenship that amalgamated American Indians to the nation, yet segregated them on reservations outside the spaces of U.S. society. This duality of inclusion and exclusion was built incrementally and existed as residues of nineteenth century Native-U.S. rhetorical relations.

American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment is the first Native-centered book in the larger field of rhetorical studies and communication studies and provides a longitudinal movement between western and Native voices.

JASON EDWARD BLACK is an associate professor in rhetoric and public discourse and an affiliate professor in gender and race studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He is the coeditor of An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk's Speeches and Writings and Arguments about Animal Ethics. His work has appeared in such journals as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, American Indian Quarterly, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

For more information contact Clint Kimberling, Publicist, ckimberling@mississippi.edu

Read more about American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment at http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1801