gazing westward

Cobb’s article defines LaDonna Harris as a Native American rhetorician who ultimately offers a rhetoric of decolonization through her insistence that all understanding, communication, and change comes through cultural values – in her case, Comanche values.  Cobb spends time first establishing Harris’ leadership roles from the 1970s to the present as not a “traditional” leader working within a hierarchy but a leader who subverts “traditional,” hegemonic leadership ideals in her rhetorics.  Harris’ rhetorics are defined by her 1)focus on sustaining and expanding social/community networks, drawing from Comanche values, 2)creation of new spaces and new possibilities, 3)focus upon creation of a forces of social changes tided to collective groups/thinking rather than her own individual ideas and ethos, 4)disruption and redefinition of ideas, language, meaning, and rhetorics that historically maintain colonization.  Cobb argues that Harris is most valuable, rhetorically, for how she creates rather than what she creates (66).  Cobb spends six years studying Harris via Harris’ writing, interviews with Harris, and working with Harris and concludes that Harris’ rhetoric is ultimately a rhetoric of decolonization that offers “powerful medicine” to her community.

Cobb works through Harris’ idea that she “filters everything through Comanche values” (67).  These values include attention to kinship and responsibilities, to functional community relationships, to equality (Harris includes people of various situations/identities/positionalities to collaborate on the formation of tribal government, for example), to redistribution, to contribution, to sharing. 

Harris positions kinship as social networks and finds kinship relationships outside of physical familial bonds, expanding her own network via publications, conferences, etc, insisting that “people must have a sense of ownership in something in order to be moved to action” (70).  Thus, Harris invites, through her own values - “treating [all she encountered] as family and expecting them to ’show good manners’ ot ‘be good relatives’ in return” (70). 

Harris used four primary sites of discourse to invite and establish such networks -

1)Red Alerts, her organization newspaper

2)Red Papers, position papers written to a Native American audience to subvert the consequences of long-term colonization, hoping to offer Native Americans “insight into internalized oppression” (71)

3)Reports from commissions, often used to present to governmental agencies or share in governmental meetings

4)Scholarly work for journals, conferences, publications – Harris is often cited as the author or co-author and presented as speaking on behalf of her organization, used to help tribes establish new governmental structures, etc.

Cobb outlines the ways in which Harris creates This Is What We Want to Share: Core Cultural Values.  Written during the Reagan/Bush era, the work is the product of Harris’ collaboration with “Jacqueline Wasilewski, PhD” (73).  The work’s purpose was to encourage and begin conversation amongst the spectrum of Native American communities to engage in discussion about the formation of tribal governments in more culturally appropriate ways, allowing for more self-determination.  This rhetorical move to invite others into authorship is, Cobb points out, one more example of Harris’ omage to her cultural values, honoring Comanche ideas about contribution and difference (73).  

Cobb points out the ways in which “collaboration” in the Harris – Wasilewski sense indicates “that Wasilewski, a non-Native scholar, wanted to express that although she was a primary writer of the document itself, that is, the actual words, she was not a primary source for the content of the document- importantly highlighting that the content came from Harris” (73).   

Thus, the author comes to be referred to in the plural  (and even as author-function) as the text works toward “collective reflection,” defining ourselves to outsiders, realizing and participating in the dynamic world, enable contribution to the greater world after 500 years of colonization (74).  The document is designed “organically” – photocopied and stapled rather than bound, full of hand-drawn illustrations, invitations to literally mark up the text, respond to the authors and “contribute” (75).  Cobb sees the rhetorical techniques of the text to be embodying what Scott Lyons calls “rhetorical sovereignty” (75).  The rhetorics of the text, even further, are what Jace Weave calls “communitist texts” (75).  Communitism is “formed from a combination of the words community and activism or activist” and, as a communitist value system, is meant to “participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (76).  Thus, Harris’ “communitist monography” This Is What We Want To Share is based upon cultural values, enacts cultural values, and inscribes new rhetorics that reflect such cultural values. 

Some characteristics of the work and its rhetorics:

1)declarations or assertions of self – acts of self-definition in “seizing the pen”

2)appreciation for being a good relative, inclusive sharing, contributing, and non-coercive leadership

3)pan-Indian collective voice – “a sort of strategic essentialism used to achieve a stronger voice in a particular moment” (77)

4)the idea that culture is not in the “outward trappings” of materialist things like dress, bead work, etc. but the values that “manifest” in “any setting” (77)

5)cultural values are also analytic values/processes

Cobb breaks these characteristics/ideas down into categories – 1)Bearing Witness – Harris argues that the community must break the silence and make colonization explicit to subvert it, 2)Developing Counter-Consciousness and Building Community – the collective must create counter ways of being that illustrates the differences between values and material culture, that provokes action, that provides a heuristic to the community, that offers an incomplete inquiry, that embodies the idea that Native American values have sustained their survival, that nation-building must happen through practical discussions that may even result in a new norm that illuminates Native American values of development and leadership as norms and displaces Euro-centric norms that push Native American into liminal space (83).   3)Sharing Gifts – the texts argues for members of the community to a)contribute which is a unique responsibility, b)redistribute which is a unique responsibility to be willing to share and give anything they have (83).  Harris argues that these rhetorics allow Native Americans to reassert themselves as “co-creators” of reality with rhetorical – and literal sovereignty (84).  Thus the work is essentially a “powerful example of a rhetoric of decolonization” (85).

Thoughts -

I’m really interested in hearing from folks about a few issues in particular -

1)Cobb’s positioning of collaboration [thinking recursively about Buchanan's idea of collaboration] as embodied by Harris and Wasilweski and Harris’ author-function like status

2)Cobb’s careful distinction between cultural values and cultural materials… I’m unsure of what “counts” as each

3)the idea of communitist ideas, texts, and rhetorics… How is this relative to womanist rhetorics?

4)the design of the document as itself a communitist rhetorical act

5)colloborative texts as heuristic across the community

6)Cobb’s decision to focus on Harris as an individual while situating her work as communitist and collaborative… interesting methodological pickle here…