Rhetoric of Native Americans

When I registered to take Rhetoric 309K of Native Americans, I honestly had no idea what I was in for. The only reasons I had signed up for the class were because it fit nicely into my schedule and I wanted to touch up on my writing skills. I was not even aware of what the course topic was until the first day of class when my professor, Miriam Schacht announced it to us. I remember thinking to my self, "How the heck will learning about Native Americans help my writing?" For a brief moment, I am ashamed to say, I considered dropping the course. Obviously, I did not, and today I am grateful of this.

At the beginning of the semester, I was certain that I was going to fail miserably. All I had ever known of Native Americans I had learned from watching The Last of the Mochicans and Dances with Wolves (both of which used to be two of my favorite movies.) But with every class day, I found myself learning more and more about what being Native American really means. One of our first assignments was to read a few chapters out of Philip J. Deloria's book Playing Indian. It was in those chapters where I began to realize that throughout history the non-Native Americans have been borrowing the culture of true Native Americans as if were their own. And though our nation as a whole likes to think that the government has been very generous towards the Native American population, in reality our nation has made a practice of breaking treaties and attempting cultural genocide. Also, after reading an essay by Ward Churchill entitled Crimes Against Humanity, it dawned on me that I too had been guilty of clear discrimination towards the Native Americans. After all, my high school mascot was the Apache and I even have several t-shirts with an Indian head emblem and "Apache Pride" written boldly across them. Today, I make it a point not to go out in public while wearing those t-shirts.

HOME