November 22, 2022 • 63 mins
Dr. Jeremy Carnes is a Postdoctoral Scholar here at UCF specializing in Indigenous rhetorics, particularly visual and material rhetorics. He is working on his first book on comics by Indigenous creators and the rhetorical affordances of comics as a visual medium for considering land-based practices by Indigenous communities. In addition to indigenous rhetorics, Dr Carnes’ research interests include: Comics Studies, Media Studies, Fan Culture Studies, Translingualism, and the Digital Humanities. He is also currently working with Dr. Jamila Kareem, a past guest of ours on this podcast, on a grant funded by the Sam and Virginia Patz Foundation in partnership with the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field at the university level, a place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences, and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today we're joined by Dr.
Jeremy Carnes.
Dr.
(00:49):
Carnes is a postdoctoral scholar here at UCF specializing in Indigenous rhetorics, particularly visual and material rhetorics.
He's working on his first book on comics by Indigenous creators and the rhetorical affordances of comics as a visual medium for considering land based practices by Indigenous communities.
(01:09):
In addition to Indigenous rhetorics, Dr.
Carnes' research interests include comic studies, media studies, fan culture studies, translingualism, and the digital humanities.
He's also currently working with Dr.
Jamela Karim, a past guest of ours on this podcast on a grant funded by the Sam and Virginia Pats Foundation in partnership with the seminal Tribe of Florida.
(01:33):
Thanks so much for joining us today, Dr.
Carnes.
Thanks for having me.
Well, so we know based on that introduction that you have a strong background in Indigenous rhetoric.
Let's start with just some basics.
What got you passionate about Indigenous rhetoric? What was your way into that? Yeah, it's a really good question that people always ask me, and I never really have, like, a moment.
(02:00):
Right.
It's like a development over the course of eight years while I was in grad school.
Right.
I did a little research in Indigenous literatures and my master's program when I was in my masters at Ball State University in Indiana, worked in an independent study with one of my professors and realized, like, I'm really interested in this, but I wasn't actually writing about it at the time.
(02:27):
I was writing about turn of the century periodicals, early modernist, like, early modernist literary magazines.
And then I got accepted to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and one of the deciding factors for me to go there was because the English department had three full time faculty members that only did Indigenous studies, which is kind of unheard of, and so I wanted to go and work with them.
(02:58):
So I got started there, and I was in a completely different world, and it was maybe 5 hours away from where I had been doing all of my degrees up to this point.
And I was the first indigenous studies class I took.
I got involved in taking anishina Abe Moon, which is the language of the Ojibwe community up north, and was reading all of these books and learning languages, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
(03:33):
And I just found myself sort of, like, not really ever wanting to talk about anything else in my work, and so it kind of helps to define it.
So I had a question for you.
That's selfish, but it might be one that you get asked a lot.
So my background came more from a literary perspective as opposed to a rhetorical perspective.
(03:57):
But I'm curious as to why the rhetoric of Indigenous communities as opposed to studying it in terms of the traditional sense of literary study.
So this is actually something that I continually struggle with because I also have a background.
My background is primarily in literary studies.
So that's what my ma and my PhD are largely in, I think, with Indigenous communities, because story is so central to the ways in which we make meaning, the ways in which Indigenous communities consider their relationalities, their ways of understanding place and people.
(04:39):
I actually think that the divide between literature and rhetoric is a little less stark in Indigenous studies than it is, say, for instance, in kind of American Studies more specifically.
Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in terms of the differences between the two? Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely sure.
(05:00):
I've kind of put my finger on it yet completely.
I think a lot of it has to do with kind of like institutional history in America, the sort of like growing up of composition programs underneath literature departments, english departments that are kind of run by literature, which causes for some complicated interpersonal relationships.
(05:22):
And then once composition kind of theory and thinking about teaching of writing becomes something not kind of defined by literature, then it causes a little bit of a differentiation.
Not a bad differentiation, not necessarily.
(05:42):
Right.
But there are different ways to approach these sorts of things that don't have to be defined by, like, teaching, I don't know, Shakespeare in a first year writing class, right? Not that I think there's anything wrong with that, but there is an institutional history there.
Whereas I think in Indigenous studies, what I think we see is a lot of so some of the central and earliest kind of Indigenous rhetoric folks like Malaya Powell from Michigan State, a lot of her research, dr.
(06:18):
Kim Kim Weaser, who works at University of Oklahoma.
A lot of their research mix Indigenous rhetoric with Indigenous literary studies because so much of what they pull out of kind of rhetorical choices are from the literature that's written by and about Indigenous communities.
(06:42):
So there's not the divide doesn't exist in quite the same way because that institutional history doesn't really define those kind of departmental questions.
How does that work for you when you think about or when you approach teaching writing or teaching any variation of the writing classes, courses that we have in our department? With your passion for Indigenous studies as an introduction to a way in or the connection and how it works for you, how do you think about those two kind of coming together, say, like, for a class, when you're designing how to incorporate those things? Yeah, I mean, I think it for me, it always depends on what texts you start with.
(07:36):
Anytime I teach you this stuff, I almost always start with or if I have a student interested in for instance, I've worked with a couple of master students on their nonthesis and thesis projects in the department.
Almost always.
One of the things I require them to read is Thomas King's the Truth About Stories, a Native Narrative.
Primarily because I think Thomas King is well known because he is a novelist.
(08:00):
His most famous book is Green Grass, Running Water.
But A Native Narrative mixes the sort of, like, literary questions with these sort of questions about rhetoric and particularly the rhetoric of storytelling.
And I think you don't really kind of you can't really get to the kind of the heart of what it means to do indigenous rhetorics, indigenous literary studies, indigenous studies in general, unless you kind of have a deep understanding of what it means to tell stories.
(08:35):
So for me, it always comes back to that kind of central question of, like, what text do I start with? And it's always kind of like, let's start talking about stories.
Let's start thinking about how stories work.
It sounds like the difference between what happens in a lot of English or literature classes where it's like, don't consider the author.
(08:55):
The text stands alone.
Don't read this as a biography or an autobiography.
Don't read into it in terms of the author's personality or their past history.
Let's just consider the text.
And the difference now seems like, no, we need to consider the experiences that shape the creation of the text as much as so it's as much about practice as it is about product.
(09:21):
Does that sound accurate? Okay.
And I think practice is really important, right? Because if we think about, for instance, some of my favorite stories in the Ojibwe tradition involve Nanobuju, the trickster figure of the Ojibwe people.
And anytime you would hear a story about Nana Bought or Nanobush, depending on who's telling that story, that story is going to elicit different feelings, is going to carry different meanings.
(09:54):
And it's not that the story is changing.
It's that the teller is choosing to emphasize different things, is coming at it from different perspectives, is coming at it with a different background.
And so, yeah, I think for this practice is as important, if not more important than product, which definitely changes sort of like where we start our questioning.
(10:18):
So thinking about how we bring this approach into our practice in the classroom, especially with first year writing, this might be an interesting time to talk a little bit about a future course that you're going to be working with in the spring of 2023.
I think you know what I'm referencing.
Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure.
(10:41):
What is it? So it's a special topics course, and forgive me, I don't remember the number right now, but it is subtitled the Rhetorics of Indigenous Communities.
And the focus is to think kind of about these questions that we've been talking about right now.
What does it mean to have rhetoric about and by Indigenous communities? Did you find the number? I asked for it before the podcast.
(11:09):
It's ENC 33 72 Topics in Civic Rhetorics and Writing Rhetorics of Indigenous Communities.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the one.
I had to write that down.
I was not going to remember all of that.
I'm teaching the class and I don't remember all of that with that class.
I've already decided that we're definitely going to start with Thomas King's book.
(11:33):
It's a short and easy to read book, but it brings up all of the kind of complications around discussing indigenity, both from outside Indigenous communities, right? So it brings up questions of like, mascots and stuff like that, which is very kind of prominent in our state, where one of the biggest colleges still has a, shall we say, problematic mascot, but then also within the communities themselves, thinking about the ways that elders think about teaching younger folks in the communities.
(12:09):
So Thomas King is Cherokee.
He's going to come at this from a really particularly Cherokee perspective, but right.
Like it's going to set the groundwork for the class so that then we can think about how all of these stories have been told in different ways.
Right.
So what I'm trying to think about with the class is not only the rhetoric that is shaped by Indigenous communities, for Indigenous communities, which is a lot of what we're going to spend our time with.
(12:41):
We're going to spend our time I know one thing we're going to do is we're going to watch the show Reservation Dogs, at least the first season, because I think it's a really good example of, like, Indigenous media created by Indigenous people.
For Indigenous people.
There are jokes that I watch and I have been studying Indigenous rhythmics for a long time, and I didn't grow up on a reservation, so I still don't catch all of the jokes.
(13:05):
Right.
And so thinking about sort of like that by and for kind of creative media, but then we're also going to spend a lot of time thinking about the stories that were told about Indigenous communities and how that rhetoric has kind of seeped into Indigenous communities.
So thinking about things like blood quantum, which is the sort of the law that you have to have a certain amount of Indian blood in order to be claimed by a tribe.
(13:32):
And if you don't have that much Indian blood, then you cannot be enrolled in that tribe, which was something that was put on indigenous communities by the United States government and by the Canadian government and has been adopted now.
And there is a large kind of conversation in Indigenous communities about like sort of do we keep doing blood quantum? Do we find a new way to do enrollment.
(13:59):
And so thinking about stuff like that and then also thinking about federal Indian law stuff like the Daws Act, which is the big it's the general allotment act of something like that, basically where land got parcelled.
And now it's all about private property, individually owned private property plots, which is not the way that Indigenous communities thought about their relationship with the land.
(14:27):
And so thinking about how those stories told by the US.
Government then affect the sort of rhetoric coming out of Indigenous communities and how in the past, say, 60 years since the American Indian Movement of the 1960s, there's been a lot of pushback against this sort of rhetoric.
And this is not your first time teaching a course that features Indigenous rhetoric.
(14:51):
Correct.
Did you taught other ones as well? I have not here, but yes, I have taught them elsewhere.
So I'm curious because we're all subject to our own biases, whether they're good or bad.
We have formative experiences that shape the way we view the world, and all we can do is kind of interrogate ourselves to figure out what those are right when we approach things.
(15:12):
So I'm wondering, are there any common considerations that you have students embark upon when they first come into a class like this, in terms of the way their perspective versus a shift in perspective they need to consider to be open to this examination and these events? Yeah, it's actually something I normally do on the very first day.
(15:36):
I normally do it if I'm teaching a class like this, I do it before we even talk about the syllabus.
I'll come in and I'll write the word Indian on the board, and then I will prompt my students to just tell me everything they think about when they think about that word, what is the first thing that comes to mind? It doesn't matter what it is.
And we get into really messy territory, but we get it all on the board the first day, and we get it out and we say, okay, now what we're going to spend a lot of time doing this semester is thinking about how much of these are based in stereotypes, how much of these are based in kind of really problematic history.
(16:17):
It's a little mind boggling, the amount of students that say things like that all Indians have died out, that there aren't Indians anymore, that there aren't Native people anymore, which is, you know, patently not true.
But that's kind of the story that has defined Indigenous communities from sort of a governmental kind of settler colonial perspective.
(16:45):
Right? And so I kind of just start in the Meyer and the Muck in my classes so that we can kind of get all of the kind of worse stuff out of the way, and then we can start to, from that moment on, think about, okay, what if this tracks? And what if this maybe doesn't track in the ways that in the ways that we expect, if that makes sense.
(17:09):
Yeah.
Do you find that a lot of the students are just missing big chunks of, like, historical information about absolutely what happened and what the government of the United States did and what were some of those? Because that is a big part of it, I think is just that missing piece of information that's there.
(17:34):
Or maybe it was sort of covered in a very superficial way.
One of my students, Sebastian Garcia, who was on a previous episode of this podcast that was his Eleven two project, was looking through his AP US.
History textbook for issues of representation, and he did a quantitative and qualitative analysis of how those groups were talked about, and he found some omissions or lack of representation by certain groups in the story of the history of the United States as taught in his AP history class just within the last ten years.
(18:21):
Right.
So that's something that I think is probably part of the, like you said, messy, unpacking process of starting the course.
Yeah.
I mean, so much of all of this work right.
Like, we can't really talk about Indigenous rhetoric until we realize that the stories that we've been told about Indigenous people are based in a settler colonial view of the world.
(18:46):
Right.
But, like, settler colonialism, and there's a famous essay called Settler Colonialism settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolff.
And in it, his kind of famous line is it's like the often quoted line is territoriality of settler colonialism's specific irreducible element.
(19:07):
So land land is what matters.
And the whole point is settlers come to the United States, they need land for people to build farms on, to build houses on.
Well, who has control of the land at the time just because of where they are? Indigenous communities have control of the land.
They are the ones that are making their lives off of the land.
(19:28):
So we remove them, but then eventually there are more settlers and we have to remove them more, and then there are more settlers, and eventually there runs out of place to move Indigenous peoples.
And so with that in mind, then we have to understand this basic history.
And the problem is that I'm finding most students who come into classes like this one don't.
(19:54):
We don't even think about the history of our own state and the sort of like the fact that the Seminole nation wasn't in fact a nation originally.
Right.
They are a group of Muskie Creek peoples.
Not just Muscogee Creek, but primarily Muskie Creek peoples who were in different kinds of communities that joined up largely to fight the US.
(20:21):
Military.
And the seminal nation kind of like built out of that before there were the Tamukwa, for instance, as one community that used to be in Florida that just aren't here anymore.
And so we can't begin to think about the ways that stories are told until we realize that the stories that we've been told are inherently problematic.
(20:51):
And by problematic, I mean also inherently patently false most of the time.
And thinking about sort of that unpacking process is long and pretty arduous and not super comfortable for students.
Well, it kind of reigns on the parade of the idea of the New World colonial experience.
(21:17):
Totally.
And look at what we've made of ourselves from the first step on the north.
Where was it? In Plymouth? I was going to say Boston.
I don't want to make anybody hate me too much, but it's very much a story that's been crafted to highlight the success.
(21:41):
But again, success by whose definition? By which perspective? And yes, I was just going to ask.
So going back to the course and how you're kind of thinking of the arrangement or the design of it, you have a messy unpack at the beginning, and then you start with King.
And then what's your sort of goal? Or where does it kind of go from there in terms of not only topically, but also what you're going to have maybe the students engage in.
(22:13):
Yeah, so I'm still making a lot of those decisions, but a lot of my thoughts right now are thinking about the ways that it can be a useful course for our students.
Right.
So not just like something that I'm interested in teaching because this is where my research is, but also something that students will be able to use.
So, like, for instance, I know a lot of our students go to law degrees after finishing in writing and rhetoric, which I think is great.
(22:42):
So having a large chunk of the class that really thinks about federal Indian law and both the sort of like, how does federal Indian law work? What are the big kind of moves in federal Indian policy? What's the sort of rhetoric around that? So we have to think about the Justice John Marshall trilogy of the early 1820s and 1830s, wherein he kind of like it's a whole court battle between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation.
(23:11):
And the big thing there is that he says that Native tribes are, in his quote, is domestic dependent nations.
Right.
So, like, unpacking sort of what that means rhetorically.
Right.
What sort of moves is he trying to get us to think through there and to think about then how law is sort of bound up in these questions.
But then also to get into sort of like media studies.
(23:35):
So thinking about Indigenous visualities, which is where my primary work is.
So things like reservation dogs, the TV show.
But also I'm going to spend some time on some Indigenous comics and thinking about the ways that kind of visuals communicate in a really particular way that's relatively different, for instance, than kind of Western visuals might.
(23:59):
And then a large portion of this, obviously, it goes across the whole thing but the sort of political sort of activism inherent in the rhetorics of Indigenous communities.
So thinking about particular activist moments like the big one in the US.
More contemporarily is the no Double movement and thinking about the ways in which Indigenous activists make use of things like Twitter and Facebook in those moves.
(24:30):
And so part of what I'm trying to do is to I haven't really figured out the kind of larger arc yet, but trying to pull in a lot of things that really show that these sort of stereotypes of indigenous folks as existing in the past and is not around or not involved in kind of contemporary and modern life are just kind of patently false, and that there are Indigenous people doing really important work that is really kind of, like, very rhetorically.
(25:06):
Savvy.
I think a lot of the class is going to be a lot of it's going to be it's going to be like history meets exposure, right? Like, we need to know this history, and then we just need to be exposed to more stuff.
And so I think it's going to be a lot of that.
I haven't decided sort of what sorts of things I'm going to ask students to produce in the class yet.
(25:33):
So a lot of this goes back to my own pedagogy of, like, doing some theory and then also some practice work, some practical sort of stuff.
So early stuff might be kind of like engaging with a sort of rhetorical theory that Indigenous scholars have come up with, and then later work would be like, okay, now what would you produce? What could we make out of this? And this is largely the move I make in a lot of my classes.
(25:59):
Well, given your background in looking at comic studies, you were kind enough to share some things with us off camera or off mike that you had been working on.
And one of them I was reading, and I hope that it's okay that I quote you directly, but that comics complicate multimedia relationships across history, and this idea of how gutter spaces and comics are used maybe unraveled as would be a word.
(26:31):
Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I feel like the conversation is kind of going there in terms of if you're considering the ways in which we construct messages and if you're only limited to maybe what the prevailing colonial history would have provided you.
There's a whole canon of fantastic Indigenous literary scholar, not just scholars, but literary producers louise Urdrich and Sherman Alexi, and I mean, those are probably, like, the most popular.
(27:06):
But this idea of I know in my own readings, there's a lot of play with form in literature.
So this idea of how that translates into multimedia and comic production, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, of course.
So I guess I'll just do it by kind of starting with that particular comics artist just because it gives us a kind of grounded way to think about it.
(27:31):
So the artist that I have spent the most time thinking about his work is Michael Jaguanas.
He's a haida artist from the pacific northwest, from Haiti, guai, which used to be queen Charlotte island, right off of the coast of British Columbia.
And he does this really fun thing where he kind of well, first off, he kind of collapses kind of hierarchies that exist in western society, right? So when we think about comics, we think about the sort of like superman, Batman, like, dime store throw away.
(28:12):
Like, this is kitchart.
It's not made to be saved and seen as high art or anything.
Right.
What he does is almost all of his comics are actually large murals that he creates as a huge mural, and then he breaks it down into page by page sequences so that you read the comic, but you can also buy two copies of the book, tear out all the pages, and recreate the mural on your wall.
(28:44):
Right.
And most of these murals are housed in large, very well respected art museums.
The Seattle art museum did a really big show of a lot of his work recently, and so thinking about the ways in which indigenous art can kind of start to collapse some of these binaries is really fun.
(29:07):
But then yeah, to go to the question of gutters, right? So gutters work really fun in comics because they're like the time.
Scott McLeod, a famous comics scholar and practitioner, he talks about how the gutters are where that's where the action actually happens.
What we're actually seeing are two still images, and we're actually filling in the action between the images.
(29:30):
So really quickly, before we go any further, give us a definition of gutters.
Yes.
So gutters are literally just that space in between the panels and comics.
So every panel panels are set by side by side, and it's that white space in between.
And so Scott McLeod says that that white space actually has so much stuff happening there because we see his famous example is a picture of a man with, like, an axe raised above another guy behind him.
(29:59):
And then the next picture is of a city skyline with a screen across it.
Now, like, the artist didn't draw an axe hitting someone.
We did that in our head.
Right.
And so he talks about how we're kind of complicit in the crime is his sort of, like, language.
And what's really fun about that is that then there's a really particular, like, linearity to the ways that stories are told and the ways that gutters kind of represent this, like, time in empty space.
(30:31):
With comics artists like Yagulinos, he does a really different thing because the gutters, instead of being this white space, in most of his works, the gutters are black form lines, and the form lines are actually what you use to kind of put the larger mural together.
And the form lines aren't just gutters to not be interacted with.
(30:53):
The form lines actually become things in the story.
Right.
They become fish that are pulled from the ocean.
They become the waves of the ocean as they crash over a boat.
Right.
So thinking about the ways in which the relationship between people and time, people and space, is really different if we think about gutters as this representation of time and space, right? So then, now, instead of having this time and space being this thing that we can't control, that is just kind of there no now it's a thing that's actively acting on people, which is a fundamentally, like, not Western way to thinking about our relationship to time and place.
(31:36):
There are really particular ways in which that's put into these sort of media forms.
Well, it reminds me of the brief exposure I've had to Native American literature and how the themes of time and being very different from the way that maybe like a Eurocentric perspective would consider time.
(31:59):
That's right.
And I don't know enough to know if that's like, a commonality across indigenous cultures, at least in North America, or if that's just maybe that's just the commonality amongst a Eurocentric perspective is that time works one way and everybody else sees it as something else.
So that's really interesting to think about those constructions in particular, like the play of form.
(32:22):
And you think about how form plays out so much in other artistic expressions in indigenous cultures and that it's just finding that other way to kind of manipulate those states of being right.
And this is where I think, like, it feels so much like we're talking about literature here, and yet it also, to me, feels so much like we're talking about, like, rhetorical studies too.
(32:45):
Right, because, like, there's a way in which thinking about these formal questions that we've talked about are things that I learned in my literary studies department or in my literary studies courses.
But then I would go to my rhetorical studies classes, wherein we think about the ways that writing can help us to relate to places that we live and times that we live and people that we interact with.
(33:08):
Right.
And so it's thinking about, like, now writing becomes a thing that we can actually think about differently in how we like to use it to interact with places.
Right.
And so I'm just thinking about how, like, all of this is kind of bound up in these really kind of complicated questions that often times the ways that, for instance, like Western universities are kind of created.
(33:33):
We love our silos, we love to differentiate.
Right.
And so much of those silos actually are complicated by something like Indigenous studies, which is kind of inherently interdisciplinary.
Yes.
And I think also the other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking was literacies and multiple literacies.
(33:55):
That we have or that we gain.
Because when I'm thinking about comics gutters how action and time is represented, it almost is.
You have to sort of tune yourself to a new way of reading and a new way of shaping meaning from the thing that you're looking at.
(34:17):
And that's something that I think even in composition classes, we talk to our students about some of the things that they already have.
Like, they already have those and maybe don't realize them.
And so I think talking about texts and genres that are constructed in these very kind of different ways that require us to think differently and read differently is something that we can introduce the students, but also we can show that students also have that ability, even though they haven't sort of formally thought about it as a literacy yet to sort of consider those things.
(34:55):
Have you found that? Do you use comics in the classroom or with students having them read? And what's your sense of how they read them or how they make meaning out of those things? Yeah, I do use comics in my classes, so it definitely comes down to sort of like, students are.
(35:21):
I think that my interactions with students have shown that students know how to read visuals really well.
Even if they feel like they can't, they often can.
And they often just kind of, like, secondguess themselves, and most of the time they do that.
And then we start talking, and then they come up with these brilliant thoughts about how visuals are working and how they're doing particular work.
(35:47):
And so when I put a comic in front of them, then it comes laden with all of these, like, thoughts that they have about what is a comic and what a comic can do, right.
Comics are superheroes.
They are for kids.
They exist in all of these spaces.
And then I put something in front of them that doesn't actually align with any of those thoughts.
(36:10):
And almost always, it's sort of like sweeping the legs out from underneath students a little bit, but they take it all in stride so well.
One of the comics that I use in my En C eleven one class often is a chapter from this book called Unflattening by Nick Susannes.
(36:31):
And Nick Susannes, he's pretty well known for having been one of the first folks who wrote his entire masters or his entire doctoral dissertation in comics form.
And unflattening is the product.
And so much of it is about the ways that we think, the ways that we become cogs in machines or the ways that we break out of those cogs because we're kind of built to think and do in certain ways.
(36:56):
And that's the chapter that I assign my students.
And almost always, they start off really trepidatiously.
Like, comics haven't been my thing.
I don't read comics.
I don't know how this works.
And then we start looking at the pictures, and we start actually thinking about what are the images and the text doing together? And they're able to take off in just ways that I don't think they even thought of themselves as being able to do.
(37:24):
So it goes back to this question of literacies that students have now with that, then, outside of comics, I will also say that this semester changed up my eleven and one class a little bit and put the introduction of the book Braiding Sweetgrass in front of my students, which is a book by Robin Wall Kimmer, who is a botanist.
(37:47):
An indigenous botanist.
And she opens this book about relationship with plants, but she opens it with the story of Sky Woman, which is a creation story, and she kind of walks through this and then she does a little bit of comparative work with the creation story from the Bible.
And then she thinks about how these two creation stories actually show us different ways of relating to Earth, to the planet that we live on.
(38:14):
And when my students walked into class the day that we were reading it, so many of them were like, this is unlike anything I've ever read before.
And I was like, great.
Yes, let's talk about that.
How is it unlike anything you've ever read before? And so many of them are like, the ways in which she was telling the story, the ways in which it was based, in these, like, almost cyclical repetition.
(38:35):
Right.
They noticed things about it that was really, like, very astute, and yet this was a moment where I could see, like, this was a literacy that maybe they haven't been engaging with in quite the same way.
And so it was really kind of fun to kind of see them be able to do this sort of like stretching.
(38:56):
Yes.
And I think it's a great way into what analysis is, what rhetorical analysis is.
We were having a conversation in the hallway the other day about students and rhetorical analysis and getting them to show, like, their thinking and things like that.
And I think what your comment just made me realize is that how the text itself and maybe changing up the text or having something other than like the essay or the piece of research necessarily where they bring to it a lot of trepidation, or they bring to it a lot of sometimes intimidation of that genre itself even before they've had a chance to get into it.
(39:45):
It's interesting how maybe just giving them, like you said, something completely different that they haven't read before is a great way to sort of get into encouraging students, showing students how to express and write about and talk about their own thinking and their own kind of processing and analysis of what they're seeing in a text.
(40:07):
Yeah, we were talking about this on the walk over, how our students can get so much from textual analysis.
And I think it is a literacy that they're much more savvy with and they give themselves credit for because they've grown up in a world where information is given multimodally for a large part, and it might be information that's not necessarily considered, like, traditionally of significance, but they still have that literacy either way.
(40:37):
And I know personally, I struggle with comics because I am a fast reader and you have to be a very patient reader when you're looking in considering comics.
You can't just, you know, flip through page after page to try to figure out what's going to happen next.
You really have to take the time and slow down and consider what is happening in every single frame.
(40:58):
And it's interesting when you say, you know, when I think of comics, you think of, like, traditional superhero type tropes.
When I think of comics, I immediately think of all of the ones that are considered to be delivering messages that are more subversive.
So, like, persepolis even.
(41:18):
There's one that I read.
I think it's Camelot 3000 V for vendetta the watchman.
Those are the ones to Mouse.
Those are the ones that I'm like.
Oh, when I think of comics, that's what I think of.
And I guess technically, they're graphic novels.
I mean, I don't know if we're going to split hairs over there, and I'm someone who, you know, is a connoisseur of Batman and Superman and all of these things, but yet I don't ever think of those as comics.
(41:43):
I think of those as just this other thing versus I think of comics as being this medium for delivering messages that are a little more contrary to the popular narrative.
Do you have any thoughts as to why? I think we kind of talked about a little bit, but why is there why is comics in particular seem to be such a good vehicle for those messages? Yeah, I think that a lot of it is because mostly we don't expect comics to do that work.
(42:14):
We don't expect comics.
Now, maybe this is not so fair anymore because lots of people read Watchmen and Mouse and Persepolis and these, like, very kind of complex, very heavily political stories.
But I still think comics exist for most folks, I think comics exist as this thing that is, like, for younger people as a stepping stone to reading.
(42:47):
Right.
This is often the sort of, like, narrative.
Now, I want to be very clear that I'm kind of painting, obviously with a really broad brush here.
But I think that one of the things that's really interesting is that this isn't comics aren't the sort of, like the sort of put on a pedestal way of how we share information.
(43:16):
Right.
Writing is like the written word has been the privileged way of sharing information in Western culture.
Right.
There's a reason why, like, in colonial history, the point is we need to get language in front of these people.
We need to get written language in particular in front of these people, right.
(43:36):
No matter where we're talking about it in the world, if it was colonized by a Western culture, language becomes central to the sort of colonial project, and written language becomes central to the colonial project.
And so we've put, like, the written word in a really particular way.
But many cultures, the written word wasn't really put on this pedestal.
(44:01):
Right.
For some cultures, like, written word wasn't even a thing.
So for most native communities in the US.
Written languages weren't really the kind of the modus operandi.
Right? Like, it was verbal.
I mean, everything was kind of verbal language.
And then there was there were visuals, there were things like winter counts that were written on hides, like buffalo hides, and there were birch bark art up in the north.
(44:30):
So thinking about the ways in which actually comics are taking this sort of like the written and the visual and bringing them together to live in a kind of media that kind of contradicts these sort of hierarchies is part of what I think is so interesting about comics and part of why I think they lend themselves to asking some of these questions really, really well.
(44:55):
There's a famous and I'm going to completely lose the kind of citation here, but there is a wellknown decolonial theorist who talks about this, who says that part of the deal with colonialism is that there is a meeting of what he calls contradicting literacies, right? That like, the literacies that colonialists were bringing with them, and then the literacies that native folks had were different.
(45:23):
And so that sort of tension is part of what leads to this sort of combat in many ways.
Of course, like, the violence is actually what leads to this.
Right? But I think this notion of combative literacy is really interesting or competing literacies, if only because comics is a medium that works to bring competing literacies together, right? And so I think in the past 100 years, what used to be competing isn't really competing in quite the same way.
(45:55):
And so I think comics can really pull some of those really interesting questions to the foreground.
This is just a stab in the dark.
But is it also the fact that you can provide more contextual support to the message in a comic than you would necessarily in other mediums? Do you think that's a part of it as well? I mean, I think that there's something to be said about, like, creating a visual context, right.
(46:22):
That it takes a lot of space and time to be able to work that visual context into a written text.
Right? Like, then you would have huge chunks of sort of, like, explanatory sort of writing that may or may not get read.
Right stage directions.
Right stage directions, exactly.
Yeah.
So, like, I'm thinking of this really funny comic.
(46:44):
It's one of the comics in a collection that I have written about.
And the story is like a retelling of a traditional story, but it's like set in the far future and it's about like, okay, so we don't live on Earth anymore because you can't live here.
But then they learn, like, oh, well, we can actually come back.
(47:06):
So they send back two indigenous men, two creek men, and they come back and they say, but the important thing is you can't eat anything.
Don't eat anything because it's really important that it could all be tainted.
Like, don't eat the food.
And they come back and then he finds a can of Spam and it's not written about.
(47:28):
We only watch this happen.
And of course, this would take some contextual background of knowing about like, commodity foods and how commodity food programs are really like, highly used on reservations because of kind of colonial histories.
And so Spam is one of the kind of big commodity foods because it is meat that can be put in, that can be revived.
(47:50):
Right.
It can last right.
Forever.
Yeah.
And so I think there are ways in which the visuals of that story add this context that makes jokes without having to be written about that I think is really fun.
I wonder if you could switching gears just a little bit, tell us about your project with the seminal Indian tribe and the Grant program.
(48:14):
I'm so glad you asked.
That's going to be my next question too.
Yeah, sure.
I'm working with Dr.
Jamila Kareem and Dr.
Sherry Robertson, and we are working with the seminal tribe of Florida in particular, working with their Tribal Historic Preservation Office and the Atasiki Museum, which is a museum that was completely funded and built by and for seminal folks.
(48:42):
So it's a really interesting museum to go to on the Big Cypress Reservation on the south end of Lake Okeechobe.
It's really great to see that happen because it's a museum that tells criminal history by seminal people as opposed to seminal history by Florida colonial.
Yeah, by white colonialists in Florida.
Right, exactly.
(49:05):
So the project, the way that it's kind of happening now is they have this slew of 20th century newspapers and newspaper clippings from kind of the 1940s, maybe the 1930s are the earliest up through like, the 1970s in Florida.
And what they want help doing is building out their digital archive so that it has both sort of a rundown of what's in the articles that are on there, but also contextual information.
(49:39):
So that like, for instance, when community members are going into it.
They'll know that there is some pretty racist and problematic language that appears in, for instance, the Okeechobe Times.
Right.
And so we're doing a lot of this work to kind of like, go through this and I'm learning a lot more about Florida history than I expected to learn and really like specific local history and the sort of communities surrounding the reservations.
(50:12):
Most of the reservations here are south of us.
So we're in Orlando, most of the reservations are down kind of Okeechobee area.
And then over in Hollywood, that's kind of the bulk of the project is building up this digital archive and repository so that it's more user friendly, both for members of the community but also for researchers who come and want to work in 20th century newspaper clippings about kind of the seminal tribe and their relationship with local Florida communities.
(50:45):
So reading between the lines on the communication that I've had access to, it seems like there were some shifts in terms of the plan for the project.
Did you have something else in mind going into it and then it just wasn't necessarily useful or can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, of course.
One of the things that I fell prey to is, and you know, I know better than this, I did all of my doctoral work and worked on grants in a different part of the country.
(51:20):
So up in the northern part of the country, I was in Wisconsin for most of this.
And in Wisconsin, most of the tribal communities there, they don't have access to as much money.
The seminal tribe is a pretty wealthy tribe because they own all of the hardwork hotels and casinos and they're also very, very, very private as a community for a lot of really particular and historical reasons.
(51:51):
And so I went into this project, we wanted to kind of do some oral histories and thinking about sort of like the histories of the community as told by elders and people in the community.
So that was what the whole point of the project was.
And it was hopefully we were going to produce sort of a book that would be usable for high school, middle school, high school and maybe even early college courses.
(52:20):
We contacted the so we got the funding for the grant, we contacted the tribe and we got word back that was basically like, yeah, we don't do this kind of work because we don't force any people in our community to talk to researchers and most people in the community don't want to talk to researchers.
(52:46):
And I was like, yes, that absolutely makes sense.
Of course it does.
And I realized that I was coming from this from with all of my thinking about the north in my mind, right.
My advisor, who is Ojibwe, she always told me you don't go to a native community asking them for things unless you're giving things in return.
(53:13):
So in grant funding terms, that means you don't go to them unless you have money in hand.
Right? Because then that's something you can help to give back to the community, which is great in practice, except for certain communities, but for other communities, they're not really interested in the money that I'm bringing, they're interested in protecting their community.
(53:36):
And of course that makes sense.
So I went with, like, this kind of one sort of thought in my mind and realize, like, oh, yeah, I'm applying what I learned in this different context here and it doesn't work here.
And luckily it worked out really well where we talked with the folks who responded with us, which was the tribal historic preservation office and the museum, and we found this other project that would work really well, and we had a grant funder who was very flexible with us.
(54:06):
And so we just kind of, like, reworked the project so that we could do a project that worked for the seminal community and not for us, right? Like, that's not kind of the goal of this project, is we did want to do something that was good for us.
We wanted to do something that would actually help the community.
And yes, then we also get to build these relationships that hopefully lead to more projects that the community wants partners on.
(54:33):
But again, the whole important thing was that it was defined and run by the community and we didn't really set the kind of project in that direction to start off, and so it took a little redirecting.
It's really interesting to consider that a community's history could be commodified in a certain lens.
(54:57):
And while I know researchers approach these projects with the best of intentions, let's share this history, let's make more people aware of this community and how they come to understand the world based on their experiences.
But it also then raises a lot of questions in terms of this tradition.
(55:18):
Now, as you've explained, of, hey, we've got money for you.
Can you share your stories with us? It's something that you really had, I know you hadn't considered and I hadn't considered until you just mentioned it.
And what does that mean about the other types of research that are ongoing and how these communities are forced to, in essence, like, sell their stories for money to survive and to think about the ways that, yeah, I realized all of the ways in which I was approaching this like a good capitalist, right? Like, I can pay you for the thing.
(55:50):
But one of the things is one of the whole things with colonialism and capitalism as a kind of economic offshoot is, well, if we have enough money, then I can have anything.
Anything can be mine as long as I have enough money for it.
The point here and what I had, like, this really difficult kind of coming to terms with, which was like, it was good, I'm glad that I had it was no, actually, there's some stuff that it doesn't really matter how much money you have.
(56:20):
It's not for you.
Right.
There's stuff that's particular to the seminal community that the seminal community wants to keep within the seminal community.
So, like, as kind of researchers from a colonial tradition, like, yeah, great, we need to recognize that and we need to be comfortable and redirect ourself and not expect seminal community to redirect themselves or any indigenous community.
(56:45):
Right.
That there's just stuff that's just not for us.
And that's fine.
Like, it has to be fine.
Yeah.
We are closing in on our time for this episode, but I wanted to ask you and of course, Megan, if you have any follow up questions as well, but what are some of the next projects you're working on? I know classic over committer, involved in so many things.
(57:14):
We got the new course.
Let me tell you, the 13 projects I have in my brain right now.
What are you excited about? What's on the horizon? What do you have coming up that you're getting into? And again, we don't know all of this.
You don't have to mention all of them if you want to.
(57:36):
The ones that you're kind of thinking about that you want to talk about.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I guess the big one that Megan actually talked a little bit about in the introduction was my book.
I'm trying to write my first academic monograph all about indigenous comics.
So it's largely most of the stuff we kind of talked about throughout today.
But the other big one that I'm really excited about is I'm working with a colleague of ours who recently retired, marcy Gobrith, and also some colleagues in the center for Humanities and Digital Research, amy George and Mike Shire.
(58:12):
The four of us have been working on projects related to St.
Augustine, and in particular to the Castillo, or what was formerly known as Fort Marion, because there's a history in the 19th century of planes, Indians, prisoners being taken there after the Plains Indian Wars.
And a lot of those folks actually produced ledger art while they were there.
(58:40):
One of the projects we're doing right now is we are putting together sort of trying to use the ledger art as historical documentation to think about the stories of these folks who were taken from the planes, brought to Florida to live here, and largely to kind of be made to learn how to be white men.
(59:06):
Right.
Really to be assimilated.
And then the ways in which some of these folks, like, they died here and their remains are still here.
The St.
Augustine Military Cemetery has two burial plots that just, say, six unknown Indians.
(59:26):
They're not even given their names right.
So a lot of the work that we're doing, we were actually working with descendants from these prisoners from the Shayan and Rapajo tribes.
And there is a big event happening in November in St.
Augustine.
We have been able to and this is largely thanks to the work of Dr.
Amy Giroud working they're replacing those two headstones.
(59:50):
They're putting one large headstone, and it's going to have the names of the prisoners that Dr.
Girou has been able to identify from her kind of cemetery burial research.
Wow.
Which is really fantastic to go along with that, then so much of this history is kind of unknown to the tribes.
So we're creating some materials to try to help build out that history for them so that they kind of know, like, what happened to their ancestors.
(01:00:19):
Because many of them felt like their ancestors came here and then died here.
And that's not true always.
Some of them went back to their homelands and some of them actually went with General Pratt, who was the guy who ran this to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which he started after this.
So this is the big project, the other big project I'm working on right now.
I've been sitting here shaking my head, which, of course, doesn't translate to this medium because every time I think about people who settled in Florida, I think they're out of their minds because I moved here in 2002 from New York, which, you know, it's not like I'd never been to Florida.
(01:00:59):
And I think about when we encounter the summers and the mosquitoes and alligators and snakes through our understanding, like, present day, and to think that there were people that, like, took wagons here and decided to sell the wilds of Florida.
They're kind of out of their minds a little bit, especially interior Florida I can't even imagine.
(01:01:24):
So it's really interesting to consider that idea of, holy cow, you're taken prisoner and here you end up in this place that is sort of like nightmarishly fairytaleish in terms of the forces that are trying to get you heat, bugs, animals, etc.
(01:01:44):
That's really fascinating work.
I'm really intrigued by that.
I had one last question, and that would be not to put you on the spot, but any recommendations on readings? Whether it be considering Indigenous communities from an outside perspective or Indigenous writers in general, what are some things that you like to recommend? Okay, so I know this episode is not coming out until November, I believe, but we're recording it in October, so it's spooky season.
(01:02:17):
And one of the things that I am really into right now is Indigenous horror, which is a really burgeoning area of Indigenous lit right now.
So one of the main names there is a guy named Stephen Graham Jones.
He's Black Feet, and he has this really amazing novel called The Only Good Indians that came out a couple of years ago.
(01:02:39):
So definitely I would check that one out.
Erika Worse has this really fantastic novel that actually comes out on November 1.
But I got an early copy because that's how you roll it's how we're friends, and it's cool.
And so it's called White Horse, and it is so scary and so good.
Outside of horror stuff, I would also suggest in the Realm of Rhetoric, dr.
(01:03:06):
Kim Weezer's book on it's called Back to the Blanket.
So recovering American Indian rhetorical traditions, I believe is the subtitle.
And then also anything by Dr.
Malaya Powell, by Dr.
Alexander Hidalgo, by Dr.
Andrea Reilly mukovitz.
Those are the kind of big names that those are the folks who I'm their work is kind of helping to define my work in rhetoric studies right now.
(01:03:35):
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and having this conversation.
Yeah, thanks so much for your time.
And thanks, everyone, for listening.
Thanks for having me.
Bye.
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field at the university level, a place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences, and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today we're joined by Dr.
Jeremy Carnes.
Dr.
(00:49):
Carnes is a postdoctoral scholar here at UCF specializing in Indigenous rhetorics, particularly visual and material rhetorics.
He's working on his first book on comics by Indigenous creators and the rhetorical affordances of comics as a visual medium for considering land based practices by Indigenous communities.
(01:09):
In addition to Indigenous rhetorics, Dr.
Carnes' research interests include comic studies, media studies, fan culture studies, translingualism, and the digital humanities.
He's also currently working with Dr.
Jamela Karim, a past guest of ours on this podcast on a grant funded by the Sam and Virginia Pats Foundation in partnership with the seminal Tribe of Florida.
(01:33):
Thanks so much for joining us today, Dr.
Carnes.
Thanks for having me.
Well, so we know based on that introduction that you have a strong background in Indigenous rhetoric.
Let's start with just some basics.
What got you passionate about Indigenous rhetoric? What was your way into that? Yeah, it's a really good question that people always ask me, and I never really have, like, a moment.
(02:00):
Right.
It's like a development over the course of eight years while I was in grad school.
Right.
I did a little research in Indigenous literatures and my master's program when I was in my masters at Ball State University in Indiana, worked in an independent study with one of my professors and realized, like, I'm really interested in this, but I wasn't actually writing about it at the time.
(02:27):
I was writing about turn of the century periodicals, early modernist, like, early modernist literary magazines.
And then I got accepted to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and one of the deciding factors for me to go there was because the English department had three full time faculty members that only did Indigenous studies, which is kind of unheard of, and so I wanted to go and work with them.
(02:58):
So I got started there, and I was in a completely different world, and it was maybe 5 hours away from where I had been doing all of my degrees up to this point.
And I was the first indigenous studies class I took.
I got involved in taking anishina Abe Moon, which is the language of the Ojibwe community up north, and was reading all of these books and learning languages, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
(03:33):
And I just found myself sort of, like, not really ever wanting to talk about anything else in my work, and so it kind of helps to define it.
So I had a question for you.
That's selfish, but it might be one that you get asked a lot.
So my background came more from a literary perspective as opposed to a rhetorical perspective.
(03:57):
But I'm curious as to why the rhetoric of Indigenous communities as opposed to studying it in terms of the traditional sense of literary study.
So this is actually something that I continually struggle with because I also have a background.
My background is primarily in literary studies.
So that's what my ma and my PhD are largely in, I think, with Indigenous communities, because story is so central to the ways in which we make meaning, the ways in which Indigenous communities consider their relationalities, their ways of understanding place and people.
(04:39):
I actually think that the divide between literature and rhetoric is a little less stark in Indigenous studies than it is, say, for instance, in kind of American Studies more specifically.
Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in terms of the differences between the two? Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely sure.
(05:00):
I've kind of put my finger on it yet completely.
I think a lot of it has to do with kind of like institutional history in America, the sort of like growing up of composition programs underneath literature departments, english departments that are kind of run by literature, which causes for some complicated interpersonal relationships.
(05:22):
And then once composition kind of theory and thinking about teaching of writing becomes something not kind of defined by literature, then it causes a little bit of a differentiation.
Not a bad differentiation, not necessarily.
(05:42):
Right.
But there are different ways to approach these sorts of things that don't have to be defined by, like, teaching, I don't know, Shakespeare in a first year writing class, right? Not that I think there's anything wrong with that, but there is an institutional history there.
Whereas I think in Indigenous studies, what I think we see is a lot of so some of the central and earliest kind of Indigenous rhetoric folks like Malaya Powell from Michigan State, a lot of her research, dr.
(06:18):
Kim Kim Weaser, who works at University of Oklahoma.
A lot of their research mix Indigenous rhetoric with Indigenous literary studies because so much of what they pull out of kind of rhetorical choices are from the literature that's written by and about Indigenous communities.
(06:42):
So there's not the divide doesn't exist in quite the same way because that institutional history doesn't really define those kind of departmental questions.
How does that work for you when you think about or when you approach teaching writing or teaching any variation of the writing classes, courses that we have in our department? With your passion for Indigenous studies as an introduction to a way in or the connection and how it works for you, how do you think about those two kind of coming together, say, like, for a class, when you're designing how to incorporate those things? Yeah, I mean, I think it for me, it always depends on what texts you start with.
(07:36):
Anytime I teach you this stuff, I almost always start with or if I have a student interested in for instance, I've worked with a couple of master students on their nonthesis and thesis projects in the department.
Almost always.
One of the things I require them to read is Thomas King's the Truth About Stories, a Native Narrative.
Primarily because I think Thomas King is well known because he is a novelist.
(08:00):
His most famous book is Green Grass, Running Water.
But A Native Narrative mixes the sort of, like, literary questions with these sort of questions about rhetoric and particularly the rhetoric of storytelling.
And I think you don't really kind of you can't really get to the kind of the heart of what it means to do indigenous rhetorics, indigenous literary studies, indigenous studies in general, unless you kind of have a deep understanding of what it means to tell stories.
(08:35):
So for me, it always comes back to that kind of central question of, like, what text do I start with? And it's always kind of like, let's start talking about stories.
Let's start thinking about how stories work.
It sounds like the difference between what happens in a lot of English or literature classes where it's like, don't consider the author.
(08:55):
The text stands alone.
Don't read this as a biography or an autobiography.
Don't read into it in terms of the author's personality or their past history.
Let's just consider the text.
And the difference now seems like, no, we need to consider the experiences that shape the creation of the text as much as so it's as much about practice as it is about product.
(09:21):
Does that sound accurate? Okay.
And I think practice is really important, right? Because if we think about, for instance, some of my favorite stories in the Ojibwe tradition involve Nanobuju, the trickster figure of the Ojibwe people.
And anytime you would hear a story about Nana Bought or Nanobush, depending on who's telling that story, that story is going to elicit different feelings, is going to carry different meanings.
(09:54):
And it's not that the story is changing.
It's that the teller is choosing to emphasize different things, is coming at it from different perspectives, is coming at it with a different background.
And so, yeah, I think for this practice is as important, if not more important than product, which definitely changes sort of like where we start our questioning.
(10:18):
So thinking about how we bring this approach into our practice in the classroom, especially with first year writing, this might be an interesting time to talk a little bit about a future course that you're going to be working with in the spring of 2023.
I think you know what I'm referencing.
Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure.
(10:41):
What is it? So it's a special topics course, and forgive me, I don't remember the number right now, but it is subtitled the Rhetorics of Indigenous Communities.
And the focus is to think kind of about these questions that we've been talking about right now.
What does it mean to have rhetoric about and by Indigenous communities? Did you find the number? I asked for it before the podcast.
(11:09):
It's ENC 33 72 Topics in Civic Rhetorics and Writing Rhetorics of Indigenous Communities.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the one.
I had to write that down.
I was not going to remember all of that.
I'm teaching the class and I don't remember all of that with that class.
I've already decided that we're definitely going to start with Thomas King's book.
(11:33):
It's a short and easy to read book, but it brings up all of the kind of complications around discussing indigenity, both from outside Indigenous communities, right? So it brings up questions of like, mascots and stuff like that, which is very kind of prominent in our state, where one of the biggest colleges still has a, shall we say, problematic mascot, but then also within the communities themselves, thinking about the ways that elders think about teaching younger folks in the communities.
(12:09):
So Thomas King is Cherokee.
He's going to come at this from a really particularly Cherokee perspective, but right.
Like it's going to set the groundwork for the class so that then we can think about how all of these stories have been told in different ways.
Right.
So what I'm trying to think about with the class is not only the rhetoric that is shaped by Indigenous communities, for Indigenous communities, which is a lot of what we're going to spend our time with.
(12:41):
We're going to spend our time I know one thing we're going to do is we're going to watch the show Reservation Dogs, at least the first season, because I think it's a really good example of, like, Indigenous media created by Indigenous people.
For Indigenous people.
There are jokes that I watch and I have been studying Indigenous rhythmics for a long time, and I didn't grow up on a reservation, so I still don't catch all of the jokes.
(13:05):
Right.
And so thinking about sort of like that by and for kind of creative media, but then we're also going to spend a lot of time thinking about the stories that were told about Indigenous communities and how that rhetoric has kind of seeped into Indigenous communities.
So thinking about things like blood quantum, which is the sort of the law that you have to have a certain amount of Indian blood in order to be claimed by a tribe.
(13:32):
And if you don't have that much Indian blood, then you cannot be enrolled in that tribe, which was something that was put on indigenous communities by the United States government and by the Canadian government and has been adopted now.
And there is a large kind of conversation in Indigenous communities about like sort of do we keep doing blood quantum? Do we find a new way to do enrollment.
(13:59):
And so thinking about stuff like that and then also thinking about federal Indian law stuff like the Daws Act, which is the big it's the general allotment act of something like that, basically where land got parcelled.
And now it's all about private property, individually owned private property plots, which is not the way that Indigenous communities thought about their relationship with the land.
(14:27):
And so thinking about how those stories told by the US.
Government then affect the sort of rhetoric coming out of Indigenous communities and how in the past, say, 60 years since the American Indian Movement of the 1960s, there's been a lot of pushback against this sort of rhetoric.
And this is not your first time teaching a course that features Indigenous rhetoric.
(14:51):
Correct.
Did you taught other ones as well? I have not here, but yes, I have taught them elsewhere.
So I'm curious because we're all subject to our own biases, whether they're good or bad.
We have formative experiences that shape the way we view the world, and all we can do is kind of interrogate ourselves to figure out what those are right when we approach things.
(15:12):
So I'm wondering, are there any common considerations that you have students embark upon when they first come into a class like this, in terms of the way their perspective versus a shift in perspective they need to consider to be open to this examination and these events? Yeah, it's actually something I normally do on the very first day.
(15:36):
I normally do it if I'm teaching a class like this, I do it before we even talk about the syllabus.
I'll come in and I'll write the word Indian on the board, and then I will prompt my students to just tell me everything they think about when they think about that word, what is the first thing that comes to mind? It doesn't matter what it is.
And we get into really messy territory, but we get it all on the board the first day, and we get it out and we say, okay, now what we're going to spend a lot of time doing this semester is thinking about how much of these are based in stereotypes, how much of these are based in kind of really problematic history.
(16:17):
It's a little mind boggling, the amount of students that say things like that all Indians have died out, that there aren't Indians anymore, that there aren't Native people anymore, which is, you know, patently not true.
But that's kind of the story that has defined Indigenous communities from sort of a governmental kind of settler colonial perspective.
(16:45):
Right? And so I kind of just start in the Meyer and the Muck in my classes so that we can kind of get all of the kind of worse stuff out of the way, and then we can start to, from that moment on, think about, okay, what if this tracks? And what if this maybe doesn't track in the ways that in the ways that we expect, if that makes sense.
(17:09):
Yeah.
Do you find that a lot of the students are just missing big chunks of, like, historical information about absolutely what happened and what the government of the United States did and what were some of those? Because that is a big part of it, I think is just that missing piece of information that's there.
(17:34):
Or maybe it was sort of covered in a very superficial way.
One of my students, Sebastian Garcia, who was on a previous episode of this podcast that was his Eleven two project, was looking through his AP US.
History textbook for issues of representation, and he did a quantitative and qualitative analysis of how those groups were talked about, and he found some omissions or lack of representation by certain groups in the story of the history of the United States as taught in his AP history class just within the last ten years.
(18:21):
Right.
So that's something that I think is probably part of the, like you said, messy, unpacking process of starting the course.
Yeah.
I mean, so much of all of this work right.
Like, we can't really talk about Indigenous rhetoric until we realize that the stories that we've been told about Indigenous people are based in a settler colonial view of the world.
(18:46):
Right.
But, like, settler colonialism, and there's a famous essay called Settler Colonialism settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolff.
And in it, his kind of famous line is it's like the often quoted line is territoriality of settler colonialism's specific irreducible element.
(19:07):
So land land is what matters.
And the whole point is settlers come to the United States, they need land for people to build farms on, to build houses on.
Well, who has control of the land at the time just because of where they are? Indigenous communities have control of the land.
They are the ones that are making their lives off of the land.
(19:28):
So we remove them, but then eventually there are more settlers and we have to remove them more, and then there are more settlers, and eventually there runs out of place to move Indigenous peoples.
And so with that in mind, then we have to understand this basic history.
And the problem is that I'm finding most students who come into classes like this one don't.
(19:54):
We don't even think about the history of our own state and the sort of like the fact that the Seminole nation wasn't in fact a nation originally.
Right.
They are a group of Muskie Creek peoples.
Not just Muscogee Creek, but primarily Muskie Creek peoples who were in different kinds of communities that joined up largely to fight the US.
(20:21):
Military.
And the seminal nation kind of like built out of that before there were the Tamukwa, for instance, as one community that used to be in Florida that just aren't here anymore.
And so we can't begin to think about the ways that stories are told until we realize that the stories that we've been told are inherently problematic.
(20:51):
And by problematic, I mean also inherently patently false most of the time.
And thinking about sort of that unpacking process is long and pretty arduous and not super comfortable for students.
Well, it kind of reigns on the parade of the idea of the New World colonial experience.
(21:17):
Totally.
And look at what we've made of ourselves from the first step on the north.
Where was it? In Plymouth? I was going to say Boston.
I don't want to make anybody hate me too much, but it's very much a story that's been crafted to highlight the success.
(21:41):
But again, success by whose definition? By which perspective? And yes, I was just going to ask.
So going back to the course and how you're kind of thinking of the arrangement or the design of it, you have a messy unpack at the beginning, and then you start with King.
And then what's your sort of goal? Or where does it kind of go from there in terms of not only topically, but also what you're going to have maybe the students engage in.
(22:13):
Yeah, so I'm still making a lot of those decisions, but a lot of my thoughts right now are thinking about the ways that it can be a useful course for our students.
Right.
So not just like something that I'm interested in teaching because this is where my research is, but also something that students will be able to use.
So, like, for instance, I know a lot of our students go to law degrees after finishing in writing and rhetoric, which I think is great.
(22:42):
So having a large chunk of the class that really thinks about federal Indian law and both the sort of like, how does federal Indian law work? What are the big kind of moves in federal Indian policy? What's the sort of rhetoric around that? So we have to think about the Justice John Marshall trilogy of the early 1820s and 1830s, wherein he kind of like it's a whole court battle between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation.
(23:11):
And the big thing there is that he says that Native tribes are, in his quote, is domestic dependent nations.
Right.
So, like, unpacking sort of what that means rhetorically.
Right.
What sort of moves is he trying to get us to think through there and to think about then how law is sort of bound up in these questions.
But then also to get into sort of like media studies.
(23:35):
So thinking about Indigenous visualities, which is where my primary work is.
So things like reservation dogs, the TV show.
But also I'm going to spend some time on some Indigenous comics and thinking about the ways that kind of visuals communicate in a really particular way that's relatively different, for instance, than kind of Western visuals might.
(23:59):
And then a large portion of this, obviously, it goes across the whole thing but the sort of political sort of activism inherent in the rhetorics of Indigenous communities.
So thinking about particular activist moments like the big one in the US.
More contemporarily is the no Double movement and thinking about the ways in which Indigenous activists make use of things like Twitter and Facebook in those moves.
(24:30):
And so part of what I'm trying to do is to I haven't really figured out the kind of larger arc yet, but trying to pull in a lot of things that really show that these sort of stereotypes of indigenous folks as existing in the past and is not around or not involved in kind of contemporary and modern life are just kind of patently false, and that there are Indigenous people doing really important work that is really kind of, like, very rhetorically.
(25:06):
Savvy.
I think a lot of the class is going to be a lot of it's going to be it's going to be like history meets exposure, right? Like, we need to know this history, and then we just need to be exposed to more stuff.
And so I think it's going to be a lot of that.
I haven't decided sort of what sorts of things I'm going to ask students to produce in the class yet.
(25:33):
So a lot of this goes back to my own pedagogy of, like, doing some theory and then also some practice work, some practical sort of stuff.
So early stuff might be kind of like engaging with a sort of rhetorical theory that Indigenous scholars have come up with, and then later work would be like, okay, now what would you produce? What could we make out of this? And this is largely the move I make in a lot of my classes.
(25:59):
Well, given your background in looking at comic studies, you were kind enough to share some things with us off camera or off mike that you had been working on.
And one of them I was reading, and I hope that it's okay that I quote you directly, but that comics complicate multimedia relationships across history, and this idea of how gutter spaces and comics are used maybe unraveled as would be a word.
(26:31):
Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I feel like the conversation is kind of going there in terms of if you're considering the ways in which we construct messages and if you're only limited to maybe what the prevailing colonial history would have provided you.
There's a whole canon of fantastic Indigenous literary scholar, not just scholars, but literary producers louise Urdrich and Sherman Alexi, and I mean, those are probably, like, the most popular.
(27:06):
But this idea of I know in my own readings, there's a lot of play with form in literature.
So this idea of how that translates into multimedia and comic production, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, of course.
So I guess I'll just do it by kind of starting with that particular comics artist just because it gives us a kind of grounded way to think about it.
(27:31):
So the artist that I have spent the most time thinking about his work is Michael Jaguanas.
He's a haida artist from the pacific northwest, from Haiti, guai, which used to be queen Charlotte island, right off of the coast of British Columbia.
And he does this really fun thing where he kind of well, first off, he kind of collapses kind of hierarchies that exist in western society, right? So when we think about comics, we think about the sort of like superman, Batman, like, dime store throw away.
(28:12):
Like, this is kitchart.
It's not made to be saved and seen as high art or anything.
Right.
What he does is almost all of his comics are actually large murals that he creates as a huge mural, and then he breaks it down into page by page sequences so that you read the comic, but you can also buy two copies of the book, tear out all the pages, and recreate the mural on your wall.
(28:44):
Right.
And most of these murals are housed in large, very well respected art museums.
The Seattle art museum did a really big show of a lot of his work recently, and so thinking about the ways in which indigenous art can kind of start to collapse some of these binaries is really fun.
(29:07):
But then yeah, to go to the question of gutters, right? So gutters work really fun in comics because they're like the time.
Scott McLeod, a famous comics scholar and practitioner, he talks about how the gutters are where that's where the action actually happens.
What we're actually seeing are two still images, and we're actually filling in the action between the images.
(29:30):
So really quickly, before we go any further, give us a definition of gutters.
Yes.
So gutters are literally just that space in between the panels and comics.
So every panel panels are set by side by side, and it's that white space in between.
And so Scott McLeod says that that white space actually has so much stuff happening there because we see his famous example is a picture of a man with, like, an axe raised above another guy behind him.
(29:59):
And then the next picture is of a city skyline with a screen across it.
Now, like, the artist didn't draw an axe hitting someone.
We did that in our head.
Right.
And so he talks about how we're kind of complicit in the crime is his sort of, like, language.
And what's really fun about that is that then there's a really particular, like, linearity to the ways that stories are told and the ways that gutters kind of represent this, like, time in empty space.
(30:31):
With comics artists like Yagulinos, he does a really different thing because the gutters, instead of being this white space, in most of his works, the gutters are black form lines, and the form lines are actually what you use to kind of put the larger mural together.
And the form lines aren't just gutters to not be interacted with.
(30:53):
The form lines actually become things in the story.
Right.
They become fish that are pulled from the ocean.
They become the waves of the ocean as they crash over a boat.
Right.
So thinking about the ways in which the relationship between people and time, people and space, is really different if we think about gutters as this representation of time and space, right? So then, now, instead of having this time and space being this thing that we can't control, that is just kind of there no now it's a thing that's actively acting on people, which is a fundamentally, like, not Western way to thinking about our relationship to time and place.
(31:36):
There are really particular ways in which that's put into these sort of media forms.
Well, it reminds me of the brief exposure I've had to Native American literature and how the themes of time and being very different from the way that maybe like a Eurocentric perspective would consider time.
(31:59):
That's right.
And I don't know enough to know if that's like, a commonality across indigenous cultures, at least in North America, or if that's just maybe that's just the commonality amongst a Eurocentric perspective is that time works one way and everybody else sees it as something else.
So that's really interesting to think about those constructions in particular, like the play of form.
(32:22):
And you think about how form plays out so much in other artistic expressions in indigenous cultures and that it's just finding that other way to kind of manipulate those states of being right.
And this is where I think, like, it feels so much like we're talking about literature here, and yet it also, to me, feels so much like we're talking about, like, rhetorical studies too.
(32:45):
Right, because, like, there's a way in which thinking about these formal questions that we've talked about are things that I learned in my literary studies department or in my literary studies courses.
But then I would go to my rhetorical studies classes, wherein we think about the ways that writing can help us to relate to places that we live and times that we live and people that we interact with.
(33:08):
Right.
And so it's thinking about, like, now writing becomes a thing that we can actually think about differently in how we like to use it to interact with places.
Right.
And so I'm just thinking about how, like, all of this is kind of bound up in these really kind of complicated questions that often times the ways that, for instance, like Western universities are kind of created.
(33:33):
We love our silos, we love to differentiate.
Right.
And so much of those silos actually are complicated by something like Indigenous studies, which is kind of inherently interdisciplinary.
Yes.
And I think also the other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking was literacies and multiple literacies.
(33:55):
That we have or that we gain.
Because when I'm thinking about comics gutters how action and time is represented, it almost is.
You have to sort of tune yourself to a new way of reading and a new way of shaping meaning from the thing that you're looking at.
(34:17):
And that's something that I think even in composition classes, we talk to our students about some of the things that they already have.
Like, they already have those and maybe don't realize them.
And so I think talking about texts and genres that are constructed in these very kind of different ways that require us to think differently and read differently is something that we can introduce the students, but also we can show that students also have that ability, even though they haven't sort of formally thought about it as a literacy yet to sort of consider those things.
(34:55):
Have you found that? Do you use comics in the classroom or with students having them read? And what's your sense of how they read them or how they make meaning out of those things? Yeah, I do use comics in my classes, so it definitely comes down to sort of like, students are.
(35:21):
I think that my interactions with students have shown that students know how to read visuals really well.
Even if they feel like they can't, they often can.
And they often just kind of, like, secondguess themselves, and most of the time they do that.
And then we start talking, and then they come up with these brilliant thoughts about how visuals are working and how they're doing particular work.
(35:47):
And so when I put a comic in front of them, then it comes laden with all of these, like, thoughts that they have about what is a comic and what a comic can do, right.
Comics are superheroes.
They are for kids.
They exist in all of these spaces.
And then I put something in front of them that doesn't actually align with any of those thoughts.
(36:10):
And almost always, it's sort of like sweeping the legs out from underneath students a little bit, but they take it all in stride so well.
One of the comics that I use in my En C eleven one class often is a chapter from this book called Unflattening by Nick Susannes.
(36:31):
And Nick Susannes, he's pretty well known for having been one of the first folks who wrote his entire masters or his entire doctoral dissertation in comics form.
And unflattening is the product.
And so much of it is about the ways that we think, the ways that we become cogs in machines or the ways that we break out of those cogs because we're kind of built to think and do in certain ways.
(36:56):
And that's the chapter that I assign my students.
And almost always, they start off really trepidatiously.
Like, comics haven't been my thing.
I don't read comics.
I don't know how this works.
And then we start looking at the pictures, and we start actually thinking about what are the images and the text doing together? And they're able to take off in just ways that I don't think they even thought of themselves as being able to do.
(37:24):
So it goes back to this question of literacies that students have now with that, then, outside of comics, I will also say that this semester changed up my eleven and one class a little bit and put the introduction of the book Braiding Sweetgrass in front of my students, which is a book by Robin Wall Kimmer, who is a botanist.
(37:47):
An indigenous botanist.
And she opens this book about relationship with plants, but she opens it with the story of Sky Woman, which is a creation story, and she kind of walks through this and then she does a little bit of comparative work with the creation story from the Bible.
And then she thinks about how these two creation stories actually show us different ways of relating to Earth, to the planet that we live on.
(38:14):
And when my students walked into class the day that we were reading it, so many of them were like, this is unlike anything I've ever read before.
And I was like, great.
Yes, let's talk about that.
How is it unlike anything you've ever read before? And so many of them are like, the ways in which she was telling the story, the ways in which it was based, in these, like, almost cyclical repetition.
(38:35):
Right.
They noticed things about it that was really, like, very astute, and yet this was a moment where I could see, like, this was a literacy that maybe they haven't been engaging with in quite the same way.
And so it was really kind of fun to kind of see them be able to do this sort of like stretching.
(38:56):
Yes.
And I think it's a great way into what analysis is, what rhetorical analysis is.
We were having a conversation in the hallway the other day about students and rhetorical analysis and getting them to show, like, their thinking and things like that.
And I think what your comment just made me realize is that how the text itself and maybe changing up the text or having something other than like the essay or the piece of research necessarily where they bring to it a lot of trepidation, or they bring to it a lot of sometimes intimidation of that genre itself even before they've had a chance to get into it.
(39:45):
It's interesting how maybe just giving them, like you said, something completely different that they haven't read before is a great way to sort of get into encouraging students, showing students how to express and write about and talk about their own thinking and their own kind of processing and analysis of what they're seeing in a text.
(40:07):
Yeah, we were talking about this on the walk over, how our students can get so much from textual analysis.
And I think it is a literacy that they're much more savvy with and they give themselves credit for because they've grown up in a world where information is given multimodally for a large part, and it might be information that's not necessarily considered, like, traditionally of significance, but they still have that literacy either way.
(40:37):
And I know personally, I struggle with comics because I am a fast reader and you have to be a very patient reader when you're looking in considering comics.
You can't just, you know, flip through page after page to try to figure out what's going to happen next.
You really have to take the time and slow down and consider what is happening in every single frame.
(40:58):
And it's interesting when you say, you know, when I think of comics, you think of, like, traditional superhero type tropes.
When I think of comics, I immediately think of all of the ones that are considered to be delivering messages that are more subversive.
So, like, persepolis even.
(41:18):
There's one that I read.
I think it's Camelot 3000 V for vendetta the watchman.
Those are the ones to Mouse.
Those are the ones that I'm like.
Oh, when I think of comics, that's what I think of.
And I guess technically, they're graphic novels.
I mean, I don't know if we're going to split hairs over there, and I'm someone who, you know, is a connoisseur of Batman and Superman and all of these things, but yet I don't ever think of those as comics.
(41:43):
I think of those as just this other thing versus I think of comics as being this medium for delivering messages that are a little more contrary to the popular narrative.
Do you have any thoughts as to why? I think we kind of talked about a little bit, but why is there why is comics in particular seem to be such a good vehicle for those messages? Yeah, I think that a lot of it is because mostly we don't expect comics to do that work.
(42:14):
We don't expect comics.
Now, maybe this is not so fair anymore because lots of people read Watchmen and Mouse and Persepolis and these, like, very kind of complex, very heavily political stories.
But I still think comics exist for most folks, I think comics exist as this thing that is, like, for younger people as a stepping stone to reading.
(42:47):
Right.
This is often the sort of, like, narrative.
Now, I want to be very clear that I'm kind of painting, obviously with a really broad brush here.
But I think that one of the things that's really interesting is that this isn't comics aren't the sort of, like the sort of put on a pedestal way of how we share information.
(43:16):
Right.
Writing is like the written word has been the privileged way of sharing information in Western culture.
Right.
There's a reason why, like, in colonial history, the point is we need to get language in front of these people.
We need to get written language in particular in front of these people, right.
(43:36):
No matter where we're talking about it in the world, if it was colonized by a Western culture, language becomes central to the sort of colonial project, and written language becomes central to the colonial project.
And so we've put, like, the written word in a really particular way.
But many cultures, the written word wasn't really put on this pedestal.
(44:01):
Right.
For some cultures, like, written word wasn't even a thing.
So for most native communities in the US.
Written languages weren't really the kind of the modus operandi.
Right? Like, it was verbal.
I mean, everything was kind of verbal language.
And then there was there were visuals, there were things like winter counts that were written on hides, like buffalo hides, and there were birch bark art up in the north.
(44:30):
So thinking about the ways in which actually comics are taking this sort of like the written and the visual and bringing them together to live in a kind of media that kind of contradicts these sort of hierarchies is part of what I think is so interesting about comics and part of why I think they lend themselves to asking some of these questions really, really well.
(44:55):
There's a famous and I'm going to completely lose the kind of citation here, but there is a wellknown decolonial theorist who talks about this, who says that part of the deal with colonialism is that there is a meeting of what he calls contradicting literacies, right? That like, the literacies that colonialists were bringing with them, and then the literacies that native folks had were different.
(45:23):
And so that sort of tension is part of what leads to this sort of combat in many ways.
Of course, like, the violence is actually what leads to this.
Right? But I think this notion of combative literacy is really interesting or competing literacies, if only because comics is a medium that works to bring competing literacies together, right? And so I think in the past 100 years, what used to be competing isn't really competing in quite the same way.
(45:55):
And so I think comics can really pull some of those really interesting questions to the foreground.
This is just a stab in the dark.
But is it also the fact that you can provide more contextual support to the message in a comic than you would necessarily in other mediums? Do you think that's a part of it as well? I mean, I think that there's something to be said about, like, creating a visual context, right.
(46:22):
That it takes a lot of space and time to be able to work that visual context into a written text.
Right? Like, then you would have huge chunks of sort of, like, explanatory sort of writing that may or may not get read.
Right stage directions.
Right stage directions, exactly.
Yeah.
So, like, I'm thinking of this really funny comic.
(46:44):
It's one of the comics in a collection that I have written about.
And the story is like a retelling of a traditional story, but it's like set in the far future and it's about like, okay, so we don't live on Earth anymore because you can't live here.
But then they learn, like, oh, well, we can actually come back.
(47:06):
So they send back two indigenous men, two creek men, and they come back and they say, but the important thing is you can't eat anything.
Don't eat anything because it's really important that it could all be tainted.
Like, don't eat the food.
And they come back and then he finds a can of Spam and it's not written about.
(47:28):
We only watch this happen.
And of course, this would take some contextual background of knowing about like, commodity foods and how commodity food programs are really like, highly used on reservations because of kind of colonial histories.
And so Spam is one of the kind of big commodity foods because it is meat that can be put in, that can be revived.
(47:50):
Right.
It can last right.
Forever.
Yeah.
And so I think there are ways in which the visuals of that story add this context that makes jokes without having to be written about that I think is really fun.
I wonder if you could switching gears just a little bit, tell us about your project with the seminal Indian tribe and the Grant program.
(48:14):
I'm so glad you asked.
That's going to be my next question too.
Yeah, sure.
I'm working with Dr.
Jamila Kareem and Dr.
Sherry Robertson, and we are working with the seminal tribe of Florida in particular, working with their Tribal Historic Preservation Office and the Atasiki Museum, which is a museum that was completely funded and built by and for seminal folks.
(48:42):
So it's a really interesting museum to go to on the Big Cypress Reservation on the south end of Lake Okeechobe.
It's really great to see that happen because it's a museum that tells criminal history by seminal people as opposed to seminal history by Florida colonial.
Yeah, by white colonialists in Florida.
Right, exactly.
(49:05):
So the project, the way that it's kind of happening now is they have this slew of 20th century newspapers and newspaper clippings from kind of the 1940s, maybe the 1930s are the earliest up through like, the 1970s in Florida.
And what they want help doing is building out their digital archive so that it has both sort of a rundown of what's in the articles that are on there, but also contextual information.
(49:39):
So that like, for instance, when community members are going into it.
They'll know that there is some pretty racist and problematic language that appears in, for instance, the Okeechobe Times.
Right.
And so we're doing a lot of this work to kind of like, go through this and I'm learning a lot more about Florida history than I expected to learn and really like specific local history and the sort of communities surrounding the reservations.
(50:12):
Most of the reservations here are south of us.
So we're in Orlando, most of the reservations are down kind of Okeechobee area.
And then over in Hollywood, that's kind of the bulk of the project is building up this digital archive and repository so that it's more user friendly, both for members of the community but also for researchers who come and want to work in 20th century newspaper clippings about kind of the seminal tribe and their relationship with local Florida communities.
(50:45):
So reading between the lines on the communication that I've had access to, it seems like there were some shifts in terms of the plan for the project.
Did you have something else in mind going into it and then it just wasn't necessarily useful or can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, of course.
One of the things that I fell prey to is, and you know, I know better than this, I did all of my doctoral work and worked on grants in a different part of the country.
(51:20):
So up in the northern part of the country, I was in Wisconsin for most of this.
And in Wisconsin, most of the tribal communities there, they don't have access to as much money.
The seminal tribe is a pretty wealthy tribe because they own all of the hardwork hotels and casinos and they're also very, very, very private as a community for a lot of really particular and historical reasons.
(51:51):
And so I went into this project, we wanted to kind of do some oral histories and thinking about sort of like the histories of the community as told by elders and people in the community.
So that was what the whole point of the project was.
And it was hopefully we were going to produce sort of a book that would be usable for high school, middle school, high school and maybe even early college courses.
(52:20):
We contacted the so we got the funding for the grant, we contacted the tribe and we got word back that was basically like, yeah, we don't do this kind of work because we don't force any people in our community to talk to researchers and most people in the community don't want to talk to researchers.
(52:46):
And I was like, yes, that absolutely makes sense.
Of course it does.
And I realized that I was coming from this from with all of my thinking about the north in my mind, right.
My advisor, who is Ojibwe, she always told me you don't go to a native community asking them for things unless you're giving things in return.
(53:13):
So in grant funding terms, that means you don't go to them unless you have money in hand.
Right? Because then that's something you can help to give back to the community, which is great in practice, except for certain communities, but for other communities, they're not really interested in the money that I'm bringing, they're interested in protecting their community.
(53:36):
And of course that makes sense.
So I went with, like, this kind of one sort of thought in my mind and realize, like, oh, yeah, I'm applying what I learned in this different context here and it doesn't work here.
And luckily it worked out really well where we talked with the folks who responded with us, which was the tribal historic preservation office and the museum, and we found this other project that would work really well, and we had a grant funder who was very flexible with us.
(54:06):
And so we just kind of, like, reworked the project so that we could do a project that worked for the seminal community and not for us, right? Like, that's not kind of the goal of this project, is we did want to do something that was good for us.
We wanted to do something that would actually help the community.
And yes, then we also get to build these relationships that hopefully lead to more projects that the community wants partners on.
(54:33):
But again, the whole important thing was that it was defined and run by the community and we didn't really set the kind of project in that direction to start off, and so it took a little redirecting.
It's really interesting to consider that a community's history could be commodified in a certain lens.
(54:57):
And while I know researchers approach these projects with the best of intentions, let's share this history, let's make more people aware of this community and how they come to understand the world based on their experiences.
But it also then raises a lot of questions in terms of this tradition.
(55:18):
Now, as you've explained, of, hey, we've got money for you.
Can you share your stories with us? It's something that you really had, I know you hadn't considered and I hadn't considered until you just mentioned it.
And what does that mean about the other types of research that are ongoing and how these communities are forced to, in essence, like, sell their stories for money to survive and to think about the ways that, yeah, I realized all of the ways in which I was approaching this like a good capitalist, right? Like, I can pay you for the thing.
(55:50):
But one of the things is one of the whole things with colonialism and capitalism as a kind of economic offshoot is, well, if we have enough money, then I can have anything.
Anything can be mine as long as I have enough money for it.
The point here and what I had, like, this really difficult kind of coming to terms with, which was like, it was good, I'm glad that I had it was no, actually, there's some stuff that it doesn't really matter how much money you have.
(56:20):
It's not for you.
Right.
There's stuff that's particular to the seminal community that the seminal community wants to keep within the seminal community.
So, like, as kind of researchers from a colonial tradition, like, yeah, great, we need to recognize that and we need to be comfortable and redirect ourself and not expect seminal community to redirect themselves or any indigenous community.
(56:45):
Right.
That there's just stuff that's just not for us.
And that's fine.
Like, it has to be fine.
Yeah.
We are closing in on our time for this episode, but I wanted to ask you and of course, Megan, if you have any follow up questions as well, but what are some of the next projects you're working on? I know classic over committer, involved in so many things.
(57:14):
We got the new course.
Let me tell you, the 13 projects I have in my brain right now.
What are you excited about? What's on the horizon? What do you have coming up that you're getting into? And again, we don't know all of this.
You don't have to mention all of them if you want to.
(57:36):
The ones that you're kind of thinking about that you want to talk about.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I guess the big one that Megan actually talked a little bit about in the introduction was my book.
I'm trying to write my first academic monograph all about indigenous comics.
So it's largely most of the stuff we kind of talked about throughout today.
But the other big one that I'm really excited about is I'm working with a colleague of ours who recently retired, marcy Gobrith, and also some colleagues in the center for Humanities and Digital Research, amy George and Mike Shire.
(58:12):
The four of us have been working on projects related to St.
Augustine, and in particular to the Castillo, or what was formerly known as Fort Marion, because there's a history in the 19th century of planes, Indians, prisoners being taken there after the Plains Indian Wars.
And a lot of those folks actually produced ledger art while they were there.
(58:40):
One of the projects we're doing right now is we are putting together sort of trying to use the ledger art as historical documentation to think about the stories of these folks who were taken from the planes, brought to Florida to live here, and largely to kind of be made to learn how to be white men.
(59:06):
Right.
Really to be assimilated.
And then the ways in which some of these folks, like, they died here and their remains are still here.
The St.
Augustine Military Cemetery has two burial plots that just, say, six unknown Indians.
(59:26):
They're not even given their names right.
So a lot of the work that we're doing, we were actually working with descendants from these prisoners from the Shayan and Rapajo tribes.
And there is a big event happening in November in St.
Augustine.
We have been able to and this is largely thanks to the work of Dr.
Amy Giroud working they're replacing those two headstones.
(59:50):
They're putting one large headstone, and it's going to have the names of the prisoners that Dr.
Girou has been able to identify from her kind of cemetery burial research.
Wow.
Which is really fantastic to go along with that, then so much of this history is kind of unknown to the tribes.
So we're creating some materials to try to help build out that history for them so that they kind of know, like, what happened to their ancestors.
(01:00:19):
Because many of them felt like their ancestors came here and then died here.
And that's not true always.
Some of them went back to their homelands and some of them actually went with General Pratt, who was the guy who ran this to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which he started after this.
So this is the big project, the other big project I'm working on right now.
I've been sitting here shaking my head, which, of course, doesn't translate to this medium because every time I think about people who settled in Florida, I think they're out of their minds because I moved here in 2002 from New York, which, you know, it's not like I'd never been to Florida.
(01:00:59):
And I think about when we encounter the summers and the mosquitoes and alligators and snakes through our understanding, like, present day, and to think that there were people that, like, took wagons here and decided to sell the wilds of Florida.
They're kind of out of their minds a little bit, especially interior Florida I can't even imagine.
(01:01:24):
So it's really interesting to consider that idea of, holy cow, you're taken prisoner and here you end up in this place that is sort of like nightmarishly fairytaleish in terms of the forces that are trying to get you heat, bugs, animals, etc.
(01:01:44):
That's really fascinating work.
I'm really intrigued by that.
I had one last question, and that would be not to put you on the spot, but any recommendations on readings? Whether it be considering Indigenous communities from an outside perspective or Indigenous writers in general, what are some things that you like to recommend? Okay, so I know this episode is not coming out until November, I believe, but we're recording it in October, so it's spooky season.
(01:02:17):
And one of the things that I am really into right now is Indigenous horror, which is a really burgeoning area of Indigenous lit right now.
So one of the main names there is a guy named Stephen Graham Jones.
He's Black Feet, and he has this really amazing novel called The Only Good Indians that came out a couple of years ago.
(01:02:39):
So definitely I would check that one out.
Erika Worse has this really fantastic novel that actually comes out on November 1.
But I got an early copy because that's how you roll it's how we're friends, and it's cool.
And so it's called White Horse, and it is so scary and so good.
Outside of horror stuff, I would also suggest in the Realm of Rhetoric, dr.
(01:03:06):
Kim Weezer's book on it's called Back to the Blanket.
So recovering American Indian rhetorical traditions, I believe is the subtitle.
And then also anything by Dr.
Malaya Powell, by Dr.
Alexander Hidalgo, by Dr.
Andrea Reilly mukovitz.
Those are the kind of big names that those are the folks who I'm their work is kind of helping to define my work in rhetoric studies right now.
(01:03:35):
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and having this conversation.
Yeah, thanks so much for your time.
And thanks, everyone, for listening.
Thanks for having me.
Bye.
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