Native American rhetoric
Native American rhetoric is the rhetoric used by Indigenous peoples for purposes of self-determination and self-naming, in academia and a variety of media. Overview. Scope. Studies of Indigenous rhetoric note that the many different Native American communicative traditions draw upon People-specific histories, multiple linguistic systems, geographically distinct though interrelated lands, and contemporary cultural, discursive, and academic modes. Ernest Stromberg writes, “Native rhetoricians appropriate the language, styles, and beliefs of their white audiences in order to establish a degree of consubstantiality. Across divides of language, beliefs, and traditions, Native rhetoricians have had to find ways  to make their voices heard and respected by a too frequently uninterested and even hostile audience.’” Native rhetoric and rhetorical practice are influenced by both contemporary and historical circumstances that vary according to the unique cultural contexts of the unenrolled Indigenous peoples, non-federally recognized Indigenous Peoples, and the “574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages.” Terminology. Indigenous scholars debate various critiques against the labels applied to Indigenous Peoples. In "What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples' Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels," Michael Yellow Bird argues that the term, "Native American", alongside others  like it homogenizes hundreds of unique tribal identities and cultures by grouping them under a shared rubric, threatening Indigenous Peoples' rights to self-definition; he also argues that emphasis on the exonym "American" in "Native American" makes the term susceptible to appropriation by majority cultures; a susceptibility which he understands as contributing to the elision of oppression and dominance. For Yellow Bird and some of the respondents to his survey, tribal affiliation and terms emphasizing First Nations sovereignty are preferred forms of self-definition. Commonalities. Decolonial and rhetorical scholars have loosely sketched a definition of Indigenous rhetoric — for which they  argue a shared relationship to the land and an uneven though shared experience of colonialism is partially responsible. Drawing upon the theories of Gerald Vizenor, recent scholarship has interpreted the written appropriation of imperial discourse in Sarah Winnemucca Hopkin’s (Northern Paiute) and Charles Alexander Eastman’s (Santee Dakota) literary work as rhetorical tactics of survivance that contest the reductive and stereotypical categories supporting colonial constructions of the vanishing "Indian." Native American rhetoric also has some similarities with Indigenous rhetorics in other colonial settings, including with the Sámi in northern Fennoscandia.