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Native American Commentators

The purpose of this research is to examine the rhetoric of two Native American commentators, Black Elk, who flourished in the latter part of the 19th century, and Russell Means, whose political activism made him a public figure in the latter part of the 20th century. The plan of the research will be to set forth the basic pattern of ideas and means by which they each articulated their views and then to discuss the extent to which their commonality of experience affected their rhetoric, with a view toward identifying ways in which their ideas and their experience reflect the realities of Indian America in the past and in the present.

Any assessment of the rhetoric of the Oglala Sioux must include the sociology of Oglala experience, particularly in the last part of the 19th century, which witnessed the decisive diminution of meaningful political power of Native Americans and the consolidation of Anglo-European American hegemony in North America. Of particular note in the background of Oglala history are the events at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. That event was the last "battle" of any moment between whites and Indians. Essentially it appears to have been a preemptive strike by the US Army, which was responding to the growth of what was called the Ghost Dance, a mystical, pietistic religious movement that had gained currency among various Native American peoples in the 1880s. Specifically, a Nevada Paiute called Wovoka preached a gospel of abstemiousness, distance from white culture, and a return to the old ways of native peoples. Whether the Ghost Dance, a ritual that was described as a way of making the white man disappear, was interpreted literally by the Lakota peoples among whom it had become popular is not entirely clear, although Neihardt explains that the so-called "Messiah craze" of the 1880s represented the last attempt by American Indians to develop an ideology of resistance to white hegemony. What is clear is that...

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Native American Commentators. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:46, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681419.html