Response to “Toward a Decolonial Digital and Visual American Indian Rhetorics Pedagogy” – Angela Haas
I never thought of Manifest Destiny as a digital divide. Yes, I always thought of MD as the genocide of the American Indian and any other peoples or things that got in the way of America’s march from “sea to shining sea”. However, I never thought of it as visual or digital. “Go West, young man” was, in fact, an aphorism that was perpetuated in the romantic U.S. History curriculum that I studied in high school. Going west to pillage was the only way to go west, young man.
Aside from the Manifest Destiny t-shirt in this article, four other things jumped out from the article.
1.) The references to Debbie Reese and her blog, AICL (https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/), made me proud. Before Debbie Reese was Debbie Yates (her maiden name), who was my sister’s classmate at Pojoaque High School. Debbie is from Nambe Pueblo. She grew up just a mile down the road from us. The last time I saw her was for breakfast one year at the Champaign/Urbana airport when she was studying at the University of Illinois. It makes me happy and proud that a local is an activist for the decolonization of the “habits of the mind … with digital and visual representations of Indianness … ” (191).
2.) When I heard the lyrics to “America The Beautiful” this morning, the words “America! America! God shed His Grace on Thee”, it reminded me of a passage in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
"Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it. It is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it. They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them."
In other words, through Divine Providence, “this land is our land,” says the “Great Book.” -- digitally perpetuated in alphabetic text (http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-Tocqueville-Democracy-in-America.pdf) in the Great Books curriculum through liberal arts scholars.
3.) The term “American Indian” is used throughout this essay. By coincidence I was looking up Native American quotes this weekend, and I came across one by Dennis Banks, American Indian Movement (AIM) co-founder. He said (I paraphrase): I prefer American Indian because anyone born in the United States is a Native American.
4.) I was happy to see the reference to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s “Indian Humor” (http://online.fliphtml5.com/gnse/xdhm/#p=1). It is an alphabetic text I pair up with a screening of Smoke Signals or reading of The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian. But I never thought of it as decolonializing because until this article/chapter, I never heard the term.
I now am wondering, why this reading assignment, though I am grateful that it was assigned.
