Impossible Rhetorics of Survivance at the Carlisle School, 1879-1883.

This article proposes embodied and multimodal readings of student compositions from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a way to illuminate processes of assimilation and resistance. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor s concept of survivance and the ways that the field of composition has taken up Vizenor s work, I argue that the project remains incomplete if we confine our history of cultural rhetoric to resistant, individual, alphabetically literate voices as the sites of rhetorical sovereignty and rhetorics of survivance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]