Indigenous Activism in the Midwest: Refusal, Resurgence, and Resisting Settler Colonialism(Rhetoric & Public Affairs)

In Indigenous Activism in the Midwest: Refusal, Resurgence, and Resisting Settler Colonialism, Margret McCue-Enser examines how Minnesota Indigenous activists use public memory sites to interrupt and challenge the dominant narrative of place. She explores how Indigenous activism reveals and disrupts material, discursive, and performative rhetorics of settler colonialism. This work cultivates the ground between rhetorical studies of place and space and Indigenous studies in which place is central to Indigeneity and activism. Using largely in situ analysis and drawing on Indigenous and rhetorical scholarship as well as Indigenous and mainstream press, the analysis focuses on sites such as an outdoor art installation, a historic settlers’ village, centennial and sesquicentennial farms, and a celebrated military fort.

About the Author :
Margret McCue-Enser is a professor of communication studies at St. Catherine University. Her recent work explores the role of rhetoric of place in constituting diasporic communities. Her published research has explored the ways that Indigenous communities in Minnesota assert Indigenous terms of belonging and expose farmer-settler narratives of place and how Menominee restoration leader and first female Indigenous head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Ada Deer centers her identity and her argument on Menominee land and culture. McCue-Enser won a top article award from the American studies division of the National Communication Association and a top paper award (with Derek Sweet) from the rhetoric and public address division of Western States Communication Association. Her work has appeared in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, Reconsidering Obama: Reflections on Rhetoric, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Studies, and Argumentation and Advocacy, among other outlets.

Review :
“McCue-Enser’s Indigenous Activism in the Midwest represents a zenith of what decolonial scholarship can be and should do. Starting first with Indigenous epistemologies and then engaging public memory and place theory, she braids a comprehensive framework that responsibly attends to clear and insightful case studies. Epistemologies, theory, and case work together to present a powerful study of twenty-first century Indigenous activism.”—Jason Edward Black, professor of rhetoric and culture at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, author of American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment “Indigenous Activism in the Midwest offers a thoughtful analysis of the importance of places and lands for Indigenous refusal and resurgence. Using Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theorization of refusal, grounded normativity, and radical resurgence as analytics, McCue-Enser’s analysis offers a story of Dakota ways of knowing and being in relationship with lands. Drawing upon both a critique of settler colonialism and an amplification of Indigenous-led movements for lands and life, this book demonstrates the value of and need for more scholarship in the field of communication focused on Indigenous rhetorics.”—Danielle Endres, professor of communication and director of the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah