Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing

In this story I listen closely to the ways in which two late nineteenth-century American Indian intellectuals, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman, use the discourses about Indian-ness that circulated during that time period in order to both respond to that discourse and to reimagine what it could mean to be Indian. This use, I argue, is a critical component of rhetorics of survivance.