Between myth and history: Enacting time in Native American protest rhetoric

Abstract

The rhetorical effort to create a shared time can divide groups as much as unify them. For example, temporal framing plays a vital part in efforts by dominant groups to marginalize others and by the marginalized to escape this fate. Both Euramerican and Native American activist discourses construct a history of Native/Euroamerican relations, construe the relevance of this past to current conditions, and predict their ultimate triumph, but differently. The activist narrative, which enacts a “sacred” time through religious ritual, is particularly significant because it subverts not only the Euramerican narrative but many common sense notions of the nature of time itself; thus, it participates in and extends the consummatory dimension of Native American protest rhetoric.