JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997 Page: 228
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228 JAC
Athabascan Indian Reservation in Alaska. Writing themes in this bicultural
borderland were thus generated by an inquiry into the landscape, and particularly
into a series of racially-charged environmental conflicts. Composition topics were
also generated by an inquiry into a series of racially-driven conflicts associated with
the school itself. In this paper I examine the complicity of the transnational
corporation and the reservation school in the enterprise of cultural colonialism.
Additionally, I explore the relevance of these local cultural conflicts for an
emancipatory, conflict-oriented, pedagogy. Moreover, I "read" or "re-read" this
experience through the prismatic lens of diverse theoretical discourses, including
postcolonialism, radical composition theory, and Native American resistance
struggle in an effort to identify congruencies between them and to expand the
"conversation" in composition studies into other disciplines.
My first day as a white male English teacher in the Athabascan village of
Nyotek consisted of a series of shocks. There was, for example, the shock of my
first encounter with the Alaskan landscape, as monochromatic as it was
limitless-perhaps an ideal milieu in which to proselytize the advantages of
cultural sameness. An ear-ringing silence the likes of which I had never heard
rolled in from every point of the compass. It was the habitual voice of the Alaskan
North-reinscribing on avast physical plane the cultural silencing of the Native
American. As I stood beside my duffel bags at the end of a gravel runway deep
in the Alaskan interior, a grimly ironic bit of Athabascan graffiti caught my eye.
Spray-painted onto a lopsided, weather-beaten shed were the following words:
"Welcome to the Nyotek Hilton! Rezervation required!"
It was my first encounter with the playfully parodic, resistant discourse of
the subaltern. The conscription of the name "Hilton" also served to underscore
the extent to which the discourse of the colonizer is often subversively appro-
priated by subalterns as a vehicle for fashioning their own resistant identity, as
further evinced by the intentional misspelling of "Reservation." This fragment
of Athabascan doggerel provided my first glimpse of what Homi Bhabha terms
the "sly civility" of the subaltern-of the way in which irony, parody, satire, back
talk, allegory and other forms of resistant discourse are used by the colonized
"other" to recuperate agency, to preserve a sense of "self" independent from his
or her construction as "other" by the colonizer.
The native subaltern similarly uses the discourse of the colonizer to keep
his or her ego from being completely colonized by that discourse. Like Hamlet,
the native Other resorts to "sly civility" in order to effect the dual, oppositional
goal of ensuring survival while subversively naming their colonized world-a
rhetorical strategy which has important connotations for the composition
classroom. Thus, the subaltern's rhetoric of "sly civility" is at once a cloak that
conceals resistance and a dagger that enacts it. As Benita Parry observes, the
toolsheddoggerel was but one of many "recurrent instances of transgression
performed by the native from within and against colonial discourse" (41).
Further, it established from the outset the central role enacted by language in the
unevenly and bitterly contested politics of identity as it was played out in this
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997, periodical, 1997; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28619/m1/90/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .