Indigenous Rhetoric and Survival in the Nineteenth Century: A Yurok Woman Speaks Out

In 1916, Lucy Thompson, an indigenous woman from Northwestern California, published To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. The first book to be published by a member of the California Yurok tribe, it offers an autobiographical view of the intricacies of life in the tribe at the dawn of the twentieth century, as well as a powerful critique of the colonial agenda. Elizabeth Schleber Lowry presents a rhetorical analysis of this iconic text, investigating how Thompson aimed to ...