Down By The River

I have a great respect for the rhetorical approach of La Flesche. Even as a child her letter to St. Nicholas was impressive. Despite her assimilation into white culture, I believe that her choice to accept white medicine and incorporate it into her own people's culture was the most intelligent choice she could have made.

Powell starts her story with creation stories. I think this is a great device to begin with. She says "I offer this beginning, an emergence" and " we must stop our easy and narrow reliance on Greek, Roman, European, even European American thinkers; that 'we must break from the colonial mindset and learn from the thinkers from our own hemisphere'."

The injustices made by the American government which are talked about throughout this essay make me so mad that ignorance like that is even conceivable. Questioning whether the "savage" is even worth "civilizing" just begs so many infuriated responses. But when she talks about a white man working with the CIA to bring funding to medical education for Indian women shows me at least some of them had decent human sensibilities.

I also appreciate when she breaks down what she understands rhetoric to be. that all her definitions start with "an art"