Transforming Relationships
Land, Colonialism, and Rhetorical Sedimentation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7176556 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joshua A Smith (0000-0001-6299-2437, Davidson College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 158-180 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for the History of Rhetoric (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2687-8003 • E-ISSN: 2687-8011 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.5325/jhistrhetoric.28.2.0158 |
| OpenAlex | W4412570590 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 44 |
This article uses the competing visions of land of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to show the rhetorical operation of the human relationship with land. Telling two stories of the same land’s entanglement with diverging modes of relationship, it explains the concept of rhetorical sedimentation. Rhetorical sedimentation describes how certain rhetorics and discourses bury others, much as new dirt becomes stratified on top of old. With the aid of this geological metaphor, this article demonstrates the intersection of land relations with broader matters of cultural politics. Lee, it argues, follows the goals of settler colonialism and attempts to bury Indigenous peoples’ land relations with the Bears Ears National Monument. Through rhetorics of land relations, Lee claims the settler Utahn as “indigenous” and portrays federal ownership of public lands as a new form of colonialism. This article also argues that the coalition’s advocacy for Bears Ears serves to center its tribes’ land relations in public discourse about federal lands. Through such rhetorical work, the discursive terrain of Bears Ears and federal public lands gains new rhetorical strata. Attending to rhetorics of land relations, this article contends, affords rhetoric studies opportunities to resist complicity in colonial power
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Geography · Linguistics · Political science · Rhetorical question · Sedimentation · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Geology · Paleontology
Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place
“A Structure, Not an Event”
Indigenous Publicity in American Public Lands Controversies
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness
Deconstructing the traditional classroom through intersections of critical place-based communication
Teaching and learning intercultural communication by reconnecting with land
Colonial Imaginations
Sacred Land or National Sacrifice Zone
Violent Inheritance
The Black Shoals
The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900
Is Settler Colonialism Just Another Study of Whiteness
An anticolonial future
The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism
Rhetoric for Earthly Coexistence
Decolonizing Settler Public Address
Landships, landship politics, and placing rhetorics
Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence
Speaking of indigeneity
Between myth and history
Variations under Domestication
Land education
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies
Coming Full Circle
Decentering the Movement
Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage
Decolonizing Development in Diné Bikeyah
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |