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This article foregrounds story as a rhetorical mode of Indigenous leadership to argue for the value of local scholars working in place. Utilizing recent scholarship in Native rhetorics, educational leadership, decolonial theory, I offer my own experience as a Cherokee citizen and Indigenous researcher to illustrate the value of local cultural knowledge to the field and the academy. I suggest the reconsideration of cosmopolitan values and institutional practices that alienate Indigenous scholars from their communities.

This column reviews four books that illustrate the idea that our locations shape our meaning-making processes. She notes how each author frames the social justice issue at the heart of her or his analysis, paying close attention to how visible the Indigenous presence is as well as the settler colonialism involved in each. The resulting readings are not so much as critique of these studies, but rather show how explicit attention to the settler colonial situation might inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues.

Emancipatory projects that have sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen short of addressing the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought. This essay defines three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition and rhetoric (i.e., languaging, translating, and dwelling in borders) that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always index imperialist legacies of thought and deed.

Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work of wampum, Sequoyan, and digital storytelling. I argue that decolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include. To be understood in and on their terms, these media need to be contextualized within the notions of time, social practices, stories, and languages that lend them meaning.

Tracing the effects of the “laissez-faire” postcolonial politics of language in the United States, which in fact enabled English to become the dominant language through cultural rather than institutional means, the essay then suggests how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in unsuspected ways, to influence the language policy of the modern U.S. university and U.S. college composition. The author argues for a national language policy that moves beyond the notion of language as a right, with its lingering assumptions of English monolingualism as an ultimate goal, and instead fosters a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable.