This manuscript explores the rhetorical coupling of food as a holistic health initiative across two Indigenous organizations—Indian Health Services (IHS) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation (AICF). Drawing upon contemporary literatures of rhetorical ecologies, I position “kincentricity” (Salmón, 2000, 2012) as a particularly provocative framework to reconceptualize the body as its own rhetorical ecosystem, contending that Indigenous dimensions of RHM offer radically creative ways to decolonize the body/body politic. My analysis demonstrates theways in which IHS and AICF engage in kincentric logics to repurpose rhetorics of food within the Native medicine wheel, most notably by emphasizing (1) pre-Columbian diets, (2) traditional harvesting and cooking methods, and (3) spiritual food-based rituals—all of which explicitly link tribal food(ways) to bodily wellbeing. Finally, this essay encourages RHM scholars to reorient rhetorical vocabularies and understandings toward more pluralistic and non-Western accounts of health, medicine, and collective wellness.

This manuscript explores the rhetorical coupling of food as a holistic health initiative across two Indigenous organizations—Indian Health Services (IHS) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation (AICF). Drawing upon contemporary literatures of rhetorical ecologies, I position “kincentricity” (Salmón, 2000, 2012) as a particularly provocative framework to reconceptualize the body as its own rhetorical ecosystem, contending that Indigenous dimensions of RHM offer radically creative ways to decolonize the body/body politic. My analysis demonstrates theways in which IHS and AICF engage in kincentric logics to repurpose rhetorics of food within the Native medicine wheel, most notably by emphasizing (1) pre-Columbian diets, (2) traditional harvesting and cooking methods, and (3) spiritual food-based rituals—all of which explicitly link tribal food(ways) to bodily wellbeing. Finally, this essay encourages RHM scholars to reorient rhetorical vocabularies and understandings toward more pluralistic and non-Western accounts of health, medicine, and collective wellness.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.