The rhetoric of Nuna Dual Tsuny : retelling the Cherokee Trail of Tears

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Nicol Nixon-AugusteĀ“ (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater

Abstract: "This dissertation discusses ways to examine historical events such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears through various rhetorical lenses and scrutinizes how to negotiate meaning via these strategies. This work will contribute to the current discourse on how rhetoric and rhetorical strategies guide the reexamination of a unique American Indian/Euro-American history. To accomplish this task, I examine the Trail of Tears event through rhetorical lenses that utilize dynamic genres such as ethnohistory, witness, and women's voice. To study the Trail of Tears narrative in this way, I employ theorists such as Amy Devitt as well as historians, ethnologists, and writers. Also included are first-hand accounts written by government officials, doctors, missionaries, Cherokees, and others who witnessed the Cherokee removal that tell the story of the Trail of Tears from alternative viewpoints, creating dynamic genres that assist in the multivocality of the historical event. This study contributes to the current scholarship that reexamines history in a way that provides a rhetorical space for multiple and lesser-known voices from the Trail of Tears to arise. It is these voices and the others included in this dissertation that work to bring change to the current paradigm concerning Indian removal and the Native Americans that lived and died while walking the Trail of Tears."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2006
Keywords
Cherokee, Trail of Tears, rhetoric, American Indians, Euro-American, history, ethnohistory
Subjects
Cherokee Indians--History--Sources
Trail of Tears, 1838-1839
Ethnohistory

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