reading and composing indians

Reading and Composing Indians: InventedIndian Identity through Visual Literacy

D A N I E L L E N I C O L E D E V O S S A N DPAT R I C K R U S S E L L L E B E A U

Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English throughits publications, conferences, and affiliates support professional devel-opment and promote public awareness of the role that viewing andvisually representing our world have as forms of literacy.

(NCTE 1996)

SCOTT LYONS RECENTLY COMMENTED THAT INDIAN IS AN ARGUMENT MADE

drawing upon available cultural and social means. Lyons sug-gested that a more productive question than ‘‘what is an Indian?’’

is ‘‘what does an Indian identity do?’’ We could also add: ‘‘what does anIndian identity do for me?’’ Here we read a collection of visual rep-resentations of Indians as a space from which we can engage a rich andmore complex understanding of cultural practices of representation—the stories told by drawings, specifically (but certainly also by foodwrappers, labels, logos, mascots, and the myriad other visual aspects ofUS culture). We frame this analysis and our discussion by theories ofvisual literacy and of visual rhetoric; multimodal literacy approachesprovide scaffolding for situating the representations we read and pro-vide a stable base from which we can build practices to engage studentsin a more complex and critical sense of cultural identities and howcultural identities function. Meaning making is a complex act. Recentscholarship has evolved to address not only the traditional, text-basedmodes of producing and circulating ideas, but also visually complexand often multimodal ways of knowing.

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2010r 2010, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Visual Literacy

Not surprisingly, in our media-saturated contemporary world, visualrhetoric, visual literacy, and visual fluency are all terms that have recentlyreceived a good deal of attention across fields.1 Special issues of journalshave been dedicated to addressing issues related to ‘‘the visual’’ (e.g.,Computers and Composition, volume 18, numbers 1 and 2, 2002; TechnicalCommunication Quarterly, volume 5, number 1, 2001; Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, volume 5, number 4, 2000; Enculturation: AJournal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, volume 3, number 2, 2001;Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, volume 8, number 3, 1993;Argumentation & Advocacy, volume 33, number 1, 1996). More andmore college-level textbooks oriented toward the teaching of writing,specifically, include visual elements, and the producers of these text-books heavily highlight these ‘‘visual’’ elements while marketing thetexts (e.g., Everything’s an Argument 4, Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz; TheCall to Write, Trimbur; Convergences, Atwan; Picturing Texts, George,Palchik, Selfe, and Faigley; Reading Culture, George and Trimbur; See-ing & Writing, McQuade & McQuade). A variety of readers designedfor students in fields not necessarily camped within the fields thathave traditionally or typically taught visual texts (such as PopularCulture Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies, etc.) have emerged;often, these texts are geared toward students interested in studying‘‘visual culture’’ and ‘‘visual studies’’ (e.g., Hall, Howells and Gill,Mirzoeff, Sturken and Cartwright, Walker and Chaplin).

Literacy as Culturally and Historically Situated

Understanding how knowledge is produced, circulated, and regulatedin our culture is crucial for us as educators and as scholars. Thus, eachof these special issues, many of our professional discussions, and someof the book authors have sought a common definition of literacy itself,and especially of visual literacy and what this term entails and includes.Although some theorists have appropriately suggested that literacyitself is a problematic and contested term (see, e.g., Wysocki andJohnson-Eilola) and offer alternatives such as visual fluency (see Wink-ielman, Schwarz, Reber, and Fazendeira), we use the term literacyhere to apply to the broad skills and understandings required of uswhen we read and compose multiple symbols in multiple spaces in

46 Danielle Nicole DeVoss and Patrick Russell LeBeau

multiple ways. We borrow Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s (367)incredibly useful definition of literacy: ‘‘not as a monolithic term butas a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among differentpositions. Literacy can be seen not as a skill but a process of situatingand resituating representations in social spaces.’’ This definitionreminds us of the claims of Mikhail Bakhtin—that utterances arealways dialogic and heteroglossic, and thus our understandings of theworld that surrounds us is created in concert with the utterancesorbiting around us, be they verbal, textual, or visual.2

We situate literacy within cultural and historical tensions, such asthe uses of literacy to regulate social spaces and practices (Gee, Street)and to regulate the boundaries of text and alphabetic literacy(Stroupe)—what ‘‘counts’’ as literate activity. We also situate literacywithin technological evolution—literacy has evolved to include tech-nological procedures and understandings, as more and more readingand composing takes place in virtual and digital realms. Olson definedliteracy as ‘‘the competence to exploit a particular set of cultural re-sources’’ and further elaborated that literacy ‘‘is not just learning theabc’s; it is learning to use the resources of writing for a culturallydefined set of tasks and procedures’’ (43). Literacy encompasses socialspace and multiple, diverse technologies and the contexts in which weuse them. Brian Street has explored how cultural tasks are defined andhow literacy is culturally positioned. He overviews the power ofautonomous literacy in western society; within modern understandingsof the world and of cultural conditions, literacy often becomes atotalizing force and powerful social muscle, proclaimed as an asset, as asort of commodity that people need to function, survive, and thrivein society. Literacy is an unquestioned good and is assumed to beunderstood and measurable. Illiteracy is blamed for a variety of socialills, without much regard to the actual social conditions that causesocial strife (few of which are directly related to illiteracy). Thisapproach to literacy allows those in power to vilify and lay social blameupon those who often are not politically equipped to answer theiraccusations. Deborah Brandt identified literacy as hybrid and complex;these seem apt adjectives to describe literacy in light of the shiftingsocial change and ideological base of practices that Street describes.Literacy is an ongoing, dynamic ability that piles up, spreads out, andbrings with it residual trappings of previous literacy skills and socialand cultural dimensions. Brandt (660) suggested that, currently,

Reading and Composing Indians 47

literacy ‘‘requires an ability to work the borders between tradition andchange, an ability to adapt and improvise and amalgamate.’’ Literacyis not a set of neutral skills, but instead an ideological practice—acomplex set of practices and values implicated in power relations andembedded in cultural meanings and practices. In American culture—especially in American academic contexts—literacy often relatesdistinctly and directly (although superficially) to the ability to readand write text. This emphasis on alphabetic knowing as primary andmost crucial has served to relegate visual and multimodal ways ofknowing to ‘‘immature’’ or even semiliterate status. Historically, how-ever, it is obvious that knowing, telling, and sharing take place inmultiple, complex, and culturally situated ways, including storytellingoutside of the privileged modes of communication (e.g., the textbook,the theoretical text).

Tensions of the Textual and the Visual

We use the term visual here in juxtaposition to textual, although visualelements have textual features and supplements, and often text hasvisual elements and supplements. For example, many visuals are ac-companied by captions when presented as figures in manuscripts suchas this one. Many visuals also often have text added to them, as we seein advertisements where a slogan or quote (‘‘copy’’) appears on top of animage. Text involves visual and design characteristics often ubiquitousto most of us, including typeface, font size, leading, spacing, marginsettings, and more. Text itself is a visual element—something that hasdesign features, something that calls forth mental images, somethingthat allows us to make associations.

At a roundtable discussion at the 2001 Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication, titled ‘‘Issues and Directions inVisual Rhetoric,’’ chaired by Anne Wysocki, the participants (TharonHoward, Stephen Bernhardt, Charles Kostelnick, Susan Hilligoss,Greg Wickliff, Karen Schriver) discussed

� the complexity of visual languages, emphasizing the need forlanguages in plural;

� the need for a shared vocabulary for discussing visual rhetoric, butadmitting that the complexity of visual languages prohibits this;


� the remediation of concepts from textual analysis to visual analysis,but also the recognition that if we rely upon textual meaning andinterpretation to explain visuals, we limit ourselves;

� the recognition that technical skill sets related to both readingand composing visual language is incredibly diverse, evenamong the homogenized group ‘‘student’’;

� the need to create spaces for students to experiment with visualdesign and visual creation;

� the recognition that education typically divorces visual languagefrom textual language early in learning (i.e., elementary school),and that education needs to better integrate visual learning andvisual languages across the curriculum (Hochman, Alexander,Hult and Crawford).

This is but one discussion, one set of voices in what is becoming acacophony of voices debating issues of text and image, visual languageand visual rhetoric. But this one discussion serves well to articulatesome of the key concerns with which we grapple as we negotiate theblurry boundaries of text and image and allow for more robustunderstandings of visual and multimodal means of knowledge making.

In the section that follows, we review the ways in which a mono-lithic and problematic story is told about Indians in American culture.We then focus specifically on how students translate their understand-ings of what an ‘‘Indian’’ is to visual texts, and how we can read thesevisual texts as rich base knowledge upon which we can build a morecomplicated understanding of contemporary cultural representations ofNative American life.

How America Reads Indians

Historically, there are two competing Indian icon dynasties: That of thebrave, noble warrior, and that of the violent, ignoble savage. Old west-erns, dime novels, movies, and myriad other cultural artifacts reflect theIndian as either a war-weary yet majestic chief or a blood-thirsty, un-trustworthy brute (Aleiss, Bataille and Silet, Berkhofer, Bird, Boehme,Bordwich, Hilger, King). These two representations have watered downto a generic Indian icon prevalent today in a multitude of visual sources,including food wrappers, billboards, and sport utility vehicles.


Sports teams—Redskins, Fighting Reds, Indians, Warriors,Chiefs—and their accompanying imagery—large-nosed, headdressedchiefs holding bows and arrows or tomahawks—have received a greatdeal of attention (an excellent resource site that includes multimediawork related to mascots is available at http://www.aistm.org/; acollection of articles that addresses the topic is King, Springwood, andDeloria). A Lalo Alcaraz political cartoon shows an image of a whiteman with ‘‘go savages, kill em’’ painted on his abundant stomach, aheaddress with a few bedraggled feathers stuck in it, and a tiny flagannouncing ‘‘go warrior savages’’ stating to a frowning young NativeAmerican man wearing t-shirt and jeans, ‘‘but I’m honoring you,dude!’’ Defenders argue that this sort of cultural appropriation issomehow an honor or sign of respect: ‘‘we love our braves’’ or ‘‘we’rerespecting the great Indian heritage.’’ This imagery misrepresents andhomogenizes a group of people representative of more than fivehundred nations in 2009 and, further, promotes misunderstanding andfosters ecologies of appropriation and ridicule.

Many scholars have both analyzed and critiqued the multiple imagesof Native Americans that appear across our culture—Redman ChewingTobacco, Natural American Spirit cigarettes, Calumet Baking Powder,Mazda Navajo, Jeep Cherokee (see, e.g., Bataille, Caldwell-Wood andMitten, Faris, Gidley, King, et al., Pewewardy, Trimble). WhereasAunt Jemima and Betty Crocker have both received a new look oc-casionally over the years to present a more current, updated image, theimages of Native Americans circulating in our culture are stale andhave not been replaced by more contemporary views of Indian life. Theimages and the text that accompanies representations of Indians arestale and stereotypical; the images are almost always men, wearingfeathered headdresses and braids, holding spears or more likely tom-ahawks or bows and arrows. In many images, the men stare reflectivelyoff into the distance (their gaze never looks outward, toward/at theviewer), or they are mounted upon a horse, holding a weapon, some-times with the carcass of a deer or buffalo at their feet (see Figures 1 –3). Very few women appear on products, and certainly no women areassociated with sports figures or sport utility vehicles. The sole Indianwoman that holds a prized cultural seat is Pocahontas, and often she isportrayed Disney style, with Caucasian features, light skin, paintedlips, and in highly sexualized costume (see Figures 4 and 5). Thelanguage that accompanies images of Indians are expressions of


http://www.aistm.org/













‘‘noble,’’ ‘‘mystical,’’ and ‘‘magical,’’ and often spirits and ceremoniesare presented ambiguously or without context or explanation. Expres-sions of a ‘‘time gone by’’ or ‘‘the history of these remarkable people’’riddle the descriptions of the trinkets for sale, labeled only ‘‘Indian’’ or‘‘Native American.’’ Few specify nations or make mention of tribes.

Imaginary Indian Identity: Real and Virtual

Not only are ‘‘Indian’’ images and lore borrowed for trinkets and col-lector’s items, but Indian identity is borrowed as well. In the early1900s, a group of students at the University of Michigan formed auniversity-sanctioned student club and created an Indian tribe to use as

FIGURE 1. Untitled Collector’s Plate.

FIGURE 2. ‘‘Native American Hunting’’ Alabastrite Figure; accompanyingtext: ‘‘With his horse at full gallop, this Native American hunter aims at hisprey with bow and arrow.’’


FIGURE 3. ‘‘Native American Figurine—Chief Sculpture’’; accompanyingtext: ‘‘A majestic Native American chief, dressed in feather headdress andtribal garb, holds a peace pipe.’’

FIGURE 4. ‘‘Native American Indian Maiden’’ Coffee Mug; accompanyingtext: ‘‘In each moment of every day, lies a little touch of magic.’’


an identity marker. As LeBeau (112) reported, these students took‘‘symbolic possession’’ of Indians in a way that catered to romantic,stereotypical beliefs about American history and the place of NativeAmericans. The ‘‘Michigamua’’ students created elaborate rituals andceremonies, selecting among and appropriating the ‘‘Indian’’ charac-teristics they most admired—most related to ‘‘warrior virtues.’’

FIGURE 5. ‘‘Mouse Pad Indian Maiden with Prayer Fan’’; accompanying textreads: ‘‘Indian Maiden Praying To Great Spirit Wolf & Eagle Spirit.’’


The use of Indian lore and mystique is not limited to ‘‘real’’ space;an infamous example of ‘‘passing’’ as Indian occurred in digital space,in an American Online chatroom in the early 1990s, where a Cau-casian man rebirthed himself as ‘‘Blue Snake,’’ a supposed EasternShawnee chief. Blue Snake existed in a virtual sweat lodge, passing apeace pipe to visitors who passed through, offering Native Americanblessings, making visitors honorary Indians, and gifting them withmembership in the ‘‘Evening Sky Clan.’’ In elaborate online rituals,he bestowed names upon his followers: ‘‘Crystal Bear Woman,Stormcloud Dancer, and Darkness Runs From Her’’ (Martin 125).Eventually, Native American AOL members caught on to BlueSnake; one woman frothed: ‘‘I couldn’t believe it. His seminars werea hodgepodge of the worst kind of bullshit stereotypes and gobble-dygook possible’’ (Martin 125). Blue Snake defended himself, sug-gesting that his adoption of an Indian identity and his perpetuationof what some people called online fraud was a respectful gesturetoward honorable Native American cultures and traditions. GlenMartin, who reported on the entire incident in Wired magazine, andwho quoted from a document scripted by members of three tribes ofthe Shawnee nation, noted that in this case, imitation was not flat-tery, nor was it sincere in any way. Miller, one of the most vocalopponents of Blue Snake, was eventually banned from AOL. Shesuggested that ‘‘the company [AOL] didn’t want us disturbing thefantasy . . . it doesn’t want real Indians—we’re not ‘‘Indian’’ enough’’(128). Apparently, AOL wanted Indians where most of mainstreamAmerica seems to want them—in homes, on plates, decorating coffeemugs, and mousepads—the buckskin fringes and the feathers, thenoble warrior. Many Native peoples online today, instead of spendingtheir time establishing active, contemporary identities and partic-ipating in larger communities, spend their time policing sites thatpresent a distorted, inaccurate, or inappropriate glimpse at supposed‘‘native’’ customs and life (Haas). Vine Deloria writes: ‘‘The whitesare sincere but they are only sincere about what they are interestedin, not about Indians about whom they know very little. They getexceedingly angry if you try to tell them the truth and will onlyreject you and keep searching until they find the Indian of theirfantasies’’ (xv). Thus, in their attempts to remedy the absent presenceof Indians (Powell), they are often trapped in roles that continue tomake them absent.


Indian Identity as Commodity

This pervasive view of the Indian as a commodity and as a romanticreflection of America’s cultural past often relies on an absence of anunderstanding of Indian culture. Images of Indians in headdress andtomahawk rarely are created or interpreted with an understanding of thecultural and tribal conventions explaining dress and custom. Thus, In-dians become both icon and archetype—a singular, static motif—of aglorious American past. Although many scholars would argue that theseever-present stereotypical representations must be removed from ourcultural imaginary, here we argue that they are far too prevalent to ignore,dismiss, or erase. They are so prevalent, in fact, that children readily view,absorb, and—as the example drawings we will share below articulate—remediate them. A recent political cartoon shows two schoolchildrenwalking together, one saying to the other ‘‘Really? You don’t lookIndian.’’ Above his head appears a thought bubble with images of aDisneyfied Pocahontas, a Kansas City Chiefs helmet, the mascot of theCleveland Braves, a caricature of a goonish-looking brave, a majestic-looking brave on horseback, and a tomahawk. It is relatively easy todismiss such representations, but, instead, imagery of Indians can berecognized as base knowledge—as an established set of cultural and visualliteracies—upon which more dynamic, accurate, contemporary under-standings of Native Americans and Native cultures can be formulated.

Composing Indians

For many years now, Patrick has been leading workshops and assembliesregarding Michigan Indians, yesterday and today, for audiences that rangefrom elementary schoolchildren to college-age adults. To begin his dis-cussions, Patrick always asks attendees to draw what they know aboutIndians. (We have included the entire prompt, along with some com-mentary and further explanation, in Appendix A.) The motifs thatquickly appear across the perhaps fifteen hundred images Patrick hascollected in his travels and speaking engagements are not surprising: theteepee, the tomahawk, and the feathered headdress figure prominentlyamong the images participants produce (see Figures 6 and 7 for examples).

These images are not surprising, considering what children knowabout Indians, and the icons and items that shape what they know ofIndians. It is easy to point out that the students apparently have no


cultural sense of the range of tribes and nations and variances in dress,language, geography, etc. It is easy to emphasize the generic quality ofthe drawings, and the fact that students very, very rarely representcontemporary images of American Indians and/or Native Americanlife. Rather than dismiss these drawings as simplistic and stereotypicalrepresentations, however, we prefer to read them differently.

These images are rich creations and representations of base knowl-edge. Obviously, the individuals who take part in this exercise andcreate these images have a complex understanding of what ‘‘Indian’’ isand are able to create complicated visual representations of thatunderstanding—representations that blend textual and visual knowl-edge of Indian identity, and that tell a story of Indian identity. If wereturn to the three figures above, we get a sense of the depth ofstudents’ knowledge. If we look at Figure 6, we can observe thestudent’s attempt to explain (with words and images) Indian life. This

FIGURE 6. Example of Indian motifs in drawings.


student knew that Indians ate steer and buffalo, represented by thehorned skull with ‘‘food’’ written above it and by the nuts or berriesand the fish with the arrow through it. This student knew that Nativepeoples hunted with the tomahawk and the bow and arrow, with‘‘wipins.’’ The student knew that Indians lived in different types of‘‘shelters,’’ including the teepee and the mud hut. ‘‘Dancing,’’ repre-sented by the somewhat abstract sketch with a face below it, was partof Indian culture(s). We can read from this student’s collage his com-plex sense of the items he associates with what it meant (means) to bean Indian. Other images reveal such complexity (see Figures 8 and 9).

Interesting sketches come from those students who have integratedPatrick’s discussion into their images—some students attempted tospell out the Ojibwa words Patrick taught them during his presen-tation (see Figure 10). Other students created a visual map of thetrajectory of historical Indians to the present space of Native Americanlife. Figure 11 presents what we assume is a comparison of a histor-ically represented Indian to a contemporary representation of an Indian.Figure 12 presents at least two possible readings: First, we might readthe set of images as progression for us of Indian life, where the familyrepresented moves from living in a teepee to living in a contemporarydwelling (relocated via moving van). However, a second reading is

FIGURE 7. Example of Indian motifs in drawings.


indicated by the numbers the student has included. If we allow thenumbers to frame our reading, we might pull two sets of represen-tations from this image: The first set of sketches (labeled first,second, third) might represent what the student might consider to betypical Indian life, defined by teepees and horses. The second setof sketches (again labeled first, second, third) juxtaposes a rendering of‘‘mainstream’’ life, defined by cars, urban dwellings, moving vans, andspeedboats to historic Indians of the past. Figure 13 integrates bothhistorical and contemporary representations of Indian life—this stu-dent has included typical Indian iconography (i.e., bow, arrow, teepee,headband), but also a rifle and, most interestingly, a slot machinecomplete with a pullhandle and flashing light on top.

Reading and Negotiating Representations of Identity

We can obviously read images such as those examples included abovein two ways: First, as condemnable, stagnant stereotypes that trapIndians in the past. The second approach, however, allows a moreproductive read of these images and allows us to read these images as

FIGURE 8. What Indians Eat (1).


multimodal visual stories that serve as arguments and that demonstratestudents’ rich base knowledge and ability to learn new concepts withina few minutes of storytelling.

Before we further explore the notions of base knowledge and themultiple literacies students express and demonstrate in these images,we want to address notions of identity, as notions of Indian identity arecrucial to these images. Identity is, essentially, the sense of self thatgrows out of one’s interactions with others. Importantly, many of theparticipants in Patrick’s work have not had significant interactionswith flesh and blood Native peoples—or, if they have, they do not

FIGURE 9. What Indians Eat (2).


associate these folks with the representations of ‘‘Indians’’ that havebeen culturally conjured for them. Again, think of the political cartoonof the boy explaining to the young girl, ‘‘Really? You don’t look like anIndian.’’ Instead, these students’ interactions with ‘‘the Indian’’ havebeen limited to stereotypical images, romantic constructions, andreproduced icons. If we reflect upon the current cultural context in

FIGURE 10. Hello (Aannii), People (Anishinaabe), and Until Later (Baamaapii).

FIGURE 11. Diachronic Transitions.


which students confront this imagery, we can see how slippery notionsof identity are, and how these particular notions of Indian identity feelcomfortable, approachable, and solid.

Historically, one of the most familiar and comfortable anchoringpoints was a solid sense of self: The I-think-therefore-I-am stable no-tion of identity. Currently, however, in our postmodern context, this

FIGURE 12. (A) Diachronic Transitions (2). (B) Diachronic Transitions (3).


sense of self and our abilities to rely upon other familiar anchoringpoints (e.g., sovereign nation states, The Family, Truth) have crum-bled—have disappeared in a landscape of dynamic global expansion,vast technological change, the rapid multiplication of micropolitical en-tities, and the explosive growth of alienating forces like global crime andterrorism. Manuel Castells (3) explained how individuals make meaningand understand identity in a rapidly shifting world; that political iden-tities formulated around language and literacy practices are

fast becoming the main, and sometimes the only source of mean-ing. . . . People increasingly organize their meaning not around whatthey do but on the basis of who they are, or believe they are.

It is somewhat paradoxical that in the face of identity slippage andshifts that the image of Indian identity is trapped in the past. However,

FIGURE 13. Traditional Images and Casino, a new traditional image?


perhaps the image of the Indian allows us a sense of stability, of se-curity—to have a shared, concrete, understandable history in the face ofa world in which identity shifts so dynamically and constantly. Wemay cling to icons and identities that feel stable in a world in whichour senses of self slide around constantly, depending on variables suchas place, space, and time in the world. Our sense of self, our identity, isa story that we write every day.

Using a postmodern understanding of time, space, and literacypractices, Deborah Brandt (651) suggests that literacy, instead of beinga somewhat stable, static, measurable thing, is actually a dynamicprocess. New literate practices constantly arise in a society where ‘‘noteven elites of the past have encountered the current contexts in whichliteracy in its many forms is being practiced and learned.’’ Today,students’ literate practices are mediated and remediated by a variety ofmedia and events, including the dynamic, evolving space of the WorldWide Web. Brandt (651) suggests that perhaps the best way to actuallymeasure what would typically be called literacy is to assess ‘‘a person’scapacity to amalgamate new reading and writing practices in responseto rapid social change.’’ She argues that literacy piles up and spreadsout. Further, literacy has a residual character. We do not instantly andeasily replace one ‘‘old’’ practice with a new practice but instead buildour literacy practices upon one another, which, in turn, shifts andreshapes our literacy practices. This takes place much as stories are toldand shared—stories evolve with each telling, just as literacy changes aswe adapt and as we adopt new practices. If we read students’ repre-sentations of the Indian as base knowledge, or initial literacy andunderstandings, we can then use this as a structure upon which tobuild additional understanding.

If we, however, attempt to eradicate students’ rich base knowl-edge—to devalue it as stereotypical and racist—we are not acknowl-edging the cultural sources and spaces where students learn theserepresentations of Indians. Nor are we paying close attention to stu-dents’ knowledge. We can read students’ expressions as base knowl-edge—or, as Brandt describes it—as artifacts of literacy, which moveback and forth and across generations and contexts.

In their ‘‘Pedagogy of Multiliteracies,’’ the New London Group(NLG) presents a learning and literacy manifesto. The authors describethe traditional page-based, official forms of learning and teaching andargue that the ‘‘idea of literacy pedagogy [must] account for culturally


and linguistically diverse and globalized societies’’ and that ‘‘literacypedagogy must account for growing variety of text forms associatedwith information and multimedia technologies’’ (61). The authorsdescribe the changing work, public, and private lives of indivi-duals living today, and argue that schools are often both the gate-keepers of ‘‘appropriate’’ means of literacy and the regulators ofthis literacy.

‘‘All meaning-making,’’ the NLG authors argue, is multimodal, re-lying on visual, audio, gestural, and spatial understandings and ex-pressions of understanding. These hybrid practices are well reflected inthe images collected during Patrick’s presentations. This hybridityreflects student attempts at bridging the textual and the visual, as theylabel their images. These hybrid designs reveal the relationship ofdifferent knowledges presented in a single document. To engage stu-dents in extending their knowledge of the Indian, we can rely on one ofthe frameworks the NLG (68) offers: critical framing, which ‘‘relatesmeanings to their social contexts and purposes . . . framing in relationto historical, social, cultural, etc., of particular systems of knowledgeand social practice.’’

The NLG presents an approach that includes available designs (theresources of design), designing (which reproduces given knowledges,social relations, etc.), and the redesigned (the resulting new meaning,which, in turn, becomes new available designs). Certain modes ofmeaning facilitate these processes, including visual meanings, audiomeanings, gestural meanings, spatial meanings, and, most importantly,multimodal meanings. All meaning, the authors argue, is multimodal.The hybridity and intertextuality of meaning help us to understand therelationship of different designs in meaning.

The visual claims here rely upon at least three kinds of context:‘‘immediate visual context, immediate verbal context, and visualculture’’ (Birdsell and Groarke 6). Visual context is sometimes difficultto measure and is incredibly complex. Are the students respondingto Patrick’s appearance and their assumptions about who and what heis? Are the students responding to the space in which the discussion istaking place? Are the students responding to visual cues that teachersand/or principals are giving? The verbal context here includes the textthe students composed, be these styled as captions or supplementaryexplanations of their drawings. Robert Sitz reported on a similarphenomenon he observed when he asked a group of students to


draw a ‘‘pop bottle’’ and reported that students embellished elaboratelywith ‘‘background detail or with verbal balloons, captions, and othernotations’’ (88), many of which related to Coca-Cola. Even thoughstudents were instructed to not use words, most of them did; Sitzreads their textual compositions as ‘‘background or contextual infor-mation . . . revealing in regard to student interests, sense of humor,attitude, and so on’’ (88). The visual culture students draw upon duringthese exercises is the world in which the students exist, rich withinformation.

Teaching Visual Analysis

The most compelling suggestion, for us, is to ask all educators tounderstand students’ base knowledges. Obviously, students come intoour classrooms with rich cultural histories and from contexts that helpshape those histories. Often, it is tempting to condemn students’beliefs, especially when they are personally or politically offensive.However, condemnation does not lead to student learning and deve-lopment. Instead, tracing student beliefs is a worthy activity, exploringwhy individuals think the way they do regarding, for example, NativeAmericans. This understanding can then be a springboard to shapemore complex and accurate understandings of difference.

American Indian stereotypical imagery is hard to avoid and hardto ignore. A cursory examination of Indian units taught in manyschools have students drawing or otherwise constructing artifactsrecognized as ‘‘Indian’’: tepees, headdresses, canoes, buckskin outfits,etc. Linking these artifacts to specific Native American people orsituating them into a specific historical frame is rarely part of the unit’sor lesson plan’s listed goals. Without much effort, these stereotypicalartifacts can be used in instruction but need a precise and accuratecontext. The challenge teachers face is not to avoid these objectsand activities or to condemn them—or to use them without thoughtor perspective. Creating buckskin outfits out of grocery bags ordesigning a canoe from birch bark can build an understandingabout a specific time and place. But there must be room for thatcontext and understanding to change and grow as students and teachersdevelop new knowledge. Therefore, teachers and students shouldrecognize images that stereotype and/or freeze Native Americans


in the historical past. Obviously, artifacts like feather headdressesinfluence the way we think about Indians, but we can add to thatinfluence by, for example, creating context and perspective by askingand answering questions about the artifacts we find in Americanconsumer culture.

An initial step toward deeper, contextual visual engagement is toseek out examples of images of Indians in stores, on billboards, andon products. These images support three important points: First, mostof the images found in grocery stores or toy stores are of warriors and/orprincesses. Second, enough stereotypical examples exist to substantiatethe claim that people are more likely to encounter stereotypical imagesof the American Indian than to meet flesh and blood Native Americanpeople. Finally, this search of stereotypical imagery shows the pre-valence of such imagery in American culture in a way that is hard toignore. Teachers and students, through this exploration and analysis,through this accumulation of images, can better understand the pro-liferation of these approaches to Native Americans, and the stereotyp-ing of American Indian culture, rituals, practices, and beliefs.

A second step is to encourage educators to work toward replacingstudents’ cultural stereotypes—both positive and negative—with morefluid, dynamic understandings of tendencies. It is tempting generallyto reduce an entire cultural group, tribe, or nation to a simple rep-resentation. Edmond Weiss (260) warns, however, that ‘‘even if thesefacile generalizations are mainly true, we should always be uncom-fortable with any conception that treats members of a group asinstances of a profile—tokens of a type—rather than as individualpersons’’ and Linda Beamer (294) adds that although stereotypes ‘‘maybe helpful and even accurate to some degree, they are limited insights,revealing only a part of the whole culture.’’ We encourage educatorshere to approach stereotypes as both positive and negative becausealthough most stereotypes emerge from fear or misunderstanding,some stereotypes hold limited truths and are useful in a limitedcapacity. Because ‘‘stereotypes’’ is such a loaded expression and fostersnegative perceptions in readers’ minds, we follow the model of DeVoss,Jasken, and Hayden (80) and suggest the use of the term tendencies,which allows ‘‘space for deviations and differences from our expecta-tions of the ‘norm’.’’ One method toward putting an understanding oftendencies into practice is described by DeVoss et al.: asking studentsto think about the groups in which they are members, and asking


students to further reflect upon the stereotypes that others might holdabout those groups, where these stereotypes arise, and how justifiedthese stereotypes are. Creating visual renderings of their own groupidentities is a space to visually represent these associations. Often,students do not have a strong sense of stereotypes until they themselvesbecome the objects of stereotyping. This exercise also allows for theanalysis of how stereotypes limit communication contexts and culturalunderstandings.

An activity that can follow an activity like the one we havedescribed in the Appendix A is to ask students to tell stories abouttheir own cultures, both textually and visually. These stories could beof North American/United States culture in general, or more speci-fically, this prompt could ask that students reflect upon their ownracial/ethnic identity. Students may find it much more difficult to tellstories about their cultures, or to visually represent their cultures. Askthe students how they situate themselves within a cultural background.What stories do their drawings tell? Does any person resemble theirdrawings?

Conclusions

As teachers, we must be prepared to negotiate the cultural visualreferences that students have built and will bring to our classrooms.And, if we believe, as Scott Lyons does, that ‘‘Indian’’ is an argumentmade drawing upon available cultural and social means, we can borrowfrom students’ established literacy practices and further those practicesto equip students with stronger ballast for their stories regarding whatan Indian is and thus reconstruct what an Indian identity does, and wecan engage students in thick analysis of their own identities and rep-resentations. In doing so, we may be able to reach a point wherestudents move beyond stereotypical and historic notions of Indianidentity to realize a broader bandwidth of both historical and con-temporary Native American identities. Ignoring the rich practices andunderstandings of students—or dismissing them—erases the potentialmoments and spaces within which we can make change; ignoringstudents’ preconceived notions negates the fissures within which we canmove our understandings of Native Americans into more robust, moreappropriately representative spaces.


Appendix A

The History of the Prompt: Drawing Knowledge in Elementary SchoolClassrooms

Patrick Russell LeBeau

Drawing Indians

Over the past 23 years as I have been lecturing and teaching on thegeneral subject of American-Indian Studies, I have collected audiencedrawings of Indians. Regardless of whether I am introducing a film,giving a lecture, teaching a class, presenting at an elementary schoolassembly, or conducting a teacher-training workshop, I ask participantsat the start of the session to draw what they think the film/lecture/class/presentation/workshop is about. Participants already anticipate thecontent to be something about American Indians, due to the title,subject, or focus of the event. Even my Lakota/Plains Chippewaancestry provides a physiognomic prompt as I stand before them andmake my request. Provided with a title, a subject, and an AmericanIndian teacher, participants spend ten minutes drawing and doodlingimages of what they believe to be relevant to the day’s discussion.Although what they draw is somewhat predictable, the level of imag-ination and knowledge of Indians and consistency of the imagerybetween disparate audiences is something surprisingly interesting toanalyze and study.

After collecting images for ten years, I made a collage piece out ofthem. Very apparent in the collage was the difficulty in distinguishingbetween what was drawn by elementary students from Michigan andCalifornia and what was drawn by adults, which included graduatestudents, social studies teachers, professors, and community membersfrom across the United States. Regardless of geographical location,the different audiences shared an elaborate and imaginative idea ofAmerican Indians as revealed by their drawings, even though theirdrawings are predictable, stereotypical, stylized, and frozen in the past.Some differences are evident: A number of elementary students usedcrayons or markers, while most adults drew stick figure Indians andscenarios with pencil or pen (less confident, I believe, in their artisticabilities). More remarkable are the similarities—most of the pictures


drawn can be reduced to teepees and warriors, with war weapons andfeathered headdresses. Why are the same pictures drawn over and overagain by all age groups regardless of gender, age, or educational back-ground? Clearly, the participants had knowledge of Indians, albeitoversimplified, standardized, and ahistorical.

Situating Indians Across Media and Education

Since the late 1960s, scholars have researched the presence of Indianstereotypes in American consumer culture, Hollywood films, televisionprogramming, toys, children’s literature, American canonical litera-ture, American art, and American popular culture. The presence ofIndians across popular media, objects, and artifacts is the understand-able source of information that has shaped what an ordinary US citizenknows about Indians. Raymond Stedman’s Shadows of the Indian: Ste-reotypes in American Culture (1967), Arlene B. Hirschfelder’s AmericanIndian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader and a Bibliography(1st ed 1982), Peter C. Rollins’ and John E. O’Connor’s Hollywood’sIndian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (1998), JacquelynKilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians: Native Americans in Film (1999), andPhilip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998) and Indians in Unexpected Places(2004) are among many works that have documented the pervasivepresence of American Indian stereotypes in American culture and so-ciety. The scholarship has proven that stereotypical images of Indiansare easy to find and that these images have had a subliminal influenceon impressionable minds.

Although early education about American Indians begins in ele-mentary school—most often in fourth grade—the knowledge youngpeople in the United States have of Indians predates classroom in-struction. For example, an education major working with elementarystudents and taking one of my classes on the origin and history ofAmerican Indian stereotypes brought to me, after a lecture on Indianclassroom artifacts, an Indian paddling a canoe, a classroom projectwhere students constructed the canoe out of paper and cardstock; whencompleted, each student’s name was inscribed on the paddle (see Figure14). However, this student reported that despite the project, most ofthe students could tell elaborate stories about Indians and they couldalso draw very detailed pictures of Indian life frozen in a distant past, as


the main part of this article explains. The education major was amazedchildren knew so much about Indians. In another elementary schoolactivity he described to me, students are instructed how to build asimple three-dimensional Indian-life diorama.

Another teacher noted that providing the students with basic ma-terials (shoebox, colored construction paper, a teepee template, a fewtoy horses, scissors, crayons, and markers), and a simple prompt (makean Indian home) was all that was needed for a fifty-minute activity (seeFigure 15). Not only were students absorbed with the construction ofthe diorama, they play-acted and were able to tell detailed stories aboutmake-believe Indians. Although much that is created and play-acted ismost often stereotypical, teachers are often surprised at the sophisti-cated knowledge young people can bring to the classroom before andduring lessons about American Indians. I have had many students inmy undergraduate classrooms remember fondly their first ‘‘Indian’’lessons and school projects. One student gave me a drawing made infourth grade that was a prized keepsake until the student learned about

FIGURE 14. An education major in my course on ‘‘Rethinking Michigan In-dian History’’ and working in a local elementary school classroom gave methis canoe after listening to a lecture where I produced examples of similarprojects conducted by elementary school teachers in other schools.


the pervasive and perplexing presence of Indian stereotypes in Amer-ican culture (see Figure 16). He told me he always could imagine an‘‘Indian world’’ when he looked at that drawing and he liked it so muchhe even brought it to college with him.

The Prompt Evolves

With years of experience and travel, along with interactions withscholars and college students, I continue to ask audiences to draw whatthey know of Indians. Recently I was scheduled to visit over fiftyelementary classrooms, grades 4 through 6, over a period of ten days(or five classrooms a day). My goal was the same as it has been forsome time: I wanted to explore ‘‘what students already know and whatthey found fascinating’’ about American Indians while at the sametime teaching them something new.

I modified my original prompt from a single, simple logo or drawingto ‘‘draw whatever you know about Indians.’’ Although some teachersfrowned on having students draw during my presentation, I encouragedthe students to do so, and the results were, in their way, a form of note-taking and a type of visual annotation of my presentation. My task was(in forty minutes) to teach fourth through sixth graders something aboutMichigan-Indian history and to give them a simple language lesson.I wanted to stress that Michigan Indians live in the present day and thatIndians have a continuous history rather than one frozen in the past.I taught them three Ojibwa words: Aannii (Hello), Anishinaabe (People),and Baamaapii (Until Later). The results were amazing.

FIGURE 15. A School Project.


The elaborate story-filled pictures elementary students producewhen asked to draw what they know about American Indians reveals acomplex visual language students can use to communicate knowledgethey are confident they possess and further, they began to incorporatenew knowledge like Aannii and Indians in modern settings. Thedrawings reveal an elaborate connection between pictures and wordsconstructed with letters of the alphabet as demonstrated by thenumerous drawings of recognizable implements, like a bow, alignedaside a word, like ‘‘bow.’’

What I learned was that stereotypes, though perpetuating falsehistories, can be a foundation for new knowledge and a way of intro-ducing imaginative minds to complicated ideas and concepts aboutAmerican Indians, the complete opposite of a simple stereotype.

Notes

1. This sense of visual literacy as a ‘‘new’’ topic in theory and pedagogy is, however, not quite

accurate. For historical explorations of visual topics, see, for example: Dondis; Fransecky &

Debes, Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn—A Way to Teach; Kolers, Wrolstad, & Bouma, Processing

of Visible Language: Vol. 2; Wileman, Exercises in Visual Thinking, Visual Communicating.

2. This definition of literacy also includes visual literacy as part of larger sets of literacy, rather

than fragmenting visual literacy as apart from other reading and writing practices. We agree

with scholars such as Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola when they question the actions, meanings,

and associations that ‘‘literacy’’ brings to mind when we apply it in new realms or to new

practices (e.g., these authors warn that it is perhaps limiting to use the same language we use

to describe and analyze practices of reading text to practices of reading visuals). Here we do

FIGURE 16. College Student’s Fourth Grade Drawing.


rely on these associations, but recognize the need to question them and to question the use of

the term literacy.

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Danielle Nicole DeVoss is an associate professor and director of theProfessional Writing Program at Michigan State University. Her researchinterests include computer/technological literacies; feminist interpretations ofand interventions in computer technologies; and intellectual property issues indigital space. DeVoss’ work has most recently appeared in Computers andComposition; Computers and Composition Online; and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,Technology, and Pedagogy. DeVoss recently co-edited (with Heidi McKee) DigitalWriting Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007, HamptonPress), which won the 2007 Computers and Composition Distinguished BookAward. She is currently working on a National Writing Project book with TroyHicks, titled Because Digital Writing Matters (Jossey-Bass), and an editedcollection with Martine Courant Rife and Shaun Slattery, titled Copy(write):Intellectual Property in the Composition Classroom.

Patrick Russell LeBeau is professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and AmericanCultures and former director of American Indian Studies at Michigan StateUniversity. His scholarly interests include creative writing; American-Indianintellectual, legal, political, and popular histories; and topics related to AmericanIndian curriculum and education. He has published three books: Stands Alone,Faces and Other Poems (1999); Rethinking Michigan Indian History (2005), a book


that provides essays, activities, and classroom resources for teachers and students;and Term Paper Resources Guide to American Indian History (2009), a book thatcovers the most significant topics in American Indian history from first contactto recent years. He has also written many articles and book chapters, the mostnotable, ‘‘The Fighting Braves of Michigamua,’’ which appeared in Team Spirits(2001). He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of SouthDakota (his father’s home) and he is a descendent of the Turtle MountainChippewa Tribe of North Dakota (his mother’s home).


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