Indigenous Activism in the Midwest: Refusal, Resurgence, and Resisting Settler Colonialism

In Indigenous Activism in the Midwest: Refusal, Resurgence, and Resisting Settler Colonialism, Margret McCue-Enser examines how Minnesota Indigenous activists use public memory sites to interrupt and challenge the dominant narrative of place. She explores how Indigenous activism reveals and disrupts material, discursive, and performative rhetorics of settler colonialism. This work cultivates the ground between rhetorical studies of place and space and Indigenous studies in which place is central to Indigeneity and activism. Using largely in situ analysis and drawing on Indigenous and rhetorical scholarship as well as Indigenous and mainstream press, the analysis focuses on sites such as an outdoor art installation, a historic settlers’ village, centennial and sesquicentennial farms, and a celebrated military fort.

Margret McCue-Enser is a professor of communication studies at St. Catherine University. Her recent work explores the role of rhetoric of place in constituting diasporic communities. Her published research has explored the ways that Indigenous communities in Minnesota assert Indigenous terms of belonging and expose farmer-settler narratives of place and how Menominee restoration leader and first female Indigenous head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Ada Deer centers her identity and her argument on Menominee land and culture. McCue-Enser won a top article award from the American studies division of the National Communication Association and a top paper award (with Derek Sweet) from the rhetoric and public address division of Western States Communication Association. Her work has appeared in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, Reconsidering Obama: Reflections on Rhetoric, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Studies, and Argumentation and Advocacy, among other outlets.