Drawing the Lines: Indigenous American Ledger Drawings and the Decolonization of Rhetorical Knowledge Spaces

Abstract

This project explores the transrhetorical conversations that take place between the material presences of ledger art across three discursive spaces. Ledger art is a visually-based narrative art form of expression that originated among Native American Plains tribes. Often characterized by its materiality, historical and contemporary ledger artists use a variety of media to mediate their drawings— from ledger pages to land deeds and composition notebooks. Particularly, this project considers the material-rhetorical presences of ledger drawings held in the Kansas Historical Society Archives and the Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. The ledger art of these spaces is placed into dialogue with the materials and metadiscourses that surround them in order to understand the action, motion, and moment of the ledger drawings within and across these spaces. These observations are then situated in relationship to personal conversations with contemporary ledger artists, considering the ways that artists see ledger art created, mediated, and mitigated. Utilizing and complicating Carole Blair’s heuristic for material rhetorics, with mindfulness of indigenous and decolonial methodologies, what emerges from this project is a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between materialities across spaces, communities, cultures, and times while furthering our understandings of decolonial transrhetorical movement and connections within the field of rhetoric and composition.