Bringing a Burden to Bear

Abstract

In this essay, I consider my position as a multiply marginalized scholar teaching within vastly different spaces—in a neocolonized island territory of the US with a minority majority student population; then to rural, land grant, and predominantly White institutions on the West coast; to a private urban campus in one of the original US colonies. I think deeply about my responsibilities, my complicity, and what it means to carry this weight, truly, across America, in order to confront the complexity of what “America” is alongside my students. To address this complexity of contexts, I look to the ways Amerindian and American Indigenous rhetorics bear against colonial injusticethrough language.