The rhetoric of settler colonialism: Joshua Smith, ‘Transforming Relationships: Land, Colonialism, and Rhetorical Sedimentation’, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 28, 2, 2025, pp. 158-180 | settler colonial studies blog

The rhetoric of settler colonialism: Joshua Smith, ‘Transforming Relationships: Land, Colonialism, and Rhetorical Sedimentation’, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 28, 2, 2025, pp. 158-180

26Jul25

Abstract: This article uses the competing visions of land of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to show the rhetorical operation of the human relationship with land. Telling two stories of the same land’s entanglement with diverging modes of relationship, it explains the concept of rhetorical sedimentation. Rhetorical sedimentation describes how certain rhetorics and discourses bury others, much as new dirt becomes stratified on top of old. With the aid of this geological metaphor, this article demonstrates the intersection of land relations with broader matters of cultural politics. Lee, it argues, follows the goals of settler colonialism and attempts to bury Indigenous peoples’ land relations with the Bears Ears National Monument. Through rhetorics of land relations, Lee claims the settler Utahn as “indigenous” and portrays federal ownership of public lands as a new form of colonialism. This article also argues that the coalition’s advocacy for Bears Ears serves to center its tribes’ land relations in public discourse about federal lands. Through such rhetorical work, the discursive terrain of Bears Ears and federal public lands gains new rhetorical strata. Attending to rhetorics of land relations, this article contends, affords rhetoric studies opportunities to resist complicity in colonial power.

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