Rockwell Tang’s “Resisting Indigenous Stereotypes in Media” is an excellent example of a genuinely question-based essay: his starting point is not deciding what he’s going to prove, but rather identifying something that needs to be clarified or figured out. Rocky begins with a documentary film, Anne Makepeace’s We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, and a theoretical framework that might help us better understand it; but where others might have simply applied one to the other, ignoring or glossing over the places where the two diverge, Rocky uses the mismatch to get to an argument. In his essay, Rocky focuses on what he expected to see but did not – most strikingly, historical images of the Wampanoag people – and uses this observation to build a powerful argument about what the film achieves through its decision to omit such images. By privileging footage of Wampanoags in the present, he finds, the film avoids a narrative that consigns Indigenous people to a vanished past and resists stereotypes about what contemporary, revitalized Indigenous communities might look like. Deploying clear logic and drawing on useful conceptual material from our course readings, Rocky is able to develop his claim efficiently and persuasively. This essay is all the more impressive since it was the very first assigned in our section of WR 120: Indigenous Resistance. Reading it again, I find myself continuing to learn from its strategy of examining what is absent in addition to what is evident, and I look forward to teaching it alongside Makepeace’s documentary in the future.
— MARIE MCDONOUGH
WR 120: First-Year Writing Seminar