CCCC and response to CFP -Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric
The Embodiment of Rhetoric/ The Rhetoric of Embodiment
Kinsey, Valerie, University of New Mexico, kinseyv@unm.edu

Isabel Crawford’s Body of Work:  Locating Rhetorical Authority, Salvation, and the Construction of the Kiowa’s Saddle Mountain Creek Baptist Church in the /Narrative/ Labor of a Canadian Missionary Woman

Isabel Crawford, a Canadian missionary sponsored by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society, worked from 1896-1906 alongside the Kiowa in what is now Oklahoma.  In the first pages of her account, Kiowa: Story of a Blanket Indian Mission, Crawford describes her reception:  “A few who had heard the news came in haste through the storm, and squeezing themselves into the mass of living, moving, damp humanity stood before me with hands raised to their mouths….they signed, ‘No White Jesus man ever sat down with us. One Jesus woman all alone and no skeered.  This is good’” (17).

Immediately, Crawford’s physical presence establishes her rhetorical authority among the Kiowa.  The paper will explore how Crawford’s body becomes the primary topos upon which the Gospel is inscribed and the locus of her discursive power.  Crawford deploys the specific, contextual materiality of the body (Price and Shildrick 5) to conversive practice.  How the Kiowa “read” and claim Crawford’s body (her remains were sent from Canada to Oklahoma and buried in the cemetery she helped build) will also be discussed.  The paper will also address her desire as narrative subject as she repeatedly links the perilous physical conditions she endures to the exalted spiritual life she craves.  She writes: “Don’t talk to me about ‘a strenuous life.’  I don’t call it strenuous to hunt lions and bears on a dandy horse in jolly company, in good health, in good clothes and in good spirits.  And I don’t call it strenuous to chop wood and carry water when you have both handy and don’t have to do either” (209, emphasis original).  Crawford conceptualizes and enacts spiritual communion with God through the deployment of her body in “hard labor;” labor which she rhetorically situates as “womanly” and in opposition to the manly work of preaching.