"Spider Woman's Granddaughters" by Paul Gunn Allen: analysis of rhetorical strategies

In the introduction of Spider Woman's Granddaughters, by Paul Gunn Allen, she provides background information pertaining to Native American history and culture. The purpose of this preface is to offer the knowledge necessary to understand the stories. She achieves this goal with the employment of the rhetorical strategies pathos and reference to authority. Allen strongly utilizes pathos. Her use of vocabulary conveys an extremely negative perception of the Anglo-American interactions with the Native Americans. Allen …

…in 1880... over ninety million acres... were extracted from the Indians' pocket." She also alludes directly to the holocaust by describing the westward expansion as such, and provides further allusion by relating schools to concentration camps. Paul Gunn Allen's use of the rhetorical strategies of pathos and reference to authority create a nearly irrefutable vision of the Native American's inauspicious history. Given this overview, the reader is provided the necessary intellect to fully comprehend the stories.