"A is for Assemblage." Nearly a decade ago now, I had the good fortune of composing "An Ethics of Assemblage: Creative Repetition and the Electric Pow-Wow" with my philosopher brother for the Yancey and McElroy collection, Assembling Composition. This chapter remains to this day one of my favorite pieces I've ever worked on as it brought together or perhaps more accurately assembled my love of music, my worries about cultural appropriation, my relations with my brother, and my hopes for the possibilities of multimodal composing. Being asked to reflect on assemblage at the same time gave me the space to think deeply about how, as we argued, the world is not just full of concepts waiting to be plucked from their contexts. We also considered how creative repetition might afford us with a space to imagine how one might assemble in a good way. This assembling in a good way, as the First Nations group, A Tribe Called Red, illustrated, opens new futures and possibilities and helps create, in the words of the New London group, new "available designs."

As I watched the Assemblage interview with Kathi Yancey, I found myself reflecting on our chapter, the process of composing it, and my enjoyment of reading it still to this day. And trust me, this is not something that often happens with me in my writing. At one point in her interview, Kathi is asked, "What is the utility of assemblage for scholars in rhetoric and composition?" She replies, "Understanding the relationship of areas that seem disparate and connecting your work to other people." This I think is precisely why I love our chapter. I was able to connect so many different areas, connect with my brother and connect with his deep knowledge of Doo in ways I hadn't before. This assembled way of being and knowledging is where I am the most comfortable and I hadn't fully felt or discursively embraced this until writing that piece. But once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. So, in this reflection on assemblage, I'm going to talk through what it means to be in the world as a rhetoric and composition scholar through the lens of assemblage.

When I reflect on the ways I'm drawn to assemblage, I think about where my affinity for this comes from. In part, I attribute this desire to assemble, to forage, as Kathi puts it, and to understand how, as she says, everything is connected to everything comes for me from indigenous ways of knowing, particularly around ideas of relationality. The idea that everything is in relation is a common refrain in indigenous philosophy. For example, see the work of Deloria, Cordova, or Vizenor. And you also see this in traditional indigenous ways of being. This epistemology and ontology functions in a way that disrupts anthropomorphism which is in itself a powerful move. But on a smaller scale, this relational way of being of seeing how everything is connected to everything affords a richness and a novelty. One whereby setting things alongside other things allows us to see anew.

My comfort with this way of being, of connecting is also likely deeply connected to my growing up in a small rural community. In a space of limited resources, you need each other. And you need the knowledge of knowing who to turn to when your roof gets a leak or your car won't start. You never know who you might need to push you out of a snowbank. And trust me, if you're driving in my hometown and your car happens to end up in a snowbank, people will appear out of nowhere to get you out. They might not talk to you and they won't accept any money, but you'll be on your way shortly. I think sometimes about how in the Ojiway language, the language of my native ancestors, age is literally translated as how many winters you've survived. Anin ando babunagan. How old are you? Or more accurately, how many winters are you? If that isn't a commentary on the realities of life in the North Woods, I don't know what is.

This idea of survival through relations, of seeing how pieces of our own thought and pieces of other people's thought can come together to make anew, is an incredibly powerful way of approaching scholarship and a scholarly career. Perhaps it's not as brutal a task as surviving winters, but it is a way of finding joy and connection, something that can often be hard to come by in academic institutions. Kathi describes that if you think about your career as an assemblage early on, it gives you permission to go places you might not go. While I'm not sure I intentionally have set myself on the path of assemblage, perhaps it's not surprising that I've always been taken by Yancey's work.

While pre-tenure I focused my scholarly pursuits narrowly and deeply on digital design and multimodal pedagogy, but I wasn't finding joy, inspiration, or connection in this deep dive. Instead, I felt a strong pull to forage, to make connections, to see how my world and relations connected up with the world I was pursuing in books and writing. My own perceptions of how the field and my institutions at the time would value assemblage led me to bracket a large part of myself off for a long time. But eventually I couldn't keep things walled off and found myself exploring the crafting practices of women from my tribe, the Kuna Bay Indian Community, Lake Superior Band of Chipoa Indians up in the UP of Michigan in the Qina Peninsula on Lake Superior.

Like a good young researcher, I began this work with an IRB approved study, "Facebook, Fry Bread, and Fancy Dancing: a Native Approach to Digital Pedagogy. According to the IRB proposal, which is amusing to go back and read, my goals were to learn from American Indians: one, what choices they make when designing their regalia; two, what choices they make when making fry bread; specifically to be sold at the pow-wow, and three, what choices they make when composing on Facebook. I said this will add to the body of knowledge in the field of English composition as to what counts as composing and how contextual and situational environments play a role in compositional choices. So, as part of this study for three years, I returned home at least once a year to attend either a pow-ow or a cultural event where I would connect with folks I knew in the community. I would show up with my business cards, my IRB forms, and my little flip cam video camera in hand, and I would ask folks about something they were making or doing.

I gathered a lot of stories. Stories of basket making, wild ricing, fry bread making, working with birch bark, regalia making. And in these stories, I always saw connections to how I understood and taught multimodal composing. There were often lessons about slowness and gathering with care, foraging perhaps, and thinking not just about the end product, but about the processes with which one engages and how those processes are intimately connected and in relation with the entire ecology of things that sustain our making in the first place. I learned so much from this project, both about the content itself, but also about research methods, ethics, and positionality.

Interestingly, though I totally get it now, the majority of things I learned from this project never made their way into publications. In my 2023 Computers and Writing keynote, I talked about my inability to see through to publication the majority of content from this project. I had numerous essay drafts, revise and resubmits, and interest from a book publisher, and yet most of it remains on my hard drive. I described in this talk my decision to not pursue a monograph. I couldn't shake the feeling that underpinning all of this work was this fact. I went into my community into my homelands with my kin to learn from them. And yet I felt this act was justified only by receiving university sanctioned IRB approval, my relative signatures on consent forms. And I felt like this work would only matter if I shared these stories in peer-review journals or a university press.

What if instead all of these stories aren't for everyone, but instead were for me to listen, to engage, to share in spaces where my body is collocated and my ancestors and kin can hold me accountable through the whispers I feel and hear beside me. Whispers I fear most people reading an article in CCC or a book by a reputable university press may not hear or listen to. In other words, this particular research left me with an awful lot of richness of thought and practice, but it did not leave me with a lot of lines on my CV. At the end of the day, though, I think it's part of the risk and also the reward if we see it the right way one takes when one approaches the life of a scholar as assemblage.

So much of this assemblage approach to a scholarly life is a process and a practice. It gave me, as Kathi says, a way of resting the areas that you consider your principal area. Throughout my career this far, I remain committed to understanding how rhetorical practices can enable better futures. And for me, this often happens through the use of multimodality. Understanding for myself the power of making for all of the native women I spoke with helps me deeply think through what it might mean to approach our work through the lens of what I've termed a slow. It was the process of approaching my work through the practice of assemblage that got me to this concept. I've described this in different presentations, not a publication, that a slow composition is a practice that reflects deeply on the self and one's responsibility to ancestors, land bases, and futures. It knows where it's been and senses where it wants to go while recognizing the best one can often do is come to a project with a good heart and a willingness to listen; takes seriously the voices and gut feelings that tell you something is off, that something needs space, that not all things are for sharing; recognizes that gathering the assets we use to make any project, be it multimodal or otherwise, needs to be done with care and respect and an acute awareness that not all things are meant for our taking. Understands writing and making is composing and composing is culturing. Builds possible futures by turning to ancestors often heard and unsighted.

It is through embodying this work in my own being as a scholar and teacher that I feel the most joy and most comfort. It is where I see, as Kathi reminds us, everything is connected. How we sit and work within these spaces and how we understand making a new out of existing text will undoubtedly vary from person to person. But it opens up possibility and joy and a future focused on becoming. I end my ruminations on assemblage with a story from the classroom. In spring 2024, I taught a grad seminar in multimodal composing. In one of our last weeks together, we read some pieces from Yancey and McElroy's Assembling Composition. For our class time, I brought in stacks of composition textbooks from the early 2000s that had been collecting on my bookshelves. Most of these textbooks, seeing and writing, compose, design, advocate, remix, picturing texts were cutting-edge at the time.

Taking a multimodal approach to the work of composing, I brought in scissors, glue, and construction paper and asked students to use the textbooks as raw material for a collage. Our class time together and the resulting collages were delightful. Students shared how after the fact many of them hung these collages on their refrigerators, their office walls and doors, or put them into journals that they keep. And yet none of us, myself included, can't remember what the exact prompt was. What was it I asked them to assemble? They had a semester's worth of knowledge about multimmodal composing as a discipline and a practice. They had glue sticks and scissors and instructions, whatever they were, and a willingness to destroy a pre-existing text to make a new. To what ends, does it even matter that none of us recall? It begs the question, for me at least, what the overall goal of assemblage might be, and how expansive we understand the concept. Is it as Johnson-Eilola and Selber famously articulated in 2007 that, quote, "assemblages are texts built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context," end quote.

But what if we don't remember the problem we were working to solve? And what if the problem is more of a condition of our being, our being with each other and our ways of practicing scholarship in the academy? Kathi ends her assemblage interview encouraging us to understand assemblage through the aesthetic, through understanding the kind of change that art is able to affect. As such, perhaps we can and should slowly assemble together as doing so can, I hope, help us build better worlds.

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