Rhetorical Devices In Chief Joseph's Speech Analysis

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The first rhetorical device is parallelism, for Chief Joseph he uses this many times throughout his speech. For example When he says “We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears.” (p. 3) Though he was making a comparison to them and the white men, he was saying that the Nac Perce tribe was the prey and the white men were the predators. In another way of saying this, he meant that the white men had to gain the Indians trust to just backstab them and say get off our land or else we will call a war. For when this happened, Chief Joseph said another thing that represents parallelism which was “If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you open an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper.” (p. 4) To Chief Joseph, he had vitriol …show more content…

In doing repetition he can get his point across with saying this phrase over and over again with more emotion each time he says it. During Chief Joseph’s speech, he repeats the phrase “Good words..” (p.3) with saying something meaningful with is after words like “Good words do not give me back my children.” Although he said this many times Joseph got more and more emotionally after every time. In another part of his speech he says uses it again but in a more powerful course of action; Joseph states the word “...free...” (p.4) Chief Joseph’s statement was for them to be “...free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade...” The Chief wanted the white men to hear what they were doing to them by kicking them off of there own land and telling them where to go afterward. This was the Chief telling them we don’t want to fight anymore we just want our land back and not to move and take our rights away. Overall Chief Joseph wanted to be persuasive by repeating certain words to emphasize their meaning and to get across to the white