On a small contested part of the world, the peninsula of Crimea, once a part of the former Soviet Union, lives a people who have endured genocide and who have struggled to etch out an identity in a land once their own. They are the Crimean Tatar. Even their name, an exonym promoting the Crimeans’ “peripheral status” (Powell) and their ensuing “cultural schizophrenia” (Vizenor), bears witness to the otherization they have withstood throughout centuries. However, despite attempts to relegate them to the history books, Crimeans are alive and well in the “motherland,” but not without some difficulty. Having been forced to reframe their identities because of numerous imperialistic, colonialist, and soviet behavior and policies, there have been many who have resisted, first and foremost through rhetorical sovereignty, the ability to reframe Crimean Tatar identity through Crimean Tatar rhetoric. This negotiation of identity through rhetoric has included a fierce defense of their language and culture in what Malea Powell calls a “war with homogeneity,” a struggle for identification based on resistance. This thesis seeks to understand the rhetorical function of naming practices as acts that inscribe material meaning and perform marginalization or resistance within the context of Crimea-L, a Yahoo! Group listserv as well as immediate and remote Crimean history. To analyze the rhetoric of marginalization and resistance in naming practices, I use the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) within recently archived discourses. Ruth Wodak’s DHA strategies will be reappropriated as Naming Practice Strategies, depicting efforts in otherization or rhetorical sovereignty.