Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 161-62.
Abstract
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a Dakota who, born and raised to adulthood on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation near Fort Thompson, South Dakota, became a successful academic and a writer. On her departure from Eastern Washington University where she taught for nineteen years, she was described by her colleagues as "one of Indian Studies' secondary founders and also, in many ways, its conscience."
She dedicates her book to "the indigenous writer in the modern world" and declares it to be "designed to raise and discuss issues that are some of the most central and crucial questions in the field of American Indian Studies." The volume consists of thirteen pieces {some first published elsewhere}, grouped into five parts of two to four essays or book reviews each, which make for extremely interesting reading because Cook-Lynn examines familiar issues in history and scholarship from a non-traditional point of view. She also points out that because fiction and scholarship by Indians is "validated by non-Indian publishers, editors, critics and scholars," its value as a body of documents assisting "the recovery of memory" is too often narrowed in the interests of not offending whites while pleasing them aesthetically.
She defends with vigor and irony her central thesis that Indians are not "done for," "over," "dead and dying," but "at this moment, alive and well, walking the earth and remembering who we are." This is the vital basis for most of her arguments, for if Indians were indeed a dying people there would be no need to take the actions this book cries for: reparations, a more truthful history, an end to racism and a continuance of affirmative action, the perception of Indians as a force that must be dealt with on political, social, and economic terms. She goes further: the indigenous-ness of Indians is unique, making them unlike any other American landowners; Indian Reservations are Indian homelands.
A mere review cannot begin to respond in any fully useful way to a book carrying such heavy moral weight and argued with such intensity. Passionate it is, defiant, angry, sorrowful, indeed, but her arguments themselves work against accepting such qualities as the reviewer's primary declarations about this work. Cook-Lynn would choose to be judged on her scholarship, the rigor of her arguments, their irrefutability, and also by the success of her aim: that we whites would come to understand our effrontery, our wrongheadedness in the matter of white scholarship concerning Indians and their work, a scholarship overlaid on the great and as yet wholly unmitigated wrongs we have committed and continue to commit against a people who constitute, in her view, if not actually, virtually, a Third World Nation.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln