Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 138.
Abstract
The fertile mind of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has produced essays, lectures, and papers on an array of issues confronting Native America, a selection of them presented here. Writing from a Dakota-centered view, Cook-Lynn provides analysis and commentary on oppression that arises and takes shape out of language, knowledge production, and "misrepresentations of Indian people on the part of individuals and institutions. Literature, federal Indian policies, the academy, American Indian Studies, scholarly theoretical trends, and art are indices to Anti-Indian ism in America.
Cook-Lynn's authoritative assessment of the state of Native American Literary Studies provides insight into her appreciation of the complications and contradictions that colonialism plants and perpetuates. She criticizes the academy and Native writers alike for Native identity fraud, cooptation of Native academic elites, avoiding critique in Native literature, and Indian writers' preoccupation with the slippery slopes of identity at the expense of pressing issues of tribal nationalism. For Cook-Lynn, American Indian Studies, too, is failing if it is not first and foremost concerned with the history and present state of tribal political welfare.
The academy has successfully erased Indian history from the American narrative and history departments. Monographs, exhibitions, documentaries, and Disney movies perpetuate sanitized American historical narratives. The responsibility to correct a seemingly irreversible erasure falls to American Indian Studies, Native scholars, and Native fiction writers. For Cook-Lynn, the problematic "tribeless" voice of some Indian fiction writers produces a literature that offers emotional satisfaction, but little substantiated tribal knowledges.
In the most compelling essay, which discusses the Indian-white reconciliation movement in South Dakota, Cook-Lynn connects contemporary issues of land reform, water rights, and the Pick-Sloan plan with the shell game of federal fiduciary and trust responsibilities, tribal sovereignty, and relentless efforts to expand state authority over tribal governments. For Cook-Lynn reconciliation is unconscionable and impossible while the state continues to dispossess Indians of land, destroy Indian economies, and simultaneously undermine sovereignty and evade trust responsibilities. As a youthful witness to her father's involvement in tribal affairs and observer of the destructive impact of Pick-Sloan, she provides a "Native voice" that moves the study of federal Indian policies from abstraction to human experience.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln