Guest Editors' Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Abstract

Guest editors’ IntroductionEssentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Melanie K. Yazzie (bio) and Nick Estes (bio) There are no two sides to this story. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Interview with Nick Estes Badger is always in Dakota stories and he is always asked many questions even though he is not important . . . But, he always has something to say . . . he always has an answer . . . Sometimes he is right but, just as often, he is wrong. Quite wrong. But what he does, you see, is . . . he keeps the plot moving . . . Without him, you see, the story would come to an early and unsatisfactory end. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn ON HISTORY In July 2013, we sat down with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at a restaurant in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. Nick got to know “Liz” (as she is known to colleagues and friends) through their mutual work to address pervasive anti-Indian racism in Rapid City. Until meeting her that day Melanie had never spoken with Liz, despite having written a [End Page 9] master’s thesis on Cook-Lynn’s role in shaping American Indian intellectual history. Even before fully understanding the profound impact she had on our maturation as scholars, activists, and committed Native nationalists, we were both long-time students of Cook-Lynn. We were extremely familiar with her foundational role in the development of American Indian studies and her unwavering commitment to the livelihood of Native people and nations. Between us, we had read, used, and cherished her entire oeuvre of fictional and nonfictional work. Our three-hour conversation with Liz on that humid summer afternoon in “the heart of everything that is,” He Sapa (the Black Hills), will endure as a high point for both of us in our careers as Native scholars. Even though we covered many topics, historical eras, and biographical details during our conversation with Liz, one particular comment of hers stood out. We were mocking the prevailing expectation that scholarship on Native history must maintain “objectivity” by counterbalancing Native perspectives with those advanced by a U.S. national narrative, though this expectation never operates the other way around. In the frank and eloquent style for which she is known, she stated, “There are no two sides to this story.” Although much has changed in academia and its treatment of Native peoples and their histories, it is still assumed that the notion of objectivity guides the social and hard sciences and history toward attaining “truth.” Objectivity, or the popular idiom that “there are always two sides to every story,” implies that disciplines like history exist in a politically and historically unbiased vacuum, untarnished by their imperial and colonial origins as instruments of power and domination. Cook-Lynn’s unequivocal proclamation that there is only one side to history forces the trope of objectivity out of the arena of assumption and places it as an object of critique within a long-standing and deeply rooted tradition of Native intellectual history that predates, endures, and challenges U.S. colonial occupation. In so doing, she forces scholars of history to contend with the prior and ongoing existence of Native people and political entities in the lands and histories of the United States that it has claimed as its own only through imperial conquest.1 Cook-Lynn noted during our conversation she has been dismissed as an “essentialist” by other scholars many times for proclamations like “there are no two sides to this story.” She chuckled about this. Anyone in the humanities who does what could be considered critical work knows that being labeled an essentialist can sometimes be seen as (and sometimes is) an academic death sentence. We observed how often the label of essentialism has tended to undermine the entire purpose of American Indian studies to emphatically and unapologetically defend and foster tribal survival. Cook-Lynn has long used the term “survival” to describe the purpose of American Indian studies. In New Indians, Old Wars, she offers one of her many meditations on survival, posing the [End Page 10] question, “How can a native people survive within and alongside their historical oppressors?” She goes on to state that this “is not a rhetorical question. It...