"The Violation of the Earth": Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's "From the River's Edge" in the Historical Context of the Pick-Sloan Missouri River Dam Project

Abstract

rom the Rivers Edge (1991) by Dakota Sioux author and critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a novel that links community breakdown and economic and spiritual loss to alteration of the Missouri River and destruction of the river valley environment. Set on the Crow Creek Reservation of central South Dakota in the 1960s, it focuses around a trial in which rancherJohn Tatekeya seeks the return of cattle stolen from him by the son of a white neighbor. Although he wins the case, Tatekeya neither gets his cattle back nor receives any compensation for them. Moreover, it is he whose character is assassinated during the trial, an ordeal that he finds increasingly farcical and the occasion of even greater loss than the theft's damage to his livelihood. Particularly disturbing is the testimony against him of a young man named Jason Big Pipe because it confirms Tatekeya's worst fear that the crime has involved not just white men but Dakotas, his own relatives. 3 85 When Tatekeya was a child, his father and Jason's grandfather took part in a ceremony that made them brothers and bound the two families together as relatives with sacred obligations of respect and loyalty. In spite of these kinship responsibilities, Jason volunteers to testify for the defense and implies on the stand that Tatekeya is a drunkard and a negligent rancher who has somehow lost his own cattle. Moreover, he reveals that Tatekeya, though married, is involved