Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Research Articles

A Study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with reference to Indian Genocide

This work is a study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who is proficient scholar and hails from South Dakotas and Sioux nations and their turmoil, anguish and lamentation to retrieve their lands and preserve their culture and race. Many a aboriginals were killed in the post colonization. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn grieves and her lamentation for the people of Dakotas yields sympathy towards the survived at Wounded Knee massacre and the great exploitation of the livelihood of the indigenous people and the cruelty of American Federal government. Treaty conserved indigenous lands had been lost due to the title of Sioux Nation and many Dakotas and Dakotas had been forced off from their homelands due to the anti-Indian legislation, poverty and federal Indian – white American policy. The whites had no more regard for or perceiving the native’s peoples’ culture and political status as considered by Jefferson’s epoch. And to collect bones and Indian words, delayed justice all these issues tempt her to write. The authors accuses that America was in ignorance and racism and imperialism which was prevalent in the westward movement. The natives want to recall their struggles, and their futures filled with uncertainty by the reality and losses by the white and Indian life in America which had undergone deliberate diminishment by the American government sparks the writer to back for the indigenous peoples. This multifaceted study links American study with Native American studies. This research brings to highlight the unchangeable scenario of the Native American who is in the bonds of as American further this research scrutinizes Elizabeth’s diplomacy and legalized decolonization theory which reflects in her literature career and her works but defies to her own doctrines.

Making Indigenous Culture the Foundation of Indigenous Governance Today: The Mi’kmaq Rights Initiative of Nova Scotia, Canada

Making Indigenous Culture the Foundation of Indigenous Governance Today: The Mi’kmaq Rights Initiative of Nova Scotia, Canada Maura Hanrahan (bio) We need to rebel against what they want us to become, start remembering the qualities of our ancestors and act on those remembrances. This is the kind of spiritual revolution that will ensure our survival. —GERALD TAIAIAKE ALFRED, WASÁSE: INDIGENOUS PATHWAYS OF ACTION AND FREEDOM Indigenousness in the Colonial Past and Present Fully aware of their disadvantaged political position, Indigenous leaders continue to engage in Canadian political processes. As Indigenous scholar Dale Turner notes, Canada is one of the world’s constitutional democracies that has, through its legal and political relationships, created political spaces, such as land claims policy, that facilitate the rights of Indigenous peoples.1 But these spaces are limited and, from an Indigenous perspective, inadequate and hugely flawed. The consent of the state is required for virtually any significant political change for Indigenous people, which indicates the ongoing lopsided power relationship between Canadian Indigenous people and the state. These processes are rooted in European and North American settler notions of Indigenous people, communities, and nations and are part of the ongoing colonial project. It is clear that the Mi’kmaq Chiefs of Nova Scotia recognize the necessity of working within the parameters set by colonial superstructures. But they also see the value in trying to strive for forms of sovereignty outside these parameters and in accordance with Mi’kmaq culture. The result of this is the tripartite Mi’kmaq Rights Initiative (MRI), aimed at just treaty implementation and governance and shared social and economic development in Nova Scotia. The MRI is unique in Canada and is not part of any existing Canadian political processes. Calls to reclaim the values that once made Indigenous governance effective are part of an ongoing pattern in which Indigenous ways of seeing, being, and living are seen and utilized as resistance strategies. As Creek/Cherokee scholar Craig [End Page 75] Womack explains, Indigenous cultures, as understood through oral tradition, are inherently political and are marked by flexibility and adaptability. Indigenous cultures allow Indigenous leaders to attempt to “reopen discussion of full national status rather than working within the current limiting legal definitions as if they are set in stone.”2 This is just what the MRI tries to do. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Map of Nova Scotia, Canada. Indigenous governance structures as they exist today are the outcomes of an ongoing colonial process that began with European incursion into North America some four to five centuries ago in the case of the Mi’kmaq. The erosion of Indigenous governance and all that has happened in concert with it has deeply affected Indigenous people in what is now Canada. Indigenous people remain marginalized by political processes and structures in Canada and even from the national political conversation and public discourse. As the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) asserts, “The current relationship between First Nations and Parliament has been characterized by a long history of interference and mistrust, [an] outdated legislative framework inhibiting progress and growth . . . and education used as a tool of oppression.”3 Colonial policy destroyed Indigenous governments as well as governance practices with a combination of stealth and blunt instruments of political [End Page 76] oppression. In 1927, for instance, the Indian Act, which governs every aspect of the lives of status Indians, forbade First Nations people to form political organizations. Latterly, First Nations leaders were excluded from constitutional talks in Canada until the First Ministers Conference on Aboriginal Rights from 1983 to 1987. Referencing the desperate economic and social conditions of many First Nations reserves, especially in the North, the AFN refers to Canada’s system of “apartheid.”4 For these reasons, members of Namgis First Nation, British Columbia, performed a once-outlawed copper-cutting shaming ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in July 28, 2014.5 In this context come calls to return to the Indigenous values which long shaped and underpinned Indigenous governance. These calls are often heard in Indigenous community meetings, for instance, and they also come from such Indigenous scholars as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Angela R. Riley, Robert Porter...

Guest Editors' Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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...

“There Are No Two Sides to This Story”: An Interview with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

“There Are No Two Sides to This Story”: An Interview with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

“No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”: Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism

“No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism Jennifer Nez Denetdale (bio) Dakota Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s scholarship has been influential in shaping Indigenous studies for at least four decades. She has steadfastly criticized how scholarship in Native studies has been hijacked by American exceptionalism so that the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples and our present dilemmas continue to be erased, sanitized, and denied as the United States poses to the rest of the world as a multicultural nation that treats all of its citizens equally across race, class, and gender. Against scholarship that sustains such U.S. claims, Cook-Lynn insists that our responsibility as scholars is “to the tribal nations that have survived terrible wars, that have signed solemn treaties with our enemies, that possess vast resources, the rivers people live by, the lands where our relatives are buried. This legacy is our constituency.”1 As a Diné woman who struggles with academia precisely because of the kinds of challenges that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn speaks of, I take her writing to be inspiring first for my own efforts to sustain the criticism of American imperialism that is founded on the genocide and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and second as sources that can be built on to move the conversation in ways that are productive and regenerative. Cook-Lynn’s insistence that Indigenous scholarship must be devoted to the support of tribal nations, sovereignty, and self-determination has been taken up in various ways and sometimes in ways that have limited our definitions of what sovereignty and self-determination mean. [End Page 111] By limitations, I mean that Indigenous studies has been slow to take up the historical and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in what is marked as urban and non-reservation or non-tribal lands.2 Because of land dispossession, the processes of capitalism, and ethnic cleansing, Indigenous peoples’ defining experiences have included displacement, relocation, and migration into urban spaces. Yet discursive practices connected to federal Indian policies have cast Indigenous peoples who reside in urban spaces and off legally recognized Indian lands as somehow less “traditional” and as instead “modern” or “progressive.” Although Native people’s experiences in urban spaces and border towns have been studied, there remains much to understand about how land dispossession and U.S. policies of ethnic cleansing have shaped the contours of movement from U.S.-designated tribal lands to urban spaces and border towns and how Indigenous people are endlessly cast as the outsiders and aliens in formerly recognized Indigenous spaces. This essay, then, presents Diné historical and lived experiences in towns that border the Navajo Nation, with a focus on Gallup and Farmington, New Mexico, but with the recognition that other towns like Winslow, Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Page, Arizona, also have histories of violence against Navajos that have everything to do with the United States as a settler nation whose thirst for Indigenous land and resources remains unabated. A history of Navajo and Native protest against the violence in border towns momentarily disrupts and unsettles, and concessions are made. Very few studies have been undertaken of border town violence, even though this violence is pervasive and a feature of Native life in these communities. Further, most of the understanding of border town violence pathologizes Navajos as both the victims and perpetrators from a health risk perspective. This violence against Navajos is evident across decades and usually is only remarked on when the violence appears extraordinary or spectacular. For the most part, settlers remain innocent in the narratives that are created about their relationships with Navajos in border towns.3 As a Diné woman who has spent most of her life on Navajo land and moving back and forth from my home community of Tohatchi, New Mexico, to urban spaces like Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Albuquerque, I participate in a pattern of travel and movement across invisible boundaries that demarcate space as either “tribal” or “urban and non-Indian” and which supposedly limit “Indians” to designated tribal spaces. When “Indians” leave these spaces, they are cast as out of place, “modern,” “progressive,” “urban,” and even “non-traditional.” My mother shares stories of...

17th Annual American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential Address: American Indian Studies/Native American Studies in a Twenty-First Century World: Practices and Opportunities

17th Annual American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential AddressAmerican Indian Studies/Native American Studies in a Twenty-First Century World: Practices and Opportunities Lloyd L. Lee (bio) Good morning. I am honored and pleased to be in Akimel O'odham territory participating with esteemed scholars, students, and community members at the 17th Annual American Indian Studies Association conference. I want to thank the members of the American Indian Studies Association Council (Myla Vicenti Carpio, Jeanette Haynes Writer, Elise Boxer, Richard Meyers, Larry Gross, Tennille Marley, Simon Ortiz, and Michael Yellow Bird), Elizabeth Martos, and the American Indian studies program here at Arizona State University for hosting this conference. I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation. My clans are Kinyaa'áanii (Towering House), born for Tł'ááschíí (Red Bottom). My maternal grandfather's clan is Áshįįhí (Salt), and my paternal grandfather's clan is Tábąąhá (Water's Edge). I grew up in Albuquerque, Naschitti, and Vanderwagon, New Mexico, and continue to keep a close association with my communities by voting in tribal elections; attending ceremonies, celebrations, funerals; and talking with community members on various topics related to education, politics, tribal governance, identity, leadership, environment, sports, and so forth. In my academic life, I am an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico and the director of the Institute for American Indian Research. My academic training is in the discipline of American studies with an emphasis in Southwest studies, race, class, ethnicity, and American Indian history. My research focuses [End Page 5] are on American Indian identity, Navajo masculinities, Navajo philosophies, American Indian leadership, Navajo transformative research, and American Indian community building. I presently teach courses on identity, tribal governance, leadership, gender, research methods, community building, and worldviews. Like many of my colleagues in AIS/NAS, I have spent a good part of my academic career theorizing and writing about colonization, decolonization, identity, gender, philosophies, and Native nation building. My future research plans include an oral history project on the Navajo Special Program at Intermountain school in the 1950s and early 1960s, develop a clearinghouse for the Navajo boy's puberty ceremony, examine the concept of American Indian creativity and cultural production, and develop a praxis approach to decolonizing the Navajo Nation. I anticipate this second stage of my work will assist students and the discipline in American Indian community building and empowerment. I've worked in Native American studies officially for the past eight years; but, I've really been a part of it my whole life. I want to share with you my thoughts on the state of AIS/NAS and the opportunities our discipline faces this century. I will discuss several American Indian scholarly perspectives on the discipline, highlight four AIS/NAS departments and programs, and end with my views on five opportunities our discipline faces. I've examined various American Indian scholars on the state of AIS/NAS including Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Vine Deloria Jr., Clara Sue Kidwell, James Riding In, Michael Yellow Bird, Jace Weaver, Duane Champagne, Robert Warrior, Audra Simpson, Melissa K. Nelson, and Sidner Larson. All of these great minds project key thoughts about the history of American Indian studies/Native American studies (AIS/NAS) and what we need to do. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's "Who Stole Native American Studies?," published in Wicazo Sa Review in 1997, describes the first American Indian scholars' gathering in 1970 at Princeton University. The scholars at the gathering called on AIS/NAS to focus on indigenousness (culture, place, and philosophy) and sovereignty (history and law). They also supported research on Native-based practitioners and tenured professors would be expected to develop appropriate research designs, collect data, and publish.1 Jace Weaver's "More Light Than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies," published in 2007, declares the AIS/NAS field a mess. He advocates the field needs to serve Native peoples, communities, and develop an academic association where colleges and universities respect the field. He believes the Native American Indigenous Studies Association is such an academic association although the American Indian Studies Association has been in existence longer and was envisioned and developed by AIS/NAS professors and...

“Words Have Consequences”: Reconstructing and Implementing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Nation-Centered Literary Theory

“Words Have Consequences”: Reconstructing and Implementing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Nation-Centered Literary Theory

Guest editors’ Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Guest editors’ Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

“God Made Me an Indian”: Who Made Native Studies?

“God Made Me an Indian”Who Made Native Studies? Edward Valandra (bio) Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country? God made me an Indian. Tatanka Iyotake This article examines the first dissertation written about the significant role that Native studies scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has played in the development of Native studies. The dissertation, Reading Cook-Lynn: Anti-Colonialism, Cultural Resistance, and Native Empowerment, by Kodjo Ruben Afagla, identifies the initial challenges that Native studies has faced in its development as a discipline. The leading challenge, of course, is Native Country’s relationship to mainstream Native studies: Native communities, who comprise Native Country, should be the primary constituency and beneficiary of the discipline’s research. Afagla’s work explores Cook-Lynn’s influence on how Native studies is addressing—or, in Cook-Lynn’s view, fallen short of addressing—this challenge. Afagla explains that in the mid- 1980s Cook-Lynn established herself as a leading Native studies spokesperson. Her consistent call to [End Page 46] Native studies has been that, without a sharp focus, the discipline would become fuzzy and uncritical; it would not step up to the original tasks before it: decolonization, nation- building, defense of Native peoples, and cultural revitalization. Arguably, disciplinary fuzziness over the decades has given rise to a claim that Native studies is for everyone—that Native peoples hold no special relation to the discipline and therefore that Native communities can neither hold the discipline accountable nor provide its intellectual center. For Native studies to serve Native peoples, disciplinary coherency remains a primary challenge. Afagla admires Cook-Lynn’s work, but he nonetheless critiques her unwavering position that any Native scholar or Native studies scholar who fails to confront U.S. colonization within our respective Native nations is at best marginal to the discipline, if not to Native peoples. According to Afagla, this position has alienated both Native and non- Native intellectuals whose research is not centered on confronting colonization or whose work is not derivative from this aim, i.e., does not promote meaningful Native sovereignty. Afagla’s concern is that Cook-Lynn’s approach could stunt Native studies, particularly its disciplinary development. This article considers this and another of Afagla’s leading critiques: Does Cook-Lynn’s uncompromising stance about how Native studies scholars expend their intellectual energies help or hurt the discipline? Does her singular focus adversely affect the discipline? I argue it does not; it sharpens Native studies’ intellectual edge. The critical focus she advocates is necessary for Native studies to address topics essential to Native Country’s development from the foundation of being sovereign nations. I also emphasize how groundbreaking Afagla’s work is on Native studies. Approaching its fiftieth anniversary, Native studies now has an opportunity to self- reflect, to assess its contribution to Native Country, and to rethink its disciplinary evolution and revolution since 1969. This article engages an important dialogue about the first fifty years of Native studies as a discipline and considers how and where Native studies might best focus its intellectual capacities over the next fifty years. After all, Native Country, sans USA, will look much different than it does today. NATIVE STUDIES’ ORIGIN STORY In 2019 Native studies as a mainstream discipline will, as I said, celebrate its fiftieth year. From its inception, Native studies has experienced programmatic growth.1 The first Native studies departments were established at both Trent University and the University of Minnesota in 1969; today, several dozen programs offer baccalaureate degrees. Programs that have department status, such as the University [End Page 47] of Manitoba and the University of Arizona, offer a doctorate in Native studies. Of course, Native intellectuals and Native studies scholars who understand the discipline’s evolution in academe know that whatever gains Native studies have made have been both challenging and challenged. Leading up to Native studies’ entry into the academy—from the mid- 1950s to the early 1970s—sociopolitical activism increased throughout the United States. For example, Native Country successfully defended...

Editor's Commentary: Honoring the Legacy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Editor’s CommentaryHonoring the Legacy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn James Riding In (bio) When Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes approached me several years ago with the suggestion for a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review in honor of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s many accomplishments, I became ecstatic because these graduate students had recognized the significance of her intellectual contributions to our knowledge. Liz, as we call her, truly deserves such an acknowledgment of her accomplishments from the journal that she cofounded in 1985.1 Although now in her mid-eighties and living in the Black Hills near Rapid City, South Dakota, she continues to fiercely oppose the crippling effects of colonialism and anti-Indianism on Indian life and sovereignty. What should we expect? After all, she is legendary for her fervor to develop American Indian studies as a stand-alone academic discipline, criticism of academia for its flawed research methodologies and analyses pertaining to the history of Indian–white relations, scathing critiques of imperialistic U.S. Indian laws and policies, and promotion of Indian nationalism as a strategy of Indian survival as distinct, self-governing political entities. In this commentary, I will share a few of my memories about the role that Cook-Lynn played in the creation of the American Indian studies program at Arizona State University (ASU). I had the good fortune to meet her on February 8, 1993, at Scottsdale Community College on the Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona during a regional hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs about amending the “toothless” American Indian Religious [End Page 5] Freedom Act of 1978. Dr. Beatrice Medicine,2 a mutual friend, introduced us. Of course, I did not realize then that Cook-Lynn and her writings would have such a lasting influence on my views about what American Indian studies should be.3 Cook-Lynn’s association with ASU started in the late 1990s. As Dr. Carol Chiago Lujan, I, and others began the work of developing an AIS program, we called on Cook-Lynn for her expertise and leadership in this area. She subsequently agreed to come to campus during several spring semesters in the capacity of a visiting professor. During meetings and one-on-one conversations, she spoke with eloquence and authority about the defensive, regulatory, and transformative roles of AIS while stressing that AIS must be grounded on the principles of sovereignty and indigenousness.4 With the support of the ASU administration and our allies, we have built a stand-alone program with its own paradigm, faculty, curriculum, methodologies, journal, conference, and undergraduate and graduate programs.5 Our curriculum has grown to include a rich array of course offerings about matters such as U.S. Indian law, U.S. policy, human rights, governance, repatriation and sacred place issues, colonization/decolonization, human rights, health, historical trauma, activism, leadership, economic development, intellectualism, and language. Our eight full-time faculty members, all citizens of various Indian nations, earned doctorates in AIS, history, philosophy, education, sociology, and social work.6 Adhering to a Cook-Lynn tenet,7 we faculty members view our research, teaching, and service as a “‘sacred’ responsibility to Indian nations undertaken for the sake of cultural survival.”8 Essentially then, the AIS model at ASU is tacitly grounded in the notion that being an AIS professor is substantially more than an eight-to-five job: it is a way of life that entails a willingness to make sacrifices for the common good. We strive to equip our students with a useful set of skills for success in various employment settings with practical and intellectual knowledge of Indian issues. Some of our undergraduate alumni have entered graduate studies and law school while others have found employment in the public and private sectors. Of particular note, Stephen Roe Lewis, a 2005 graduate, is now completing his first term as the governor of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.9 Graduates of our relatively new master’s program are finding similar opportunities. Over the years, ASU’s administrative support for AIS and other Indian-focused programs has grown. On August 31, 2015, President Michael M. Crow sent an...

Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen, and: The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism by Jodi A. Byrd, and: A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen, and: The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism by Jodi A. Byrd, and: A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Introduction

Introduction Margo Lukens (bio) and Siobhan Senier (bio) At a Native American Literature Symposium in the late 1990s, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the respected Crow Creek Lakota author, scholar, and editor of Wicazo-Sa Review, opined that most scholars of Native literature knew nothing of literature from Native New England, not to mention Maine, and urged a young colleague to publish some scholarship on it. The prospect was daunting; at the time, not only was there a void of scholarship, but most of the primary work was out of print. Since then, things are looking up. The essays included below offer a strong response, after some intervening years, to Professor Cook-Lynn’s request. This special issue follows close on the heels of the publication of a woliwikhikon, or “great book.” Peskotomuhkati Wolastuoqewi Latuwewakon: A Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary (2008) represents lifetimes of work in Passamaquoddy language preservation and teaching, involving numerous community members and native speakers.1 The project began in the 1970s as a manuscript collaboration between linguist Philip S. LeSourd and Wayne Newell, a native speaker of Passamaquoddy and director of the bilingual education program at Indian Township in Princeton, Maine. The dictionary’s publication also represents a new way that works of Native literature and culture are getting produced and published. A true collaboration among community knowledge keepers and academics, it drew on the expertise of longtime friends David A. Francis, a native Passamaquoddy-Maliseet speaker and elder at the Pleasant Point community, and the linguist Robert M. Leavitt, now [End Page xi] retired as the director of the Mi’kmaq-Maliseet Institute at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Margaret Apt, also from Pleasant Point, served as the community research coordinator. Francis received an honorary doctorate in 2009 from the University of Maine for his devoted work on language preservation, with the dictionary as tangible evidence. He and other Passamaquoddy-Maliseet speakers spent forty years carefully documenting the meanings of the words and phrases. In the dictionary they place these terms in full sentences collected directly from native speakers, to illustrate their meanings and uses. The dictionary is thus much more than a compendium of vocabulary; it is a living document that describes and ensures the cultural survival of the Passamaquoddy people and situates them firmly within their homeland. The word wikhikon means something written or drawn in words or pictures; it can also be a map telling the ways through and uses of the land that feeds and supports people. The dictionary can be read as one of these wikhikonihkuk—a way to understand Passamaquoddy territory as what the Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks would call “a network of waterways and relations” (xl). Maine’s indigenous people have used the territory’s network of rivers for generations: rivers are roads inland and to the sea, roads between communities, roads to seasonal locations, gathering and harvesting places. In the Wabanaki languages, names signal safe or unsafe places for travel, and places where food is plentiful or where communities were established; so the dictionary is about naming place and the networks that constitute it. Besides the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary, this special issue owes an enormous debt to another important wikhikon (or, as the Abenakis would say, awikhigan): Brooks’s own 2008 study, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Like David Francis and his colleagues, Brooks wrote her book out of a sense of responsibility to her own people; like the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary, The Common Pot has benefited a much wider audience. It brings a particular focus to the literary history of the Wabanakis and other northeastern indigenous people, illustrating their deployments of writing as political and intellectual responses [End Page xii] to colonization. Brooks makes visible the connection between Wabanaki writing in English and traditional systems of textualization—such as wampum belts and maps on birchbark scrolls—that were used to document social organization, law, treaties, and people’s relationship to land. She provides linguistic evidence of this in the Abenaki verb root awigha, to draw, write, or map, and the noun awikhigan, the tool resulting from the act of drawing, writing, or mapping. Brooks recounts how awikhiganak, birchbark scrolls containing symbolic...

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires:Native American Literary Studies in Europe Deborah Madsen (bio) It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and research programs in Native studies. The institutional conditions under which Native literary studies takes place in a European context give rise to four primary methodological approaches, which I address below: national (though not necessarily tribal nationalist), multiethnic, universal, and postcolonial. European scholars of Native American literary studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative "American studies" approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their groundbreaking book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). It is to these claims that my title gestures while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American literature, and in scholarly publications are used as "the basis for the cynical absorption into the 'melting pot,' pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice" (Why I Can't 96). 1 The category of "Native" is effectively "melted" into another category of cultural experience (with the attendant loss of Indigenous identities, historical experiences, and claims to justice), whether this is the universalizing canon of "literature" per se or, more specifically, a national American (settler) literature, a national [End Page 353] canon of minority "multiethnic" literature that fails to distinguish adequately between Indigenous and migrant literary production, or a transnational "postcolonial" canon. As Wolfgang Hochbruck predicted back in 1991, "creating new reservations for minority literatures would eventually create new problems" (51). It would seem that this problematic time has come. Consequently, Cook-Lynn's insight guides my critique here of some of the directions in which Native American literary studies is currently moving in Europe. If the term "Native" is a simulated category that brings together under a homogenizing banner the rich diversity of Native tribal cultures, so too is the term "Europe." Much of what I have to say about the current state of Native American studies in Europe is focused upon the United Kingdom and on scholarship written in English. Dynamic research cultures in the field of Native studies flourish across continental Europe in very different institutional and nonacademic contexts. A long history of "Indianism" or Native American "hobbyism," for example, helps to promote Native American studies in countries like Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland. Additionally, Europe is, and has been, an important international forum for Native artists, scholars, and activists. Native people have, of course, been visiting Europe since the sixteenth century. As Naila Clerici reminds us, "Native Peoples know the importance of being heard abroad: in Europe they find an audience fascinated by their cultures and rarely biased for economic or political reasons" (7). Clerici may be overstating the claim to political acceptance; Joëlle Rostkowski, in her account of the failure of Deskaheh, the Cayuga chief of the Iroquois Confederacy, to garner international recognition of the conflict between his community and the Canadian nation-state, underlines the refusal of the League of Nations to acknowledge his tribal nation as a sovereign state engaged in an international conflict with another sovereign state (Canada). However, Rostkowski concludes her account with the reminder: Deskaheh paved the way for future generations. The interest in international organizations that Native Americans have demonstrated goes back to the first contacts he established within the League of Nations. In the 1930s, an Iroquois delegation went back to Geneva and was again disappointed by the result of its visit. But some Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee remained convinced that international [End Page 354] organizations could be of some assistance to Indians. The Iroquois were among the first tribes who expressed an interest in the United Nations and, in 1949, they sent a delegation to the opening of...

Wiindigoo Sovereignty and Native Transmotion in Gerald Vizenor's <em>Bearheart</em>

In the study of American Indian literatures, the rise of criticism focused on literary nationalism, with its emphasis on tribal-specific approaches to literary study, the sovereignty of Native nations, and claims to tribal homelands, would seem to herald the displacement of Gerald Vizenor’s work from a central position in the American Indian literary canon. Indeed, Vizenor has been criticized for failing to address or for actively subverting in his creative work and criticism these issues of primary concern to literary nationalists. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the earliest and most ardent proponents for a nationalist perspective in American Indian Studies, identifies Vizenor as “a major voice” in what she calls “mixedblood discourse,” characterized by “an aesthetic that is pathetic or cynical, a tacit notion of the failure of tribal governments as Native institutions and of sovereignty as a concept, and an Indian identity which focuses on individualism rather than First Nation ideology” (“American Indian Intellectualism” 124–25). Sean Kicummah Teuton, arguing for a tribal realist approach to identity formation and knowledge production, sees Vizenor writing from the zone of the trickster in his poststructural criticism, which seems to reject any normative claims to American Indian identity, history, and land: “[D]isconnected from a distinct culture and land, it ultimately cannot support a coherent Native identity, nor protect actual Native territories.” Moreover, Teuton claims that Vizenor’s “ahistorical trickster fiction,” such as his novel Bearheart, “provides little guidance on how to construct one’s own Native selfhood,” and instead

Editor's Commentary

Editor's Commentary James Riding In (bio) This issue contains information about the twelfth annual American Indian Studies Association (AISA) conference and three articles that make a significant contribution to our knowledge. First, however, I will pay homage to the life of Jack D. Forbes. Then I will share an American Indian studies paradigm that my Arizona State University colleagues asked me to craft for a proposal calling for the creation of a master's program. Honoring the Memory of Jack D. Forbes Jack Forbes, who was of Powhatan-Renape, Delaware-Lenape descent, entered the spirit world on February 23, 2011. Having earned a doctorate in history and anthropology from the University of Southern California in 1959, his legacy is that of a visionary, intellectual, and scholar, and his contributions to AIS and academia in general are abundant. He wrote numerous books, book chapters, and journal articles focusing on such topics as Indian history, colonialism, and education. Of particular note is his 1966 study titled "An American Indian University: A Proposal for Survival," which helped spark the Indian college movement. 1 He called for the creation of an intertribal university controlled by Indians that would provide training in various areas, including education, law, agriculture, social work, and general education. By 1971, [End Page 5] he had cofounded D-Q University near Davis, California, which had a mission that centered on cultural survival. By then, Navajo Community College had been founded in Tsaile on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Today, approximately one-third of all Indian college students attend one of the thirty-six tribal colleges scattered across the nation. Most of these institutions are geographically isolated and serve students who otherwise would not have an opportunity to improve the quality of their lives through education. 2 Forbes also played a pivotal role in creating the Native American studies (NAS) program at the University of California, Davis. Today, it is one of only two U.S. universities offering a doctorate in AIS/NAS. Even after retiring in the mid-1990s, Forbes remained active as a scholar. In December 2010, he e-mailed me to ask about the status of a manuscript titled "America: The Theft of a Continent's Names and What It Means," which he had submitted to Wicazo Sa Review several months earlier. Like much of his scholarship, this study challenges a fundamental component of the master narrative stemming from white colonialism in the Americas. I will publish this work in an upcoming issue. Jack is gone, but his legacy and life's work will endure for years to come. AIS and the Indian world are significantly better because of his courage, foresight, and commitment. An American Indian Studies Paradigm Statement There are a hundred or so academic programs and departments with AIS designations in the United States and Canada functioning under a variety of paradigms ranging from the reasonable to the absurdly superficial. There are few graduate and undergraduate programs with adequate administrative support, as well as strong curricula and faculty, while the majority of other programs suffer from a lack of resources, cohesion, Indian faculty, and focus. In this diverse milieu, there is neither a unifying paradigm that links AIS into an academic discipline nor a shared understanding of what AIS should be. It is difficult to assess these programs because there are no academic standards in place that measure what students should be taught, where faculty should publish, and the types of service faculty members should provide to communities. When my colleagues asked me in January 2011 to draft an American Indian studies paradigm statement that would describe the nature of the program in less than five hundred words, I felt honored to do so. In formulating my ideas for this task, I reflected on what AIS could do to empower students while helping to strengthen and sustain diverse Indian nations. Then I turned to the inspirational writings of such scholars as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Dakota), Susan A. Miller [End Page 6] (Seminole), Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renape and Delaware-Lenape heritage), Michael Yellow Bird (Arikara/Hidatsa), and Tom Holm (Muscogee/Cherokee), whose works are significant to AIS for a variety of reasons. 3...

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe

This essay addresses four methodological approaches to Native Literary Studies that dominate in the European academic context: national (though not tribal nationalist), multi-ethnic, universal, and postcolonial. European scholars of Native American Literary Studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative “American Studies” approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their ground-breaking book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). It is to these claims that my title gestures, while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American Literature, and in scholarly publications, are used as “the basis for the cynical absorption into the 'melting pot', pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice” (Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, 96). The category of “Native” is effectively “melted” into another category of cultural experience – with the attendant loss of indigenous identities, historical experiences, and claims to justice -- whether this is the universalizing canon of “Literature” per se, or more specifically a national American (settler) Literature; a national canon of minority “multi-ethnic” Literature that fails to distinguish adequately between indigenous and migrant literary production; or a transnational “postcolonial” canon. As Wolfgang Hochbruck predicted in his “Survey of Recent German Research in American Indian Literature,” back in 1991, “creating new reservations for minority literatures would eventually create new problems” (51). It would seem that this problematic time has come. Consequently, Cook-Lynn's insight guides my critique here of some of the directions in which Native American Literary Studies is currently moving in Europe.

Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Review: New Indians, Old Wars, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Review: <i>New Indians, Old Wars</i>, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn