Reflections of an Indigenous scholar

A Separate Country (paper)

Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn takes academia to task for its much-touted notion that “postcoloniality” is the current condition of Indian communities in the United States. She finds the argument neither believable nor useful—at best an ivory-tower initiative on the part of influential scholars, at worst a cruel joke. In this fin de career retrospective, Cook-Lynn gathers evidence that American Indians remain among the most colonized people in the modern world, mired in poverty and disenfranchised both socially and politically.

Despite Native-initiated efforts toward seeking First Nationhood status in the U. S., Cook-Lynn posits, Indian lands remain in the grip of a centuries-old English colonial system—a renewable source of conflict and discrimination. She argues that proportionately in the last century, government-supported development of casinos and tourism—peddled as an answer to poverty—probably cost Indians more treaty-protected land than they lost in the entire nineteenth century. Using land issues and third-world theory to look at the historiography of the American Plains Indian experience, she examines colonization’s continuing assault on Indigenous peoples.

Indispensable . . . a groundbreaking work. What is the future for Native Nations as they move into the twenty-first century? What is the future of the U.S. if it continues to create a fantasy about its history for a deluded public? Cook-Lynn poses—and answers—the key questions. —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Roots of Resistance: History of Land Tenure in New Mexico

Contents
Words to Dazzle the Mind, an Introduction
I: The Indian Postmodern
Situating Postcolonial Studies
Indigeneity as a Category of Analysis
A New Understanding
Elimination-ism
Looking Westward
Law—The Task of Justification
II: Imponderables
A Critical Brief
Citizen! Citizen!
The Cynical Tourist
What about Violence?
Misogyny
Dilemma of Language
Balancing Acts for Academic Risk Takers
Taku inichiapi? What's in a Name?
III: Two Case Studies
A case study in political genocide: 1888
A case study in literary genocide: 1920–30
IV: Postcoloniality
Is Now the Time?
State Governmental Power vs. Tribal-Nation Autonomy

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn of the Crow Creek Sioux Nation is a writer, poet, and professor emerita of Native American studies at Eastern Washington University. Among her many honors is the Oyate Igluwitaya award given by Native university students in South Dakota to those who "aid in the ability of The People to see clearly in the company of each other."

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