This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native American in academia. She asks questions of critical importance to tribal people: who is telling their stories, where does cultural authority lie, and most important, how is it possible to develop an authentic tribal literary voice within the academic community?
In the title essay, “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” Cook-Lynn objects to Stegner’s portrayal of the American West in his fiction, contending that no other author has been more successful in serving the interests of the nation’s fantasy about itself. When Stegner writes that “Western history sort of stopped at 1890,” and when he claims the American West as his native land, Cook-Lynn argues, he negates the whole past, present, and future of the native peoples of the continent. Her other essays include discussion of such Native American writers as Michael Dorris, Ray Young Bear, and N. Scott Momaday; the importance of a tribal voice in academia, the risks to American Indian women in current law practices, the future of Indian Nationalism, and the defense of the land.
Cook-Lynn emphasizes that her essays move beyond the narrowly autobiographical, not just about gender and power, not just focused on multiculturalism and diversity, but are about intellectual and political issues that engage readers and writers in Native American studies. Studying the “Indian,” Cook-Lynn reminds us, is not just an academic exercise but a matter of survival for the lifeways of tribal peoples. Her goal in these essays is to open conversations that can make tribal life and academic life more responsive to one another.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"The unfortunate truth is that there are few significant works being produced today by the currently popular American Indian fiction writers which examine the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century." With that statement, it's evident that Cook-Lynn (Dakota Sioux author of From the River's Edge) doesn't feel a need to ingratiate herself to her compatriots. Politically minded and very outspoken, she criticizes everyone from the U.S. Government (for its racist and oppressive policies) to Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich (for "the sheer commercialism of Crown of Columbus" and especially their stance in The Broken Cord) to Stegner ("There is, perhaps, no American fiction writer who has been more successful in serving the interests of a nation's fantasy about itself than Wallace Stegner"). When not fraught with animosity, her essays are so congested with academic prose that they are very difficult to read. Anyone who doesn't share her view is blasted by her vitriolic pen, and the constant pounding is so relentless that it becomes mind-numbing. As to the book's title: "Stegner's attitude is, without question, the pervasive attitude of white midwesterners whose ancestors marched into a moral void and then created through sheer will the morality that allowed them, much the same way that the contemporary white Dutch South Africans marched into South Africa proclaiming Pretoria, to convince the world that 'this is my country.' " These are essays on important issues that need to be explored, but most readers are likely to find them bitter and overwrought.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Book reviews dressed up as essays; slipshod polemic dressed up as scholarly discourse. It is not so much that Sioux novelist, poet, and academic Cook-Lynn (From the River's Edge, 1991, etc.) cannot read the work of the late Western historian and novelist Wallace Stegner; it is that she will not (``my reading in the work of Wallace Stegner is minimally undertaken''). She builds this thin collection around a misapprehension of Stegner's thought, namely, that he maintains that American Indian history (and, by implication, American Indian life) ends in 1890, with the closing of the frontier. As a result, Cook-Lynn goes on to assert that Indian history should be written by Indians alone. In some cases she makes good points, as when she dissects Ruth Beebe Hill's allegedly factual account of the Sioux in the spun-from-whole-cloth novel Hanta Yo, but she is hard-pressed to know who the enemy is when Native American writers like N. Scott Momaday opine that Hanta Yo is, after all, a pretty good read. Objecting to Stegner's view of himself as a native Westerner, Cook-Lynn makes the tired argument that only American Indians can claim to be native to the continent. Along the way she dismisses writers like John Updike, ``a white, male member of a prosperous and efficient Euro-American (i.e., white) capitalist democracy,'' and criticizes Michael Dorris, a mixed-blood, for having written negatively of the alcoholic Sioux mother of his adopted, brain-damaged son. Her book abounds with errors--among other things, she attributes the novel Dances with Wolves to Norman Maclean (it was written by Michael Blake). A shoddy piece of work full of self-satisfied platitudes that bespeak an absolutist worldview not open to debate. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
58 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Why I Can't Read This Book,
By Okla Elliott (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Paperback)
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, while admirable in her passion and energy, should be ignored and left unread for her unbending, close-minded, self-pitying, small, and miserable book Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays. She clearly has no understanding of Stegner's work. She also apparently refuses to try to appreciate the work of anyone with the slightest disagreement with her worldview, which is narrow and mean-spirited at best. She assaults Michael Dorris for speaking lowly of an alcoholic woman who caused the mental retardation of her child by her carelessness. She thinks this is a bad choice on Dorris' part because the woman was a Native American. Does she believe that Native Americans are somehow above criticism? What race can claim such moral perfection and not seem like small-minded racists? Every member of every race is responsible for his/her actions, and if Ms. Cook-Lynn had read more of Stegner's work before she blindly bashed it, she would understand that deeper human truth, which is obvious to any real thinker.I am annoyed to even have to mention such basic beliefs. There is no reason to believe that a group of people is better than another group, or that only members of that group have a right to write histories about the group. Ms. Cook-Lynn has some ideas about white history that she freely spouts, and I believe in my heart of hearts that it is her right to write alternate interpretations of the past (though she seems to just be rewording long-tired versions of history). Only by hearing what other groups have to say about us can we grow by seeing ourselves with new perspective. Ms. Cook-Lynn hasn't even read Stegner--she refuses to hear anything but her own shrill, childish voice. I for one look forward to reading critical analyses of society, history, and literature by African Americans, Native Americans, German Americans, Frenchmen, Poles, Australians, etc. This is what led me to read Ms. Cook-Lynn's book. However, I was met with a fierce small-mindedness that enraged rather than enlightened. Ignore this book. It is not worth the paper it was printed on. So long as these sorts of ideas are propagated, humankind will never end its struggles with racism and hatred.
9 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We Need Uppity Women,
By Matyowynne (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Hardcover)
Yes, she's angry, I won't deny that, but what a balm to my soul to hear her words spoken! I am an intellectual Native American woman living in an America that is still living in state of denial and self-congratulation! Like others I enjoy and am encouraged by voices that bridge the gap between groups. But to live with the constant contradictions between what America thinks it is and what it does is something that turns like a screw on my soul every day of my life. Cook-Lynn makes me go "right on!" "Yeah!" Yeah, she's angry like Malcolm X was angry, but she's right.
20 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elder and knowledge keeper for American Indian studies,
By A Customer
This review is from: Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Paperback)
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with Vine Deloria, Jr., and Beatrice Medicine are among the Northern Plains Elders of the American Indian studies movement in the academy today. This important first collection of Cook-Lynn's essays should (I think will, as well as already does) appeal to Indigenous undergraduate and graduate students and our allies hungry for tribal voices among the chorus of anti-Indian "common sense" in this country's non-Native universities and colleges. Unfortunately, those readers intellectually debilitated by subscribing to the tenants of white supremacy will MIS-read Cook-Lynn's enabling and powerful tribal voice as "racist" or "anti-white person." This is not the case. Rather, what Cook-Lynn offers is a re-centering, a re-valuing, and a re-claiming of knowledge about the land and about Indigenous Peoples from writers like Wallace Stegner. Despite his many talents, Stegner failed to comprehend that the tribal nations of North America have sophisticated intellectual disciplines. Mentally undermined by the hegemony (or "common sense") of raced-white supremacy and colonial self-assurances, Stegner failed to see. Outside of Stegner's limited and limiting vision, indigenous intellectual disciplines are integrated into and constitutive of tribal cultures. They are as responsible as anything for tribal persistence--something certainly see-able. Cook-Lynn understands this; this social fact merits her respect and admiration. Indigenous intellectual disciplines would seem to deserve the respect of others too, but the colonial practice of raced-white supremacy long has been to ignore--or, worse, trivialize--these intellectual disciplines as well as the peoples who are their knowledge keepers. Cook-Lynn meaningfully contributes to the possibility for changing this unfortunate condition. It remains to be seen if a certain variety of reader can suspend the outrageous notion that to focus on the problem of racism and its cousin colonization is itself a racist act. Unfortunately for others dedicated to the idea of addressing the trauma of colonization, countless readers will find joy both in reading Wallace Stegner and witnessing racial injury. For everyone else, there is Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and the political common sense of anti-white supremacy, anti-racism.
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