Anti-Indianism in Modern America : A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth

by Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780252026621
• ISBN10: 0252026624
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

In this powerful and essential work, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn confronts the politics and policies of genocide that continue to destroy the land, livelihood, and culture of Native Americans. Anti-Indianism in Modern America tells the other side of stories of historical massacres and modern-day hate crimes, events that are dismissed or glossed over by historians, journalists, and courts alike. Cook-Lynn exposes the colonialism that works both overtly and covertly to silence and diminish Native Americans, supported by a rhetoric of reconciliation, assimilation, and multiculturalism. Comparing anti-Indianism to anti-Semitism, she sets the American history of broken treaties, stolen lands, mass murder, cultural dispossession, and Indian hating in an international context of ethnic cleansing, "ecocide", and colonial oppression.Cook-Lynn also discusses the role Native American studies should take in reasserting tribal literatures, traditions, and politics and shows how the discipline has been sidelined by anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies. Asserting the importance of a "native conscience"--a knowledge of the mythologies, mores, and experiences of tribal society--among American Indian writers, she calls for the expression in American Indian art and literature of a tribal consciousness that acts to assure a tribal-nation people of its future. Passionate, eloquent, and uncompromising, Anti-Indianism in Modern America concludes that there are no real solutions for Indians as long as they remain colonized peoples. Native Americans must be able to tell their own stories and, most important, regain their land, the source of religion, morality, rights, and nationhood. As long as public silence accompanies the outlaw maneuvers that undermine tribal autonomy, the racist strategies that affect all Americans will continue. It is difficult, Cook-Lynn concedes, to work toward the development of legal mechanisms against hate crimes, in Indian Country and elsewhere in the world. But it is not too late.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, is professor emerita of Native American studies at Eastern Washington University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Part 1: Anti-Indianism Defined
Anti-Indianism in Art and Literature Is Not Just a Trope	3	(21)
Is the Crazy Horse Monument Art? or Politics?	24	(10)
Literary and Political Questions of Transformation: American Indian Fiction Writers	34	(11)
The Idea of Conscience and a Journey into Sacred Myth	45	(7)
Tender Mercies and Moral Dilemmas	52	(17)
Part 2: A Novel Class of Spokespersons
Letter to Michael Dorris	69	(3)
A Mixed-Blood, Tribeless Voice in American Indian Literatures: Michael Dorris	72	(19)
Innocence, Sin, and Penance	91	(6)
News of the Day and the Yankton Case	97	(7)
Science, Belief, and ``Stinking Fish''	104	(8)
Life and Death in the Mainstream of American Indian Biography	112	(9)
Part 3: On Writing and Keeping a Diary
Foreign Sculptors and Time Zones: Diary Entries Kept during a Three-Week Visit to Mexico, a One-Time-Only Effort at Journal-Keeping	121	(10)
Writing through Obscurity	131	(12)
Part 4: Speeches
Pte---Coming Back from Oblivion	143	(8)
Native Studies Is Politics: The Responsibility of Native American Studies in an Academic Setting	151	(8)
Reconciliation, Dishonest in Its Inception, Now a Failed Idea	159	(12)
American Indian Studies: An Overview	171	(14)
Part 5: Genocide
Anti-Indianism and Genocide: The Disavowed Crime Lurking at the Heart of America	185	(11)
Postcolonial Scholarship Defames the Native Voice: Academic Genocide?	196	(15)
Contemporary Genocide: Killing along the Missouri	211	(6)
Notes	217