This is the second part of a long conversation with the Crow Creek Sioux academic and writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and her political book entitled A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations. It is a collection of essays where Elizabeth takes those in the ivory tower to task for espousing the idea that “postcoloniality” is the current norm for Indigenous peoples in the United States. After a long career Liz gathers writes 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. We also discuss the idea that Native Studies still has a lot of work to do in creating a more rigorous discipline, the difficulties in producing work while working within academia and the anger of writing about a cultural genocide. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, was born in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and raised on the reservation. She is Professor Emerita of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington.
Liz says “The final responsibility of a writer like me … is to commit something to paper in the modern world which supports this inexhaustible legacy left by our ancestors...and yes I am angry.”
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