Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Volume 59)

by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

An eclectic collection of poetry, prose, and politics, Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a text, a narrative, a song, a story, a history, a testimony, a witnessing. Above all, it is a fiercely intelligent, brave, and sobering work that re-examines and interrogates our nation’s past and the distorted way that its history has been written. In topics including recent debates over issues of environmental justice, the contradictions surrounding the Crazy Horse Monument, and the contemporary portrayal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as one of the great American epic odysseys, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn stitches together a patchwork of observations of racially charged cultural materials, personal experiences, and contemporary characterizations of this country’s history and social climate.

Through each example, she challenges the status quo and piques the reader’s awareness of persistent abuses of indigenous communities. The voices that Cook-Lynn brings to the texts are as varied as the genres in which she writes. They are astute and lyrical, fierce and heartbreaking. Through these intonations, she maintains a balance between her roles as a scholar and a poet, a popular teacher and a woman who has experienced deep personal loss.

A unique blend of form and content that traverses time, space, and purpose, this collection is a thoroughly original contribution to modern American Indian literature. Moreover, it presents an alternative narrative of the nation’s history and opens an important window into the political challenges that Natives continue to face.

208 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 2007

About the author

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (born 1930 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota) is a Crow Creek Lakota editor, essayist, poet, novelist, and academic, whose trenchant views on Native American politics, particularly tribal sovereignty, have caused controversy.

Cook-Lynn co-founded Wíčazo Ša Review ("Red Pencil"), an academic journal devoted to the development of Native American studies as an academic discipline. She retired from her long academic career at Eastern Washington University in 1993, returning to her home in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has held several visiting professorships since retirement. In 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lou Corn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grateful this collection exists as it gives a lot of snippets of Cook-Lynn’s wide ranging thought and particularly on the formations of American Indian Studies from a more intimate place. I don’t always agree with her on the answers to the big questions here “Why write?”, “Why teach?”, but our differences on those are illuminating, both generationally and perhaps tribally.

[Melissa]

What a force; the power and honesty of Cook-Lynn's writing is both inspiring and humbling.