New Indians, Old Wars

by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

  Challenging received American history and forging a new path for Native American studies Addressing Native American Studies' past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in its past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of the West as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that it should be fundamentally understood as stolen. Firmly grounded in the reality of a painful past, Cook-Lynn understands the story of the American West as teaching the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

Genres: Indigenous, History

248 pages, Hardcover

First published May 14, 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

[Tasiyagnunpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I have heard many of the author's talks and teaching about the need to further develop American Indian studies as a field, I had been remiss until this year in reading this particular title. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's writing in this book doesn't just give you one of her best cultural and colonial critiques, she also gives us a great deal of hope for our future as citizens of American Indian nations via American Indian Studies as a developed discipline. Indeed, she gives us the map if you will. How awful of us to not attempt to tread accordingly.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoy Cook-Lynn's work. She has gems of sentences that stay with you. Her major argument is how Native scholars need to center distinctive tribal consciousnesses in their works.