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

by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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 the West's past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of it as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that the American West should be fundamentally understood as stolen. Cook-Lynn says that the Indian Wars of Resistance to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial effort to seize native lands and resources must be given standing in the face of the ever-growing imperial narrative of America--because the terror the world is now witnessing may be the direct consequence of events which began in America's earliest dealings with the natives of this continent. Cook-Lynn's story examines the ongoing and perennial relationship of conflict between colonizers and indigenous people, and it is a story that every American must read. Cook-Lynn understands that the story of the American West teaches 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, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 25, 2001

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

[axlr102]

It's a shame that this book doesn't have more reviews since I generally don't like to be the nail that sticks out, especially as a hater. However I did not like this book and I am compelled to rant about it somewhere, so here I am. It's also the fact that I didn't really read even most of it, I stopped after the first chapter though obviously I wrote this review so I'm deeply confident in my reasoning.

Cook-Lynn sought to establish and normalize a new term for describing the prejudices that Native Americans face. This term is "anti-Indianism", which she openly admits was inspired by the term "anti-semitism" and she compares the concepts repeatedly in order to construct the former. I'm not entirely opposed to the comparison, I think the first thing that comes to mind off the cuff is Ludwig Klages remarking once that the Nazis effectively wanted to be Jews, looking at how so many of the Nazi 'critiques' of Judaism paralleled Nazi behavior. They romanticized Yahweh's wrath and simply wanted his beard to be blonde. Compare this to American settler perceptions of Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages scalping innocents in the hills and savagely pursuing fights wherever they go with the very real White American practices of genocide and boy scouting, it's not so far off. You could argue Americans want to be their fetishized assumption of Indians, they only wish that the red skin could be taken off just as much as the Nazis deep down wanted to be a cabal of Aryans controlling and mastering the Earth. This theoretical composition could be a great basis for a work exploring the roles of Native Americans in American literature.

Unfortunately, this is not the basis of Cook-Lynn's argument. Her basis instead is a narrative that implicitly evokes Zionist mythology by tacitly framing anti-semitism as a time immemorial persecution on 'religious' grounds.

Anti-Indianism in the American imagination, starting even before the time of such luminaries as Washington Irving and Walt Whitman, probably originated in religiosity. Like Anti-Semitism in Europe, Anti-Indianism in America raised its ugly head in specific places and in a variety of contexts but gained momentum as a fundamental element of American Christianity. Indigenous America was not Christian, therefore it was seen as an opposing force to be obliterated at any cost. (3-4)

White settlers were in search of land, not a religiously heterogeneous population and the fate of the "Five Civilized Tribes" should prove this rather definitively. To speak to its inadequacy in describing the Jewish experience is another matter entirely, for the relations between Jewish and Christian peasants in medieval Europe was not at all a relation between colonizer and colonized like here, or even the vague notion of religious persecution that Cook-Lynn presents, but something else far more difficult. Allow me to cite Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak.

The first difficulty in writing about this subject is that the term 'Jew' has been used during the last 150 years with two rather different meanings. To understand this, let us imagine ourselves in the year 1780. Then the universally accepted meaning of the term 'Jew' basically coincided with what the Jews themselves understood as constituting their own identity. This identity was primarily religious. but the precepts of religion governed the details of daily behaviour in all aspects of life, both social and private, among the Jews themselves as well as in their relation to non-Jews. It was then literally true that a Jew could not even drink a glass of water in the home of a non-Jew. And the same basic laws of behaviour towards non-Jews were equally valid from Yemen to New York. Whatever the term by which the Jews of 1780 may be described - and I do not wish to enter into a metaphysical dispute about terms like. 'nation' and 'people'. - it is dear that all Jewish communities at that time were separate from the non-Jewish societies in the midst of which they were living.

However. all this was changed by two parallel processes - beginning in Holland and England, continuing in revolutionary France and in countries which followed the example of the French Revolution. and then in the modern monarchies of the 19th century: the Jews gained a significant level of individual rights (in some cases full legal equality), and the legal power of the Jewish community over its members was destroyed. It should be noted that both developments were simultaneous, and that the latter is even more important, albeit less widely known, than the former.

Since the time of the late Roman Empire, Jewish communities had considerable legal powers over
their members Not only powers which arise through voluntary mobilisation of social pressure (for example refusal to have any dealing whatsoever with an excommunicated Jew or even to bury his body), but a power of naked coercion: to Ilog, to imprison, to expel - all this could be inflicted quite legally on an individual Jew by the rabbinical courts for all kinds of offences. In many countries Spain and Poland are notable examples - even capital punishment could be and was inflicted, sometimes using particularly cruel methods such as flogging to death. All this was not only permitted but positively encouraged by the state authorities in both Christian and Muslim countries, who besides their general interest in preserving 'law and order' had in some cases a more direct financial interest as well. (14-15)

These excerpts should hopefully prove that Cook-Lynn's comparison of Native American persecution and anti-semitism is woefully underdeveloped and ignores crucial nuances to the Jewish experience that totally separate the two on this frontier. I doubt that being Native American in 1780 was like being in what Israel Shahak called 'one of the most totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind' on page 15, so what does that make Cook-Lynn's invocation of the comparison if not painfully reductive? I would recommend anyone interested in anti-semitism specifically to read Israel Shahak, whose writings tread with genius care the razor-thin line between self-reflection and self-hatred, never absolving either those who murdered his people or the people of his who murdered.

Side-note: You really should read Shahak. Consider this excerpt from a series of his:

The old pre-1795 Poland – a feudal republic with an elective king – is a converse example; it illustrates how before the advent of the modern state the position of the Jews was socially most important, and their internal autonomy greatest, under a regime which was completely retarded to the point of utter degeneracy. (https://matzpen.org/english/1981-10-1...)

Back to the line between self-reflection and self-hatred, it is something that Cook-Lynn struggles greatly with. After having completed this rather reductive construction of anti-Indianism as a concept, one might ask where the book is going to go with this. The direction seems to be Cook-Lynn describing her personal grievances with American literary culture in a fashion that is obvious at best and offensive at worst. I found her literary analysis of Adrian C. Louis to be something that I would have likely considered genuinely insulting if I were a fan of Louis. A good critic doesn't necessarily need to rely on audience familiarity with a source material to make their points, they have many tools available for them and indeed when one controls the examples one stacks the deck and how can you lose when you've got that power? Cook-Lynn somehow finds a way. She starts by citing a poem of Louis', which specifically has the following line:

"Most of us know Sitting Bull wasn’t bullshitting, but we still don’t know which way to go. We are between two different worlds and between the past and the future. At least that’s what we tell ourselves when we fail. We never mention the fact that it was skins who killed Mr. Bull." (9-10)

This is minor, but it's the immediately following line so I will address it here:

Contextualizing this sentiment in a book in which the poet calls himself and other Indians “damned” (which is, of course, an American stereotype) and entitling the poem with a line from a pop-religious song urging listeners to “hear the word of the Lord” places the poem in pop culture vernacular so that mainstream America can and will respond. In other words, these devices are used so that the poem will appeal to a broad audience of non-Indians. (10)

Cook-Lynn fails to consider that these inclusions may simply be because Louis enjoys the song. These details do not make the case that Louis designed his poem for a 'white gaze', it only proves that Louis likes white media and finds himself attached to the word 'damned'. Does he address white people? Does he explain events in a way that would elucidate truths only unknown to a white man? This lazy analysis is irritating. It's not really a big deal anyway since it's only tangential to her real problem with the passage, but it still annoyed me. Getting to the meat:

What does make it an expression of Anti-Indianism is the context in which the historical fact of the killing of Sitting Bull in 1890 becomes the focus, an event that occurred just two weeks before the Massacre at Wounded Knee. As to this last phrase of the verse, there is no question that “skins” shot Sitting Bull, as the poet says. Sioux BIA policemen Red Tomahawk and Bull Head are generally regarded as the shooters. Tribal history, however, which the poet ignores in the poem, tells us much more. Tribal historians say that the U.S. government police force, made up of reservation-based Sioux Indian males, was part of an illegal occupation force much like the Jewish guard details at the concentration camps in Germany and Poland during World War II, who were hired and paid assassins and tormenters of their own people. History now reveals some evidence that the killing of Sitting Bull may have been a political assassination engineered by the non-Indian Agency officials at Standing Rock Reservation. Like the Jews in WWII, forced by the Gestapo to starve and mistreat their own comrades in concentration camps, Sioux Indians were forced to beat and kill and otherwise menace their own people on their own lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Compulsory service of one kind or another was forced upon the Sioux on their own treaty lands during this period of extermination and genocide. It is largely white historians, and now Paiute poet Louis, who have interpreted the act of shooting Sitting Bull as an internecine act, rather than as the colonial extermination event that it probably was. (10-11)

Wtf. I am not even Jewish and yet I want to call her a goy. If she's talking about kapos, then she ought to know that kapo hate is a deeply persistent theme across many Holocaust memoirs. More than that, 'kapo' is now a common insult in the Jewish community to basically condense the conception of a 'self hating Jew' into a single word. Shaming Louis for emotions that basically the entire Jewish community worked through on their own time in Holocaust literature is ridiculous. Fuck, Jews were kind to kapos. Consider what Algerians did with the Harkis. Having given everything for the struggle in French Algeria on the side of the French, they faced a grim fate when the colony seemed to be teetering on the edge of collapse. More than ever, they needed their French masters to save them from the wrath of their countrymen.

When De Gaulle was pressed on the fate of the Algerian harkis (Algerian Muslims who’d fought the FLN alongside the French) in 1962, he’s alleged to have asked what the French nation could possibly gain by taking in ‘men who had betrayed their own blood and faith?’

The result was reprisals in which the lower end of deaths is estimated at 30,000 and the higher end all the way up at 150,000 (including family members). 'Harki', much like 'kapo, is a common place insult. Cook-Lynn doesn't ever really call this history into question the way she absolutely needs to if she wants this criticism to stick, she simply gestures that 'they made us do it' to bury the issue. This is not serious analysis, this is wishful thinking. Did she (rest her soul) think that the hatred faced by these groups was astroturfed by white supremacy? Algerians did not force harkis to dig their own graves and then kill them and their entire families out of some subconscious self-hatred. Regardless of your stance on this issue, if you'd like to intervene on behalf of the harkis you are going to have to do much better than pointing out that they were forced to do it. Did the white supremacists some exercise of remote mind control to prevent Sitting Bull's killers from defecting to him once they were in his presence? Cook-Lynn decries a deprivation of tribal history in Louis' writing, but fails to provide it in her own book. Of course the Yankees were the real enemies in town, that is expressly why the killers of Sitting Bull haunt Louis so.

In “Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone,” Louis draws on this Anti-Indianism of American thought and by doing so condemns or at the very least blames the victims for this history. This is an example of Anti-Indianism in Literary Form because the poet uses the historical oppression and subjugation of tribal people, for which they were not responsible, against them in a contemporary retelling. (11)

Is it really? Were the Harkis forced to turn guns on their countrymen who were expressly fighting against the colonial system? Were Yasser Abu Shabab's bandits in Gaza who had spent the better part of this year killing and looting the victims of a genocide forced to do it by Israel? Hard times certainly beckon hard decisions, but Cook-Lynn fails to generate a meaningful response to Louis' emotional sentiment here that actually even achieves the bare minimum of simply challenging what he said, let alone exposing it as autobigotry. One could argue the opposite. Through revelation that the murder of Sitting Bull was a deliberate plot by the federal government, Cook-Lynn unintentionally confirms her defendants as being collaborators in an American settler plot.

I'll artikerlate my opinion: The absolution of responsibility is nauseatingly and childishly simplistic and holds no value for anyone attempting to seriously analyze militant resistance movements. Cook-Lynn cannot even interrogate honestly the emotional sentiments of her opponents, mistaking the effect (self-hatred) as the cause (which, to anyone with half a brain cell, is so obviously wounded self-pride I don't know how the fuck this woman got up in the morning when she was alive).

She goes on. I will cite these passages with a further down one first and the immediately proceeding one later for reasons that will be evident once I'm done.

Sioux readers, if they know the history of the event in tribal terms, may be offended by the poem because it does not seem to invest itself in them as participants in the audience. Indeed, it challenges unfairly the worth of Indian holocaust survivors and descendants rather than seeking an understanding of the complexities of a colonial history. There is no question that Indians should take responsibility for their behavior and their lives and their histories, which may be the point of Louis’s vicious stereotyping of the Lakota, but there is a troubling self-disdain expressed by a poet who claims himself to be an Indian. (11)

As mentioned previously, these complexities are not explored. In fact, the opposite. Cook-Lynn avoids some of the most pressing questions. Was it not 'anti-Indian' when those Lakotans executed the most important leader of Native American resistance at the time? Was it not 'anti-Algerian' to be a Harki fighting the independence movement? Is it not 'anti-Palestinian' to be a member of Shabab's gang? What can you say about a stereotype if someone actually is the fucking stereotype? I'm a gay survivor of child sexual abuse, what the hell am I supposed to say about all the chickenhawk Republicans who traffic in being 'the right kind of gay' and then go and rape little boys just like they were? (see Milo Yiannopoulos)

Anyway, I found Cook-Lynn's calling into question of Louis' identity to be most troubling. The identities of indigenous people are not up for debate, especially not because you happen to think they're a bit self-hating. Is this the anti-semitic influence that Cook-Lynn was after? She channels perfectly the energy of an Israeli challenging the religious identity of an anti-Zionist Jew with these careless remarks, delivered perfectly in the sort of scornful and condescending tone of a bully. Thankfully, Cook-Lynn has already solved the mystery for us by accidentally revealing the method of how she acquired this opinion in the previous paragraph.

Those who know the real history of Sitting Bull’s assassination read the poem and the phrase adversarially. Indeed, many thoughtful Sioux readers will be offended at Louis’s rendering of history, in which he blames them for the killing of Sitting Bull. Louis challenges the trust that Sioux readers want to have in him. This is not just a minor distraction. It is a real dilemma for those who would like to give this poet the benefit of the doubt. Yet because Louis discriminates between his audiences, an adversarial position between tribal readers and poet is the result. White audiences who can accept the misplaced blame in order to feel pity or contempt for the Sioux and compassion for their own histories read the poem with enthusiasm, and Indian audiences who refuse to accept a corrupted history and a misplaced blame read it adversarially. The Louis interpretation of this history is at the very least an apology for the white historical interpretation, at worst it is the tactic of a propagandist who does witting or unwitting harm to himself and fellow Indians. (11)

In this (and later defenses of tribal governments), Elizabeth reveals her real motivations are that Louis' poem made her feel bad. In true self hating fashion she distances herself from her insecurities by assigning them to white men and then projects this onto Louis. The rest of the chapter follows this pattern, and I did not continue for that reason. We need serious analysis, not people passing off their feelings as facts.