Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice

by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native American in academia. She asks questions of critical importance to tribal   who is telling their stories, where does cultural authority lie, and most important, how is it possible to develop an authentic tribal literary voice within the academic community?
    In the title essay, “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” Cook-Lynn objects to Stegner’s portrayal of the American West in his fiction, contending that no other author has been more successful in serving the interests of the nation’s fantasy about itself. When Stegner writes that “Western history sort of stopped at 1890,” and when he claims the American West as his native land, Cook-Lynn argues, he negates the whole past, present, and future of the native peoples of the continent. Her other essays include discussion of such Native American writers as Michael Dorris, Ray Young Bear, and N. Scott Momaday; the importance of a tribal voice in academia, the risks to American Indian women in current law practices, the future of Indian Nationalism, and the defense of the land.
    Cook-Lynn emphasizes that her essays move beyond the narrowly autobiographical, not just about gender and power, not just focused on multiculturalism and diversity, but are about intellectual and political issues that engage readers and writers in Native American studies. Studying the “Indian,” Cook-Lynn reminds us, is not just an academic exercise but a matter of survival for the lifeways of tribal peoples. Her goal in these essays is to open conversations that can make tribal life and academic life more responsive to one another.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Native American, Indigenous

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

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

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of essays is now 25 years old and still as relevant as it was in 1996. The US has made no positive progress in the restitution of stolen lands to Native Americans or basically in any kind of relationship between the US or state governments and native tribes at all. I was most interested in the essay about Wallace Stegner because I have loved the books I've read by him, so I wanted to know what Cook-Lynn has against his books. She made a compelling case for despising his books in relation to Native Americans because he is perpetuating wrong ideas, most especially that they are finished as a people, as if they have all died off and are only part of history and not a vibrant community of people who have a living culture.

It was also interesting to read the penultimate essay in which Cook-Lynn wrote that all race relations discussions since the Civil War have focused on black/white and new immigrant relations and the indigenous peoples are never considered at all. She was addressing another author's book which asserts that racial harmony has already been achieved and civil rights legislation is not necessary.

Such idealization of a long and troubled racial history has made any modern civil rights debate almost meaningless to the Native Americans who are citizens of Indian nations in this country. Because these debates are based on the experiences of blacks, whites, and new immigrants, the result has been a failure to understand that for equality and democracy to be defined according to the original constitutional and aboriginal intent, Indians must be seen as Indians, not as ethnic individuals in America. They must be seen as the original peoples, possessing dual citizenship in their own tribal nation(s) as well as in the United States. They must be seen as nations of people who occupied this continent for thousands of years with personal and national rights and who still do.

Her assertion that Native Americans are not part of the race relations discussion is accurate, I believe. I rarely hear mention of them in discussions of race. We as a nation must remember that there are entire tribes of Native Americans who need to be part of the process to change our laws in regard to race and citizenship and to keep their unique position in society in mind and part of the legislative process to redress the wrongs done to them for hundreds of years. The author points out that the original racial atrocity perpetrated in our country is not slavery, but the wholesale theft of land and the massacre of entire tribes of Native Americans.

[Angie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this should be re-named "Why I Haven't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays." She has some interesting points in her other essays, but her beef with Stegner is absurd. Read Benson's scathing reply - he says it better than I ever could.

[Greg Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now nearly 20 years old, this book is bitingly relevant. In fact, Cook-Lynn's observations seem to be an important precursor to the current state of American Indian studies.

[Lisa]

Due back to the library before I could finish it, but I loved reading this book. It's a bit over my head as an academic work.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I got this since the title references Stegner (whom a JHU classmate had recommended reading Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety).

I’m not disappointed (more on that below), as the title also mentions “And Other Essays”and even in her Preface, Cook-Lynne got my attention saying “and a black man who declares that affirmative action has damaged him sits on the Supreme Court bench” (and still does). And in a book written in 1996, she mentions “institutional, systemic racism.” I guess since so little has changed and not improved in our handling of Native American issues, the anti-CRT people don’t have to pay attention to such statements; if Ellison thought the black man was invisible, the Native American is even less visible.

In her response to The Broken Cord, she holds, among other things, that Adams mother, (vilified in Dorris’ book) “who deserved better from all of us, was as much a victim as her ‘friendly’ child.”

In the title essay, she points to Stegner’s work Wolf Willow which states “this country was a new country and a new country had no history” Which, um, does ignore the Indian who were here before Europeans. She opens with “The invasion of North America by European people has been portrayed in history and literature as a benign movement directed by God, a movement of moral courage and physical endurance, a victory for all humanity.” Well, except, of course, for the people who were already here. And she takes exception to Stegner’s saying “The plains indians were done.” As though they no longer existed; and I think this is the sentence that raised her ire against Stegner specifically, the idea that the plains Indians no longer existed. I’m not certain, but I don’t think she explicitly cites passages from more than two of Stegner’s novels. But he certainly found himself in her crosshairs. (Update: I’ve read a bit more about Stegner and that he was very involved in conservation and aspects of those activities may have also rubbed Cook-Lynne the wrong way)

And a link to Benson’s rebuttal that Angie provided in her review “why I haven’t read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays” appears to be broken; might have been interesting to read.

I’ve read others who call this work a screed. I think if you probe the actual history, not the white washed history, of what we European settler/invaders did to the Native American Indians, you’d be writing screeds too. And you be tired of apologetic words and want reparations.

I’d read Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and what prompted me to read it was a review in the NYRB on books on WWII - in which it was stated that the Nazis studied how we went about essentially exterminating the Indians to use as a model to do the same to Jews and others.

[Hollis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much appreciated voice, offering serious engagements with (non-)Indigenous writers and activists alike. In particular, in Chapter 2 Cook-Lynn reads the questionable politics of Michael Dorris' The Broken Cord (supported by Louis Erdrich) as a text promoting the further criminalization of at-risk Indigenous women. Elsewhere, in Chapter 7, she examines the settler will-to-authority over Indigenous narratives in the popular novel Hanta Yo. Chapter 8, “The American Indian Fiction Writers,” was my favorite. Here, Cook-Lynn asks after the difficulties of calling for a nationalistic rather than cosmopolitan aesthetic from young Indigenous authors. She is especially probing on the thorny debate of "free" aesthetics as compared to what might be called essentialist or propagandist writing. In her own words, “[f]or those writers who are called American Indians, the question of whether the myth of nationhood is a cultural force is often unanswerable in their works. The idea that a national culture exists for them is obliterated by ideas of minority status in the United States, temporality, dysfunction, Indian-ness” (89). It is a powerful essay, and much recommended for those interested in the distinctions between minority and sovereign rights contextualized by settler governance.

[Cutcha Risling Baldy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mom just bought it for me! Go Mom!