Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9780816550029

Book preview

Volume 59

Sun Tracks

An American Indian Literary Series

SERIES EDITOR

Ofelia Zepeda

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Vine Deloria Jr.

Larry Evers

Joy Harjo

Geary Hobson

N. Scott Momaday

Irvin Morris

Simon J. Ortiz

Emory Sekaquaptewa

Kate Shanley

Leslie Marmon Silko

Luci Tapahonso

Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

ELIZABETH COOK-LYNN

The University of Arizona Press

Tucson

The University of Arizona Press

© 2007 by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth.

  Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn / Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.

       p. cm. — (Sun tracks; v. 59)

  A brief collection of previously unpublished poetry and political commentary from the desk of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2583-6 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8165-2583-8 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

  1. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.

 I. Title. II. Series.

PS3553.O5548N67 2007

 811′.54—dc22

2006017563

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 50% postconsumer waste and processed chlorine free.

12   11   10   09   08   07          6   5   4   3   2   1

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-5002-9 (electronic)

This collection of casual writings is dedicated to

all those who have classified the Native Races—

circa 1660 to the present—

making sounds that haunt us all the rest of our days.

Contents

Preface

I

What about ART?

When we talk of

The Inadequacy of Literary Art

This Story

The Woman Who Wrote Poems

In This

There Is Something Off-Stage

Written in Kindness . . .

Books in Missoula

Messages as I Pass a Car

Hearing Spiders Pray . . .

People who read my work

Surrounded by Serbs on Rapid Creek

Birds, Yellow Jackets, the Sun, and an Old Man

II

Who Owns the Past?

Thoughts While Driving across a Bridge on Interstate 90

A Younger Sister, I Try to Believe in Myself

Another Place to Walk Back From

Who Are You, Tim McVeigh?

III

June 2004

Reading Guide to Aurelia

The Old Couple

Another Commencement Address

What I Really Said . . .

IV

Omnipresence/Thunder

A Mixed Marriage

Writing Is a Hard Thing to Do

A Gentle Heart

A Poem

When I did graduate work

Whatever Happened to D’Arcy McNickle?

Going Away

When Scott Momaday,

V

The Riverpeople

September 5/2004

Irony’s Blade

Democracy in 2002 and the Free Press

Murder at the Nebraska Line

Change

October 2004

At Churchside, 1995

Contradictions . . .

A Commutative Poem about Graduate School

Exile

The condition

There is the widespread notion

In the Summer

VI

There are few vocations

The Way It Is

Colonization

Trying to Make a Difference

Rabbit Dance

December Twenty-Eight

Sitting Beside an American Woman . . .

Out of the Mouths of Babes

A Cynic Assumes the Right . . .

Restless Spirit

Culture Wars

While Watching a Prairie Bird

VII

Great literary events

Phyllis Schlafly says this:

The Sioux say,

The Morning World Is Like This

November 19, 2005

Must We Go to Delphi . . .?

Dakota Iapi Tewahi(n)da

There is a man

Metaphor

Anangoptan (Listen!)

Make Believe

New Myths of Feminism

What is a feminist?

Snowy Days and Nights

Rejoice, Rejoice

Below the Poverty Line

In Defense of Politics and Ethical Criticism

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources

Preface

I was living with relatives in a one-room tar-papered house on the Crow Creek Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota when I learned to read English, and as soon as I learned to read I wanted to write. The time was later called the dirty thirties, but, for me, it was a time marking the beginning of my interest in books. It took many decades for me to learn to use English efficiently. I published nothing until I was forty.

There was little to share except our lives in those early days because great holes of poverty and preferred silence were all around. With the exception of a grandmother and a sister just a year older than I, there was no one to share my grand thoughts with had they somehow mysteriously arisen. I have forgotten very little of what went on then, ordinary things like the ice breaking up on the creek in the spring and astonishing things like a friend of my father killing his wife and mother-in-law, his being hunted for days, weeks even, and our fear that he would come to our place for refuge out there in the middle of nowhere. What we didn’t know was that minutes after he shot those he loved, he had gone into the woods a mile from his place and had ended it with the 30-30 he had borrowed from my father. His name was J. Long Turkey and he was a Santee and a relative of my grandmother’s. There was no long ceremonial that followed this tragedy as there often was in other circumstances. Indeed, no one ever spoke of it.

A faded red pickup always sat in our yard and we started it up once in a while when we had gas money, and my grandfather taught me how to drive when I was six or seven. Perched on his lap, too small to reach the pedals, I learned how to shift gears, good skills for a child of two worlds. I’ve been shifting gears ever since. My grandpa, a grandnephew of Bowed Head, who they say fought at the Little Big Horn with Sitting Bull and Gall, rode a bay mare to the Agency almost every day, a distance of about fourteen miles, sometimes even in winter snowstorms. He was a politician, a great bull shitter, my father used to say, but I prefer to think of him as an Orator, a bilingual keeper of history. From him and others like him, I learned to value and honor words in two languages.

When I went to school, I copied poems on scraps of paper as soon as I saw them in books, not having any idea what they meant, not having mentors to explicate them for me. I remember copying and keeping Thanatopsis in my precious collection of writings, not knowing it was a poem about Death, the realm my grandmother taught me was sacred and not to be talked about. Even then and in the subsequent years that are supposed to bring about the philosophic mind, I continue to be bewildered by the neoclassicist tradition just as I am by the fables of the illiterate. The mystery of it all, though, has taught me that whatever is sought by wise men and women must be approached through Art.

I

What about ART?

We ordinarily have a high regard for ART though sometimes we are reminded that accidental masterpieces are often called that simply because of the improbable taste of passersby, innocents, and sycophants. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to find masterpieces and even more difficult to know them when you see them. Just looking at, collecting, and financing doesn’t tell us everything.

While driving past the Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, one is reminded that this white-man’s notion of ART, where thousands of tourists come every year is, alas, not Machu Picchu, also a well-trodden place by the daily influx of visitors. Not knowing the difference between Inca ruins and the white man’s effort to seize the holy lands of the Sioux, tourists are witness to the blowing up of a sacred mountain. They see the fashioning of a false image of desolate, controlled, and expanding colonization, with little mention of the true history of the Man and his People whose desire it was to flourish and practice a tribal way of life. This image does not speak profoundly of the possibilities of the imagination and probably raises more questions about the function of the imagination than it answers. Is it a shrine? A cenotaph? Is it a monument? A temple? IS IT ART?

Monuments like Crazy Horse Monument, those pedestals where models of virtue are placed, hold none of the mysteries of ART, none of the enigmas, none of the ubiquitous questions of an indigenous people’s sacred knowledge expressed for thousands of years in ways both realistic and unfathomable.

The stonework of Machu Picchu, on the other hand, is impressive, conveying the intimate relationship between a People and their surroundings, the shapes and spaces of the mountain landscape that the People venerated. This was also a holy place for the Inca Indians of Peru to imagine who they were and who they had always been. The worship of the sun took place here and great offerings were made. It was the last refuge, a place never visited by the Spaniards. There is no evidence of postconquest occupation at Machu Picchu, and, for some, that’s what makes it a masterpiece called Art.

After we have seen a work, and have moved away from it, we take from it only the Memory of it. We remember that we have glimpsed something remarkable and we try to learn from it, how to live and die, how to conceive of our own personal existences. The visual language, obscure carvings that mark the places of Machu Picchu as special, presents the patterns and concepts still evident in the Inca ART portfolios and provides an understanding of culture. Thinking about that makes us ask the ultimate question about Art and the Imagination. What is the Memory of the Crazy Horse Monument we take with us when we drive on?

When we talk of

history, myth, identity, and art we are going back to origins. In what may be called the Native American Experience, there are historical and mythic journeys everywhere. To go back to origins it is suggested that we recognize the importance of geography; by that I mean a specific landscape so often referred to vaguely in lit/crit speak as a sense of place. And we recognize the importance of language and we recognize the presence of those we call the holy people and we recognize all of the creature worlds, sights, and sounds of the universe that surround us as human beings and our lives. It is an astonishing thing to ponder, especially if you are an artist, not just those artists who sculpt or paint or sing, but those who write and tell the stories, too.

It seems to me that in terms of the imaginative concepts evident in Indian narratives, origin myths and historical migrations toward humanity are probably the least accessible and least well known of the influences. Yet those are the influences that resonate in the most humble of stories and poems.

A little piece I published some years ago illustrates this point, and it is retold in the following paragraphs. It is taken from one of my first significant publications in fiction, a 1990 collection of short stories published with Arcade. This is a collection of thirteen stories out of print for the last decade but recently reissued by the University of Arizona Press.

The collection is called The Power of Horses and Other Stories, but . . . don’t get the impression it is about horses. It isn’t. It is about history, myth, and the secret journey toward humanity.

This collection begins with a brief story called Maḣpiyato, a kind of preface, or introduction. While you read it, try to think of origins, try to think of geography and language and the holy people who might be