Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Readers and teachers of western American literature know Elizabeth Cook-Lynn as a Sioux writer who sees "everything in the world through the prism of the theft of the Black Hills" (15). For Cook-Lynn, art, writing, identity, and memory are inextricable from the genocide that devastated tribal peoples, lands, and lifeways. Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn documents this legacy in seven sections of essays, addresses, poems, stories, and a "Reader's Guide" to her novel Aurelia (2002). Cook-Lynn quips that the collection's "haphazardness" illustrates either a "coherent whole" or "the unsystematic way an indigenous political writer keeps from going mad" (191). Indeed, what links these pieces is Cook-Lynn's insistence that only when the "benign mutual discovery" of tribal lands is re-called as "colonial genocide" will tribal peoples be free to recreate their reality (99).

Cook-Lynn dedicates these writings to "those who have classified the Native races—circa 1660 to the present" (v). Throughout Notebooks, her irony disabuses readers of the "false images" perpetrated by the Lewis and Clark mythology and the Crazy Horse Monument—"this white man's notion of ART" (3). In "Irony's Blade," she articulates the gap between the "master narrative" of discovery and myriad Native American responses, ironic "lamentations, protests and oppositional modes of scholarship," considered by white literary culture as "inferior genres" (102). This "hatred" of irony "stems from" its power as "a device that helps you tell an unsuspecting audience what you really mean" (104). In "Rejoice, Rejoice," the speaker recalls a church gathering of "white folks / whose generous, servile, smelling of blue soap / children gave us brown sacks of moldy fruit / because we were needy Indians / no longer landlords. Dispossessed / by the generous and servile fruit givers" (178). The poem closes with the white congregation singing, "I serve thee, Jesus" (178). Such is Christianity's deliverance.

Endemic poverty, unemployment, ailing schools, broken lifeways: this is history's bequest to Native Americans. "Whatever Happened to D'Arcy McNickle?" critiques "the path to literary notice in the Native American literary field these days" (81). McNickle, a Salishan writer whose novel Surrounded (1935) addresses "real people" and "real events," is, says Cook Lynn, out of fashion. Contemporary novelists tell "fantastic stories about the deficit lives of Indians on the streets of America" (81). She acknowledges reasons (including "anguish") for this escape into "magic realism, or surrealism," but concludes, "to exile one's self from one's history as a fictionist is a personal choice that may have severe consequences beyond personal ones" (81, 88).

Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn takes the measure of a writer aware that politics exact a cost from the artist, aware, too, that "if I am not going to nation build / I don't need to write" (74). Refusing the master narrative is her vocation. In "The Way It Is," the poem's speaker lives in "the hills" and walks a "predestined path." She listens to the wind "exchange stories" with the birds: "they say: / hwo come, sing to remember / wacipo come, dance to forget" (129). Cook-Lynn wields memory's blade, ironic and bloody. Her stories carry the past—tribal rituals, colonial genocide, tribal identity—into present time. Illuminating a "legacy of flawed hope," they cut both ways (179).