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  • Keynote Address:Indian Studies— How It Looks Back at Us after Twenty Years
  • Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (bio)

I am very pleased to be here. I love coming back here. You know I'm not teaching this year. I'm retiring, as I retired last year, and as I retired ten years ago. It goes on and on. Anyway, I am happy to be here, thank you for inviting me back. I want to say that, if I were teaching, I would teach here. The past four years here have been among the best teaching experiences I've had. I love your student body here—you have students committed to their tribes and who aren't all about getting a job and having two cars in the garage and living in Phoenix. They realize there are things to be done in Native studies. So you have an unusual student body here, unlike any I've encountered elsewhere.

I think that I don't want to grade papers anymore. I think I want some kind of job where I just go and lecture, talk, tell you all about my biases, my prejudices, and I won't have to grade any papers. I don't know if you can find those kinds of jobs anywhere—I have not been that fortunate. But I am working on a couple of manuscripts. The latest one is called, tentatively, Gateway to Consensus, because I do think we have to come to a consensus sooner or later about what we're doing in Indian studies, and that's one of the reasons the work we did yesterday concerning the organization of the consortium is so important to me. The subtitle of my manuscript is Conversations in Indian Studies. Have you noticed how difficult it is getting people to talk about what you want to talk about? It's a little like bringing up herpes; they look at you like you have some kind of terrible disease if [End Page 179] you want to talk about Indian affairs. Or politics, which is one of my favorite subjects.

Where I come from in the Black Hills (I live in the Black Hills of South Dakota just outside a racist little town called Rapid City—I've tried living there two or three times but I keep moving away), the people there, all they want to talk about is Leonard Peltier. They don't want to talk about how to make tribal government work. They want to talk about the hairdo on James Brown the last time he was picked up for domestic violence. And when you try to talk with them about treaty matters, which are a big deal where I come from, there's no one to talk to. They don't want to talk about stolen land, they want to talk about gay marriage, or Janet Jackson, or mad cow disease. They do not want to talk about how to improve tribal government or the schools; they don't want to talk about racism or my latest book, Anti-Indianism in Modern America, which has quickly fallen into obscurity almost everywhere. They don't want to talk about David Wilkins's book on the Supreme Court, probably the best book that's been written in the past ten years for Indian studies. You bring up any of those important things, and they just want you to go away.

The latest thing where I come from is a murder trial, another AIM trial, that just got over with, in a district court. It's about who killed Anna Mae Aquash, a Micmac Indian from Canada who joined AIM in 1970 or so, and they've arrested some poor homeless Oglala named Arlo Looking Cloud, who's going to become the federal scapegoat for this. He's been found guilty, of course. The issue, apparently, was that Aquash was supposed to be a federal informant, but she was killed by AIM, and the feds have now arrested this most unfortunate man who's lived most of his life on the streets of Denver, and he's going to take the blame.

Well, I went to some of that, lots...

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