Still Waiting for the “Post” to Arrive: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and the Imponderables of American Indian Postcoloniality

In her 1996 collection, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn issued a call for American Indian studies to take up a larger body of Third World criticism. Her goal was to reframe American Indian literary and critical productions within the anticolonial intellectual traditions of the global South and push toward the development of resistance literatures and theories that could substantively critique the rise of a cosmopolitan Indianness that continues to circulate against the specificity of tribe, treaty, and nation. Concerned that the political realities of sovereignty, nationalism, and decolonization that inform American Indian literary productions were being ignored by readers and critics alike, Cook-Lynn asserted that the “themes of invasion and oppression so familiar to colonized peoples throughout the world that are taken up by American Indian writers serve as proof for the argument that major concerns of Third World theorists must be crucial analytical components of anything that might be said about the current literary trends in American Indian voice.”¹ Her call, largely overlooked when it was made in the mid- 1990s by a masculinist field guardedly cautious of Third World critique and deeply suspicious of temporalizing prefixes, in substantive ways heralded the rise of Indigenous critical theory within the academy. Perhaps more important, however, Cook-Lynn’s work has consistently and conscientiously demanded an accounting of voice and authority by those in the field who speak on, to, and for Indigenous communities.

With the publication of A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations in 2012, Cook-Lynn charted an even broader engagement with postcolonial theory alongside a simultaneous rejection of postcoloniality for American Indians still colonized by the United States. Her dialectical method begins with the observation that “for an Indigenous scholar to be sympathetic to postcolonial studies is to be relentlessly optimistic or unaccountably interested in expanding one’s conceptual vocabulary.” As a poet and novelist, she professes a love of language, and her sympathies trend toward the subaltern and the resistance to aggressive colonialisms that subsume all subjectivities within its expansive and heralded post. She quickly, however, turns her devotion to expansive vocabulary into a critique of the dazzlement that academia deploys to obfuscate the lived realities of Indigenous peoples still struggling within a deeply entrenched colonialism hinged upon eliminationism, anti-Indianism, and settlerism. Postcoloniality is, Cook-Lynn asserts, “an elaborate and indefensible scholarly endeavor, both in academia (in Indian studies) and in political life, either for the purpose of obfuscation, denial and discrimination; or as a deliberate strategy to take away the nationalistic or tribal autonomy from millions of people; or finally, to find solutions.”² Situating Indigenous theory as an alternative to postcoloniality, Cook-Lynn posits that indigeneity “as a category of criticism of colonial realms is not only useful for clarification of the condition of colonization, but necessary to the future of tribal nationhood.”³ With the stakes starkly drawn, and holding contradictory theoretical impulses in tension, she cautions that academic Indians require constant scrutinizing to ensure that their work does not ultimately serve to mask tribal nations’ struggles for autonomy and justice.⁴

Caught in a neoliberal corporatized environment that demands, fetishizes, and finally subverts Indigenous voices to further the status quo, Indigenous scholars confront, in Cook-Lynn’s words, “the fate of all of us who try to go in two opposed and, in my opinion, ridiculous directions at once.”⁵ The adversarial environments in which Indigenous writers, teachers, and researchers work is often vexed and mired in compromises that diminish Indigenous struggles through sheer exhaustion and attrition. Given just enough resources to coerce an attachment to participate in order to make a difference within academe, American Indian studies programs falter under the lack of sustained infrastructural support to expand, innovate, and foster Indigenous critique across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. At the same time, and in Cook-Lynn’s assessment, Indigenous scholarship struggles against co-optation, defamation, and isolation as the traditional fields of Orientalist knowledge production continue to assert disciplinary and proprietary control over what are often...