A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (review)

Intending A Separate Country to be the culmination of her career, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, professor emerita of Native American studies at Eastern Washington University, delivers a book that will be debated for years to come. A Dakota Indian born on the Crow Creek Reservation of South Dakota in 1930, Cook-Lynn is a novelist, poet, and historian whose long career includes the cofounding of Wicazo Sa Review and a record of publishing significant works in American Indian studies since the 1970s. Weaving an eccentric mix of essays and reviews on Indian law, women, academia, ethnic fraud, literature, Abraham Lincoln, and tourism (to name a few), A Separate Country builds an argument, in a circuitous but convincing manner, for the consolidation of American Indian nationhood and against the notion that contemporary Indians live in a postcolonial America.

Colonialism, which she defines as "the policy by which a nation maintains or extends control over foreign dependencies" (vii), continues to be a compelling and relevant topic in American Indian studies. In light of direct colonialism in the United States' forced removal of indigenous people from the Pacific island of Diego Garcia in 1968, as well as the removal by the US military of residents of part of the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1940, Cook-Lynn rightly asserts that American colonialism continues. Decolonization, or notions of the postcolonial, in the Indian context is merely empty talk. She argues that American Indians continue to be "the most colonized folk on the planet" (xv). Further, American colonialism permeates many aspects of American life; indeed, the scholarly tradition itself, she claims, is a colonial construct, leaving Indians to struggle for acceptance of their own intellectual paradigms and continually fight for academia to recognize indigeneity as a serious category of analysis. Therefore, as Cook-Lynn maintains, "to suggest … that the North American continent, and particularly its relationship with its indigenous peoples, can be called postcolonial is an outrageous fraud perpetrated by scholars, thinkers, politicians, and historians" (xvi).

Cook-Lynn splits her narrative into four parts. In part 1, titled "The Indian Postmodern," she illustrates the colonial conditions under which American Indians endured and continue to endure and how academia actively promotes American colonialism as a narrative of progress, effectively downplaying the significance of historical colonialism and obscuring ongoing colonization of American Indian people. Many academics, she asserts, participate in upholding American colonialism through explicating a version of American history that leaves colonial powers blameless for Indian genocide and supporting legal justifications for continuing American colonialism. She calls for the remembrance of the American colonial past, citing Colin Powell's words, "a sense of shame is not a bad moral compass." Another goal of the book is to reject the federal government's assertion of plenary power over Indians and its false declaration of legal ownership of Indian land. In response, Cook-Lynn suggests that academia should rectify these wrongs by employing an honest critique of American history and law. Her most powerful solution is her support for reinstating Native treaty-making power in order to uphold Indian sovereignty and Native land rights.

In a move away from her calls for action in part 1, part 2 explores what Cook-Lynn calls "imponderables," referring to the obstacles, drawbacks, and consequences encountered by American Indian studies scholars in academia and beyond. She decries the lack of institutional support for American Indian studies programs, but more convincing is her analysis of ethnic fraud in American Indian studies. Ethnic frauds, meaning non-Indians who claim Indian identity or profess membership in an Indian nation, are detrimental to American Indian nationhood and do harm to the academic discipline. Several cases of ethnic fraud receive scrutiny, but Cook-Lynn digs deeper into the familiar case of Ward Churchill and its consequences for American Indian studies. She criticizes the lack of penalties for perpetrators for ethnic fraud, but especially the lack of understanding by the American legal system and non-Indian university officials...