Words Have Consequences”

Reconstructing and Implementing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Nation-Centered Literary Theory

Bibliographic Data

ID14810947
AuthorsSarah Hernandez (0000-0002-1217-234X, corresponding author), Sarah Hernandez Sarah Hernandez
Year2016
Volume31
Issue1
Pages64
Publication date2016-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWicazo Sa Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0749-6427 • E-ISSN: 1533-7901
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5749/wicazosareview.31.1.0064
OpenAlexW2468828212
LanguageEN
References cited11

“Words Have Consequences”Reconstructing and Implementing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s Nation-Centered Literary Theory Sarah Hernandez (bio) Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has had a tremendous impact on the development and growth of Native American studies (NAS). Wicazo Sa Review (WSR) is perhaps one of her most important and long-lasting contributions to the field of NAS. Cook-Lynn helped cofound, fund, and edit this unique academic journal for twenty years. WSR is known as the first academic journal to provide an intellectual platform for NAS scholars—including Cook-Lynn herself—to develop and critically engage with their own nation-centered theories. In recent years, she has used this space to examine and explore a number of important and, at times, controversial issues related to Native history, law, and politics. However, early in her career, much of Cook-Lynn’s scholarship also focused on Native literature and literary criticism. In 1993, Cook-Lynn published “The American Indian Fiction Writer: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty,” which is her most cited and republished work of literary criticism to date. This seminal essay analyzes how literary representations shape and influence tribes and tribal nationhood. It also helped lay the groundwork for American Indian literary nationalism, the literary methodology that currently dominates the field of NAS. This methodology firmly maintains that nationalism “is a legitimate perspective from which to approach Native American literature and criticism. . . . [and] that such a methodology is not only defensible, but crucial to supporting [End Page 64] Native national sovereignty and self-determination.”1 Although Cook-Lynn’s literary scholarship helped lay the groundwork for American Indian literary nationalism, she clearly disapproves of this school of literary criticism and has firmly denounced “its disastrous effects . . . over the study of Native languages and tribally-specific literary theory and aesthetics.”2 This criticism hints that there is a more effective literary methodology for analyzing, interpreting, and critically engaging with Native literature. Unfortunately, Cook-Lynn largely abandoned her scholarly interest in Native literature and literary criticism before she had the opportunity to fully articulate or implement this more effective literary methodology. In many ways, then, her nation-centered literary theory is incomplete. Fortunately, she has tentatively outlined this methodology in several of her early essays for WSR, which focused primarily on Native American literature and literary criticism. The purpose of this essay, then, is to reconstruct Cook-Lynn’s literary methodology by revisiting her scholarship and also to test the validity of this reconstructed methodology by analyzing and interpreting her 1999 book Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy. This approach provides new insights into the content and structure of Cook-Lynn’s trilogy, and also helps determine if Cook-Lynn’s writing adheres to the same high ethical and literary standards that she has set for other Native writers and scholars. Cook-Lynn seems to welcome this challenge as indicated by the following admission: “I began to write and publish because I really wanted to be a literary critic, and it seemed to me, though others disagree, to be somehow unfair, cowardly, or graceless to critique another’s work if my own wasn’t out there in the full glare. I think I felt it analogous to behaving like the Catholic priest who makes the rules about marriage, but doesn’t play the game.”3 Briefly stated, this essay examines how Cook-Lynn “plays” or critically engages in the “game” of Native American literary studies. “WORDS HAVE CONSEQUENCES” Born on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in Fort Thompson, South Dakota in 1930, Cook-Lynn traces her knowledge of the Dakota literary tradition to her grandmother and namesake, Eliza Grey Shawl Renville, whom she describes as “a traditional woman” who “wrote in the Dakota language for some of the early Christian newspapers.”4 At first blush, this statement seems like an oxymoron: Cook-Lynn’s grandmother attempted to preserve Native culture and language by writing for a nontraditional publication printed by Christian missionaries intent on extinguishing traditional Native lifeways. Nevertheless, Renville used her writing to preserve traditional Dakota lifeways by: [End Page 65] 1) contributing bilingual stories to the newspaper for both Dakota-and English-speaking tribal members;5 and 2) focusing on

Art · Cosmopolitanism · Criticism · History of literature · Literary criticism · Literary theory · Literature · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Sovereignty · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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