AUGUST 1997
Images & Ideas
of the West
Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays:
A Tribal Voice
by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
University of Wisconsin Press
1996 ISBN 0-299-15144-1
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit:
Essays on Native American Life Today
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Touchstone/Simon & Shuster
1997 ISBN 0-684-82707-7
Reviewed by Kathleen Alcalá
These are two collections of essays written over several years and gathered for the first time. Each represents the concerns and scholarship of remarkable people.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a member of the
Crow Creek Sioux tribe from South Dakota, where she was born and now lives.
She has taught and lived in Albuquerque and Eastern Washington as well.
She is one of the editors of the Wicazo Sa Review, a scholarly journal
of Native American studies.
The title essay is drawn from a statement
Cook-Lynn came across by Stegner in which he declares the indigenous cultures
dead before claiming the land as his birthright ("Western history sort
of stopped at 1890."). Naturally, she takes issue with this, and a
land-based aesthetic and culture inform her approach to other subjects as
well. This is as clearly as I have ever seen this viewpoint presented, and
while it can seem extreme and unrealistic at the end of the twentieth century,
one sees the value in insisting on this premise before approaching issues
of law, politics, religion and literature.
Certainly Cook-Lynn is nothing if not
even-handed in applying this standard to others, including other Native
American writers. In her discussion of The Broken Cord, Cook-Lynn
shows how the legal and social point of view advocated by author Michael
Dorris puts the onus on Native American women rather than offering a tribal-based
support system. She sees the deprivation of Indian women of their children
as merely a continuation of the U.S. government's policy of deliberately
breaking up Indian families and calls for alternative solutions to fetal
alcohol syndrome.
Cook-Lynn also takes recent statements
of apology by church groups and declares them poor substitutes for justice
in light of the historical collusion of Christian churches with the government
in depriving Native Americans of culture, language and their children. I
was surprised to find that a statement I helped write at the request of
Northwest Puget Sound tribes has been picked up and adapted by church groups
across the country. It is the facile nature of these statements on paper
in light of countless treaty violations that Cook-Lynn finds so offensive.
Both Cook-Lynn and Silko show a thorough
familiarity with U.S. law pertaining to Native American rights. This thicket
of legal decisions, still in process, is seen by some as the ultimate weapon
in regaining tribal lands and rights. Silko studied law before becoming
overwhelmed at the cruelty and futility shown in individual cases. She returned
to her early love of word and image as embodied by her Laguna Pueblo upbringing
in a loving, extended family.
Silko is a MacArthur scholar and the author
of Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead and other landmark books.
Yellow Woman is a mythical character embodying the resourcefulness and earthiness
of the ideal Pueblo woman, and one whom Silko admires. She recounts a Yellow
Woman story in which a love affair brings new gifts to Yellow Woman's family.
Pueblo culture is so secure and deeply rooted in its collective legacy,
according to Silko, that it is not threatened by individual choice or preference--sexual,
religious or cultural--that does not harm others. She provides an excellent
discussion on how the mythic and the specific do not conflict in traditional
storytelling, keeping the stories dynamically alive generation after generation.
Silko talks about her great-grandmother
who married one of the first whites in Laguna and was still alive during
Silko's childhood. She recalls the pain of being waved off by tourists taking
pictures when she was a child because she did not look Indian enough. The
irony is that her father was a professional photographer and Silko has always
mixed photography with her written work. In "The Indian With A Camera"
she reclaims this visual and artistic legacy as her own. Silko, like Cook-Lynn,
returns repeatedly to the ties of the people to the land and the Hopi prediction
that European ways will eventually succumb to indigenous culture. Demographic
trends bear her out
Both women speak out of thought, meditation
and study. Neither purports to represent the only valid viewpoint (well,
maybe Lynn-Cook does) and neither embraces the writings of all Native Americans
just because they are Indian. Neither have bought into the seductive aesthetic
of commercial success and personal beauty. Recent events have shown that
we expect those who have received the blessing of celebrity status to be
immune to tragedy. These writers remind us that we are accountable to an
ancient order which is blind to such things. Only with such thoughtful and
critical discussion can a Native American aesthetic continue to grow and
develop into the next century.
Buy Why
I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays:
A Tribal Voice From Amazon.com.
Buy Yellow
Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit:
Essays on Native American Life Today from Amazon.com.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997