In Defense of Loose Translations - (American Indian Lives) by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

About the Book

"In Defense of Loose Translations: An Indian Life in a Mainstream Academic World is Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's memoir that bridges personal and professional experiences of the provocative, and often controversial, writer who narrates the story of her intellectual life in the field of Indian Studies"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In Defense of Loose Translations is a memoir that bridges the personal and professional experiences of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Having spent much of her life illuminating the tragic irony of being an Indian in America, this provocative and often controversial writer narrates the story of her intellectual life in the field of American Indian studies.

Drawing on her experience as a twentieth-century child raised in a Sisseton Santee Dakota family and under the jurisdictional policies that have created significant social isolation in American Indian reservation life, Cook-Lynn tells the story of her unexpectedly privileged and almost comedic "affirmative action" rise to a professorship in a regional western university.

Cook-Lynn explores how different opportunities and setbacks helped her become a leading voice in the emergence of American Indian studies as an academic discipline. She discusses lecturing to professional audiences, activism addressing nonacademic audiences, writing and publishing, tribal-life activities, and teaching in an often hostile and, at times, corrupt milieu.

Cook-Lynn frames her life's work as the inevitable struggle between the indigene and the colonist in a global history. She has been a consistent critic of the colonization of American Indians following the treaty-signing and reservation periods of development. This memoir tells the story of how a thoughtful critic has tried to contribute to the debate about indigenousness in academia.

Review Quotes

"[Cook-Lynn] embodies a remarkable consistency and remains unflinching in her dedication to her truth. . . . The final chapters, hard meditations on the choices she has made as an [American] Indian academic, are especially poignant and contribute much to appreciating the intellectual core of American Indian studies. . . . What she presents is a meta memoir, one we will do well to digest and discuss--or dismiss to our detriment."--Eric P. Anderson, Kansas History


"In Defense of Loose Translations is eyewitness testimony of what Native academics lived through as they infiltrated settler-colonial institutions of higher education, purposefully and diligently working to advance the inclusion of Native history, literature, politics, and environmental management into Western-based Euro-American pedagogy, unmasking pretenders who played Indian to advance themselves and jeopardize fledgling Native programs and scholars as they pursued their self-interests."--Kerri J. Malloy, American Indian Quarterly

"As a Native intellectual and a Dakota intellectual, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn constructs indigeneity as well as her own life while deconstructing U.S. settler-colonialism. She is one of the world's experts on the subject area, which gives the subjective text a solid foundation. The book is beautifully written, poetic, lyrical, a signature style. It is truly a brilliant work."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, winner of the American Book Award-- (3/3/2018 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is professor emerita of English and Native Studies at Eastern Washington University. She received the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and won the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. She cofounded Wíčazo Sa Review and is the author of several books, including Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice; New Indians, Old Wars; A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations; and Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth.