A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn takes academia to task for its much-touted notion that postcoloniality is the current condition of Indian communities in the United States. She finds the argument neither believable nor useful-at best an ivory-tower initiative on the part of influential scholars, at worst a cruel joke. In this fin de career retrospective, Cook-Lynn gathers evidence that American Indians remain among the most colonized people in the modern world, mired in poverty and disenfranchised both socially and politically. Despite Native-initiated efforts toward seeking First Nationhood status in the U. S., Cook-Lynn posits, Indian lands remain in the grip of a centuries-old English colonial system-a renewable source of conflict and discrimination. She argues that proportionately in the last century, government-supported development of casinos and tourism-peddled as an answer to poverty-probably cost Indians more treaty-protected land than they lost in the entire nineteenth century. Using land issues and third-world theory to look at the historiography of the American Plains Indian experience, she examines colonization’s continuing assault on Indigenous peoples.