New Indians, Old Wars

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780252031663
• eBook ISBN: 9780252056987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenging received American history and forging a new path for Native American studies

Addressing Native American Studies' past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in its past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of the West as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that it should be fundamentally understood as stolen.

Firmly grounded in the reality of a painful past, Cook-Lynn understands the story of the American West as teaching the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. To Keep the Plot Moving
• 2. An Aside: How Do We Know about Literary Indians?
• 3. Warriors, Still?
• 4. The Pitfalls of Telling Tribal Histories: Lewis and Clark, Colonial Diaries, and Fool Soldiers
• 5. Defensive, Regulatory, and Transformative Functions of Indian Studies
• 6. The Struggle for Cultural Heritage
• 7. The Ghosts of American History in Art and Literature
• Conclusion
• Notes