Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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As a Dakotah Woman: An Interview with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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SOURCE: "As a Dakotah Woman: An Interview with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn," in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Sun Tracks and The University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp. 57-72.

[Bruchac is an Abenaki poet, short story writer, novelist, author of children's books, editor, educator, and critic. In the following interview, Cook-Lynn discusses her poem "At Dawn, Sitting in My Father's House," the development of her literary style, and the influence of Kiowa author of N. Scott Momaday on her writings.]

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a writer whose voice has only begun to be heard at a time when most other writers are already well established. As she says of herself, she truly came to writing in her forties and is still hesitant to call herself a poet. A member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, she was raised on the reservation and is a fluent speaker of Dakotah. Her work reflects her connection to her people and she has been described by some critics as one of the most authentic of Native American "tribal" voices….

         "At Dawn, Sitting in My Father's House"
 
         I.
 
                  I sit quietly
       in the dawn; a small house in the Missouri breaks.
       A coyote pads toward the timber, sleepless as I,
       guilty and watchful. The birds are commenting on his
       passing. Young Indian riders are here to take the old
       man's gelding to be used as a pick-up horse at the
       community rodeo. I feel fine. The sun rises.
 
         II.
 
                  I see him
       from the window; almost blind, he is on his hands and
       knees gardening in the pale glow. A hawk, an early riser,
       hoping for a careless rodent or blow snake, hangs in the wind-
       current just behind the house; a signal the world is
       right with itself.
 
                  I see him
       from the days no longer new chopping at the hard-packed
       earth, mindless of the dismal rain. I hold the seeds
       cupped in my hands.
 
         III.
 
                  The sunrise nearly finished
       the old man's dog stays here waiting, waiting, whines
       at the door, lonesome for the gentle man who lived here. I
       get up and go outside and we take the small footpath to the
       flat prairie above. We may pretend.
 
                            —Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

[Bruchac]: I like that poem. The mood you've created is such a gentle and evocative one. The picture you give of the relationship with your father—though you don't speak directly about that—is a very strong one.

[Cook-Lynn]: Yes. I didn't know that for a long time, about my relationship to my father. It just seemed to be like all relationships are. I think that's one of the interesting things about being a poet, it leads you to discover things. The discovery of the relationship with my father is one of the marvelous things that has happened through the years. He's been dead now for five years, and I wrote this poem after his death but before I had really gone to this place. I think the poem does say a lot of things about my relationship with my father, who has turned out to be quite influential. I think the poem probably does some other things as well. You know, the Sun is, in Sioux mythology, a male figure. There are several ways to say "Sun." You can say tunka-shina, which is the actual word that you use for your blood grandfather. So, the Sun itself becomes a kind of father figure, symbolically speaking or metaphorically speaking—in the poem. This is one of those poems, too, that was just so easy to write. It was all right there. It's probably one of the poems that I've written most quickly and I don't know how to explain that, either. It's positive poem, too. The Sun rises and so everything is all right, even though it is a poem about death.

That is one of a number of things which strike me about this poem: the clarity and simplicity of statement, those very brief and direct sentences; the way the dawn comes into the poem and the sun is rising so that even though it is a poem about your father's death it is not pessimistic or negative.

Yes, and that brings up, perhaps, some of the religious matters in the poem. We are talking about the dawn, after all, and there are many songs that one knows about anpao wichakpe, which is the morning star that comes then. There are lots of songs that are sung, religiously speaking. I happen to be doing some translation of some songs right now. I didn't have that in mind, I suppose, when I wrote the poem, but it does have that quality of singing to the dawn. Then there is kind of a finished thing, too. The sun rises in the morning and that is the end. The sunrise is really finished. That's something I like about it. You know, so many times you write a poem and you're not satisfied and you just work at it and struggle with it so that it does seem complete. This one just was completed without any effort.

There's a philosophical direction the poem takes—an attitude toward death, dying, and those who have died, which I see in American Indian writing in general.

Death is certainly part of life. I think this poem affirms that cultural idea. It's not a poem that is in despair over this death. It is a poem that rather accepts it, I think, in that kind of way that American Indians have. It is not a poem that is filled with grief and loss. The narrator of the poem says, "I hold the seeds cupped in my hand." And when the hawk rises in the wind currents behind the house … there are so many things. And the sunrise itself finishing, that's a very positive sort of thing. It's odd, I suppose, that a Native American writer uses these kinds of things but very seldom knows about it until later. Until someone talks about it or pays particular attention to it. I was talking to Ray Young Bear one time, and he and I had just had some of our work discussed by Jim Ruppert. It was an essay called "The Oral Tradition and Six Native American Poets," something like that. Ray was saying, "I really like to read that because it makes so much more sense to me. It sort of explains to me what I'm doing and it clarifies it for me." I don't know if I ever told Jim that. I should have, probably. I felt the same way. I think there are a lot of poets, however, who know what they are doing. I think that Ray certainly does have a notion of many of those things. But I think that what he was saying was that when you talk about it, when you read some literary criticism, then it does clarify things you might not have thought about. I have the sense that I know less about what I'm doing as a poet than most people I talk to. So, it's an interesting process.

When did you become a writer?

The question of when you did become a writer is a question that I really don't know how to answer because I still don't consider myself a writer. Another friend of mine who is a writer said recently, "I finally got a passport and on it, where they asked occupation, I put down 'writer.' So now I'm a writer. It's on my passport." I said, "Well, I've never come to that conclusion." I think of myself in a lot of ways. I'm a teacher. I'm a mother. I'm a wife and a grandmother. I am a teacher. I do accept that. But when I talk of myself as a writer I don't know if I am. I very often say "I could have been a writer" (laughs). So I have this ambivalence, but I have been writing forever. As a kid I went to schools on the reservation, around Fort Thompson and Big Bend. When I first learned to read and write, I used to copy poems down—before I knew what poems were. I had these notebooks that I kept and I just copied them exactly as they were in the book. So I have the recognition that it was always an art which interested me, before I even knew what poetry was. I didn't write a lot of poetry when I was a child. I probably didn't write poetry until I was in college. I wrote stories, but I didn't do much of that until I was in college. My undergraduate degree is in Journalism, and I got that at South Dakota State College. It was then that I became very much interested. I wrote early things and published them then and after I was married. They were terrible things, and I don't know why anyone published them. Often quite emotional. So that's how I began, but I really didn't like anything I wrote until I got to be forty. Then I liked what I wrote. Then I really started publishing, and people started talking to me about what I was writing. Then I gave readings and so on. Isn't that odd?

What led you to write poetry and fiction?

I don't know. I haven't the foggiest notion about that. I just know that I have always been interested in writing and I have always been interested in language. I grew up, of course, in the midst of some very difficult times for reservation Indians. I was born and raised on the reservation. I married another Sioux from another reservation, the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, my first marriage. I'm sure that the whole notion of poetry and writing and those rather esoteric kinds of things were far from the influences in my life. I'm sure that becoming a college professor wasn't even in the realm of possibility. So it's very strange how I managed to write and become a college professor and the editor of a magazine and all these things. I don't really know. But I did have a grandmother whose name was Eliza Renville. She was from the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Reservation up near the Canadian, North Dakota border. She wrote. She was a woman who seldom spoke English and so she wrote in Dakota language for some of the early Christian newspapers that came out of that part of the country. I was very close to that grandmother. I was with her quite a bit. She lived probably four miles from where we lived. I used to walk back and forth and we would talk and she was a writer. She was taught by the Presbyterian missionaries. There were Presbyterian missions in both North and South Dakota, and she and her family were very much involved in that. Her father and her grandfather helped put together one of the first Dakota dictionaries. Contemporary writers don't arise out of nowhere. They don't operate in a vacuum, they come out of some kind of tradition. So, even though I wasn't sure about all of that stuff and didn't know a lot of it, I think that must have been influential. I still have a lot of those newspapers that were published then. I suppose they started publishing them in something like 1850–60, and they went through to the 1930s. So there was a long tradition in that and my grandmother, even though she was really a traditional woman, became involved in that. Most of the time Christians thought that only men were people of importance, that her father and her brother were the important people. But somehow Eliza—I'm named after her, too—Eliza Renville did this. I read those newspapers every now and then. Of course she wrote about religious things. She also wrote about community things. And she also wrote about traditional things because there was a kind of a combination of Christianity with the old tradition that was still going on.

So, you have both Dakota oral tradition and relatively unknown Dakota literary tradition to back yourself up with?

Yes. A lot of people don't think that there really is a Dakota literary tradition. A lot of people have no sense of that at all. But there is a kind of an interesting dual tradition there, and this was before very much work had been done concerning how to write down the language. I think she was writing at a time when people were just discovering how to do that. There's been a lot of criticism of that sort of thing lately in that the writing syllabary is pretty much oriented toward the English language rather than finding ways to do it like the Crees have done or as the Cherokees did back in the old days, where they invented their own alphabet. That didn't occur for the Sioux.

This ties into a statement you made in Wicazo Sa Review: "Different poets concentrate in different ways and my own individual way of concentration generally comes from what I know as a Dakota woman." Can you expand on that?

One of the things I worry about when I write poetry is whether I utilize the devices that one knows about poetry in the Western tradition. I think that I don't concentrate on a kind of lyric tradition that might come out of classical European poetry. When you concentrate on the lyric you are interested in emotion and then you are doing certain things. I would like to be able to do that, but that's not really my concentration. So, I concentrate more on the narrative. If you're concentrating on the narrative more than the lyric, then you're interested in the story, not the emotion. Then you're interested in characters and events. I think that's what I meant. And much of what I do in that rises out of the story or history. I'm not a really terribly religious person with access to all the rituals and all of that. So, I think I'm concentrating in different ways. Does that explain it?

Yes. It also makes me think of your reference to a statement of Robert Penn Warren's: "short stories destroy poetry." Because of the way you use storytelling techniques in your poetry, I felt that you don't agree with him.

Oh, yes. I think I don't agree with him. I think that they rise from the same thing. I think that they're both there. I've written a lot of poetry that is directly related to a story I've written. The poem may say something different, but it is certainly connected to the story.

Your first book, Then Badger Said This, was published in 1978 and reissued in 1981. That book's structure is very interesting. You combine poetry, personal narrative, story, and essay. How did you happen to put it together that way?

Well, of course the influence of Scott Momaday on Indian writers is just profound. I was trying, of course, to write the Sioux version of The Way To Rainy Mountain. I was trying to find out what I could discover in that volume about the Sioux tradition and what I know. So I started out to do that and I will be perfectly up front and open about that. People have said that The Way To Rainy Mountain and Then Badger Said This are similar in structure and I think that Elaine Jahner even wrote an essay in which, I believe (I haven't read it), she commented on the similarity of those two works. I happen to think that Scott Momaday discovered something terribly important when he did that, for all of us of specific tribal histories. He did it for himself, for a Kiowa, but I wanted to do it for myself, as a Sioux, in some important way. I don't know if I can say much more about that. But, of course, it fell into chaos and I ended up simply ending and putting a few poems in. The reason I called it Then Badger Said This was because the badger is not a terribly important figure in Sioux literature but he is always there. He comments on what people say. He sort of keeps the plot moving. Sometimes his observations are correct and sometimes they are not. But his basic function is to keep the plot moving. That's kind of how he operates in Sioux literature. So that's what I wanted to do with that. I wanted to keep the plot moving. Actually, I think you could use the devices that Momaday chose to use in there and you could explain a lot about the Yakimas and the Dakotas and the Hopi, all sorts of tribal perspectives could come out of that.

You seem, like Momaday, to have done quite a successful job of blending various forms of narrative to produce an overall different texture and result.

Well, I don't know that it was so much a classic quest on my part, as it is in his, clearly. Then he has the prologue and the epilogue also, which explain that. The essay "The Man Made of Words" goes along to explain it even further. I don't know that I was into it to that degree. However, I wanted to find out what the past has to do with the present, what oral tradition has to do with what you're doing today in literature. Things like that interest me. I think that more Indians who really come from some kind of a traditional background ought to try to use that form that he has put so clearly in front of us. It is more the Indian novel, you see, than House Made of Dawn. It does what a novel does, it gives you that worldview. That's the function of a novel. So I consider that the form of the Indian novel. I think it is fantastic.

How would you describe that form?

I don't really know. I don't know that I discovered that so much when I tried to utilize it. But I'm sure that you can see the possibilities in that form by looking at Then Badger Said This. Let's take a look at the one that starts on page 22:

When the Dakotapi really lived as they wished, they thought it important to possess a significant tattoo mark. This enabled them to identify themselves for the grandmothers who stood on the ghost road entering the spirit world asking, "Grandchild, where is your tattoo?" If the Dakotah could not show them his mark, they pushed that one down an abyss and he never reached the spirit land.

That, of course, is myth. That's myth that everybody knows, I suppose. I'm not making it up and I'm not saying anything original. Any Dakotah who reads this simply knows it. Then, I talk about a particular man, LaDeaux. He dies and there is something in there that doesn't allow him to reach the spirit land. So, he has to have this ritual for that to occur. The father of the little girl sings the song, paints the man's face, and wraps him to get him ready for that journey. We never knew exactly what had happened to him. That comes from an actual death I knew as a child, I really did know Jack LaDeaux.

Were you the little girl?

Yes, I'm the little girl in the story and this is, of course, my father again. I don't want to make my father out to be a really traditional religious figure, because he wasn't. He was just an ordinary man who didn't consider himself necessarily virtuous or religious. So that story is a personal matter I have to explore. I never did know why LaDeaux died, but there was something awful about it. Then the poem, which follows the story, gives some answers to that. I wrote the poem years later. In fact, I was leaving Seattle one time to drive across Montana to South Dakota. It was Sunday morning. I looked out of the window and there was this man standing there in his long gray coat and I thought for a moment I knew him. Then when I turned around and watched him I didn't know him. But I got to thinking what a terrible thing it must be, what terrible thing happened to this man that here he is now, probably drunk for days? The most terrible crime that can be committed in Sioux culture, in Dakotah culture, is to commit a crime against one's own relatives and against one's own brother. So I make that up, you see, and that gives me an explanation for why it is that LaDeaux found himself in the position of not being accepted into the spirit world. It also says something about the significance of myth and how it impacts one's own life. That's what I wanted to do when I put those three pieces together.

Myth, then, impacts your life not just through the past but in an on-going way?

Yes, it does. Yes, indeed it does. It explains many things for you. So, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to use myth and personal history and poetry to discover a cultural value and to say what that value was in the very beginning and to say what it is now. That's what I was trying to do when I was doing this. I was so totally moved when I saw Momaday doing this in some important sort of way that I really didn't understand fully at the time—nor do I yet, probably. But I was for years trying to explain some of these things and then, when I saw how Momaday managed that, it was extremely useful. And I think it would be useful to a lot of Indians who are still significantly connected to the past.

I'm struck, too, by the place where you've retold a story much like a story Momaday told. I'm thinking of the Sioux story of the boy in the lodge, which is very much like Momaday's now well-known parable of the arrow-maker.

Yes, it is from the Dakotah literary tradition.

But the message of your story seems a bit different from Momaday's.

In Momaday's story the enemy is recognized because he does not know the language. In your story, the owl speaks to the boy, Swan, and the connection to the natural world is the significant turning point.

Yes, I thought of that at one time, but I sort of forgot about it. What do you make of that?

It shows, to me, the way traditions cross boundaries throughout Native American cultures … and that there are different lessons which can be gained through almost the same stories.

Yes, I think that both of those things are probably very true. You know that the Kiowas are very closely related to the Dakotahs, culturally speaking. In fact, we have a lot of stories that talk about the Kiowas, our traditional stories. I would imagine that is true of the Kiowas. They must have taken note of the Sioux … traditionally speaking. (laughs) Of course, the Sioux have a tendency to think how important they are. But I do remember some stories my Grampa used to tell, and they did mention the Kiowas particularly. And they were rather familial kinds of stories, almost like the stories that one tells about the Cheyenne. There's a lot of that kind of familial relationship in Sioux tradition. So, the Kiowas aren't terribly far removed, and I think that the story itself is in all of the Northern Plains and the Southern Plains literatures. It is a very common kind of story among groups that are similar. I suppose if you went to the Northwest or if you went to the East Coast, it wouldn't be there. So there is a kind of commonality, and perhaps that is why I was so terribly emotionally moved when I read Momaday back in the '60s.

Would you regard Momaday as one of the major influences on your writing?

Definitely—and I think Momaday is one of the major influences on almost any Indian writer that I know. That's why I'm so disappointed in this new biography that's out on Momaday written by Matthias Schubnell, published by Oklahoma University Press. It says things that indicate Momaday's real contribution to literature is in common themes and common ground with people like Wallace Stegner and Georgia O'Keefe and five or six other western artists. Well, I think that is important to say about Momaday, that he is also effective in the western literary tradition. But the fact is that Momaday, almost single-handedly, made it possible for many of us to find out what it is we know and to express it.

Yes, I think that book misses the point—as have a number of other critical studies which discuss Momaday. Are there certain things special to American Indian culture which you deliberately don't write about or only refer to indirectly?

Oh, yes. I was thinking about that when I was talking about that thing from Badger, talking about the myths, the personal experience, and then the poem. I've got shoeboxes full of that stuff I don't publish and I feel it's an invasion—not only myself, but the people that I know, an invasion of the traditions which I don't really know that much about and I don't know that I should be talking about. So, yes, there is a lot of stuff I don't want to deal with. Sometimes I go ahead and do it anyway, but I'm not so happy about that. There is a story in Then Badger Said This about the woman and the little girl. I was talking to another Dakotah friend of mine, Beatrice Medicine, and she said, "Oh, that story is really good." And I said I was worried writing about that because I don't know anything at all about that thing I refer to in the story, the Elk Society, the male society that men used to have, societies that gave them power over women. I don't know a thing about that. But the fact is that I felt all right imagining it because I'm a woman anyway and a woman isn't supposed to know anything about that. (laughs) So I felt that would be all right. And maybe the Dakotahs who read it would say, "Well, she's a woman and she doesn't know." But I think there are two ways to approach that. One is that you don't know everything you need to know to explore it. The other thing is that perhaps it shouldn't be explored at all in the literary context—written and in English language.

I'm worried about a lot of the things I write. The trouble is you're expected to know absolutely everything. You're supposed to be this expert and you're supposed to have so much authority. The fact is I'm only a poet. I'm not an historian, I'm not a linguist, I'm not all these other things. I'm just a poet, and people have to understand that. Jim Ruppert also said in an article that of all the writers he knew I was the one who functioned as a tribal historian. I was appalled when I read it and I wrote to him jokingly and said, "Jim, really this is terrible." He said, "Well, I see that in your work." And I said, "But historians are supposed to be right about things. They're supposed to know. And besides that, historians are not self-appointed (in Sioux culture, at least) as poets are." But I think there is that worrisome feeling, and I've talked to Ray Young Bear who also expresses the same thing. I think a number of Indian poets worry about that. Even writing about my father intimately, or my mother or my daughter or my grandparents, I feel those also are invasions. The real trouble with being a poet is that you have to let people know you. I want to be a poet but I also want to be anonymous. (laughs)

You mention the difference between men and women in Dakotah ritual life. I know some white feminist writers who—at one time, at least—would just hit the roof at the idea of women being excluded from things, at purely male ceremonials. But I sense a different feeling on your part. Can you explain that?

Oh, yes. There has always been a kind of politeness toward one another. Politeness toward men because they're men and politeness toward women because they're women. You know, even in our language there are those distinctions. Women have different endings to words. They say things, they have words, vocabulary, that men don't use. The same is true on the other side. There are male kinds of things that women don't say. So I think there has always been the recognition of a kind of respect for one another as genders. Respect of gender. People, I think, have misinterpreted that and have often said about Indian women that they are simply beasts of burden following ten paces behind carrying all the bundles. That is not the traditional perspective on feminine life. I think maybe after Christianity came, after the world changed, that things have occurred which American Indian women might want to discuss in the feminist perspective. But I grew up, perhaps in those times when Indian women were seen as inferior. I was born in 1930 when women were having very difficult times and Indians in general.

I think now that Indian women and men are going to have to become familiar with one another in a contemporary setting and discuss the things that have happened to us. You know, there are a lot of Indian women writers now with very strong voices. I think it is possible that different Indian cultures will approach these matters in different ways. Many people think that Sioux culture is very male-dominated, but I think that taking note of that traditional respect of gender is a very important thing to say. Whether or not that excludes men from women's experiences and women from men's experiences, I don't know. I tried to write about that—about an old couple that used to come and visit my grandmother and grandfather. They would come with a team and wagon and they would stay for days. They came from Standing Rock. When it was time for them to leave, she was the one who went out and caught the horses and harnessed them. Then he would get in the wagon and sit up there. She would hand him the reins and then get in the back, with her blanket or shawl over her head and sit with her back against his seat. Then they would leave. I never thought anything of that. Their children were gone, and he was old and very ill and couldn't catch the horses. She was younger than he was, his third wife, I would say. So she did it, and I think that's the way things were and I didn't think of that as being a detrimental thing to their relationship nor did I think of it as a detirmental thing to her as a woman. I tried to write about this but was not satisfied with it. However, I did not perceive Lucy as being an inferior figure. This was just the way it had to be done.

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