Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An Origin Story

2005; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wic.2005.0021

1533-7901

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,

Archaeology and Natural History

An Origin Story Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (bio) When the first issue of the Wicazo Sa Review was sent out from my office at an unassuming state university in Washington state, Eastern Washington University, in 1984, no one knew what to expect. Would we find readers? Would the academic world accept us, our contentions and ideas, in a scholarly publication dedicated to the idea that Indian First Nations are sovereign nations with long, arduous, and difficult histories embodying the "alternative" story of America? That our futures are held in the principles of sovereignty and indigenousness, not assimilation and colonization? We had no way of knowing, but our founding editors Dr. William Willard (Cherokee), Dr. Beatrice Medicine (Lakota), Roger Buffalohead (Ponca), and myself (Dakota Santee) had agreed to begin. "Everything had to begin," the Native scholar N. Scott Momaday had written some years before in his classic The Way to Rainy Mountain, and the subsequent story of how the Kiowas emerged from a hollow log into the geography of the northern plains was being read by everyone in Indian Country. Indeed, emergence stories are everywhere in Indian lore. How does anything happen? How do a People converge on the landscape? How do stories begin? How do we today say the world began? Who are we and what is our vision, our imagining of ourselves? Whose vision is given credibility? This brief "emergence" story told here about the beginnings of the Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies tells about a vision a [End Page 17] handful of people had concerning the development of American Indian studies as an academic discipline. Until recently, Indians had been studied largely by others, as vulnerable subjects in science, anthropology, sociology, and politics. It was the vision of the Wicazo Sa Review that Indians would study themselves; that we would remark about who was right, who was wrong; that we would review the works of those other disciplines; that we would look to the future that we held in our own hands. Had this been the case from the beginning of this country, we told ourselves, we would hardly have been called "savages" or "primitives." After our first edition, we sent out letters asking that other scholars join us as the board of contributing editors, and we were astonished at the response of those scholars who were willing to lend us their credentials toward organizing a refereed academic journal of American Indian studies. We set our publishing schedule as semiannual and within a couple of years we were being read by such diverse populations as the Indian students and faculty at Sinte Gleska, the reservation-based community college of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, as well as the cosmopolitan folks at the New York Public Library in Manhattan. By the time we were accepted as a publication of the University of Minnesota Press, our journal was subscribed to by public repositories all over the United States, as well as ones in a dozen foreign countries. The eagerness with which we were welcomed into the academic world by our readers and researchers and writers has been surprising and heartwarming. The downside of all of this, as those of you who desire publication know, is that there is so little funding for such an enterprise. When we began, we had only ideas. We had reams of correspondence, stacks of paper outlining issues, writing to contributors, asking researchers and writers to send us manuscripts, huge telephone bills. In the midst of this hubbub, I got a $3,000 check from the settlement of a land case that involved my grandmother, Eliza Grey Shawl Renville—a woman who had spent her entire life on the Sisseton/Wahpeton and Crow Creek Indian Reservations in the northern plains, the wife of an Indian politician, raising seven sons and one daughter. She was from the large French and Indian Renville tiospaye of the Eastern Sioux. Her relative, Akipa, had assisted in the publication of the first dictionary of the Dakotah language long before I was born. Gran Eliza wrote in Dakotah and English for the missionaries who had invaded the Sisseton reservation, though she never spent a day in a...