An Origin Story

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth.

Wicazo Sa Review, Volume 20, Number 2, Fall 2005, pp. 17-19 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: 10.1353/wic.2005.0021

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wic/summary/v020/20.2cook-lynn.html

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An Origin Story
E l i z a b e t h C o o k - Ly n n

W hen 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 con-
tentions and ideas, in a scholarly publication dedicated to the idea that
Indian First Nations are sovereign nations with long, arduous, and dif-
ficult 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
R E V I E W

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
S A

had written some years before in his classic The Way to Rainy Mountain,
W I C A Z O

and the subsequent story of how the Kiowas emerged from a hollow
log into the geography of the northern plains was being read by every-
one in Indian Country. Indeed, emergence stories are everywhere in 17
Indian lore. How does anything happen? How do a People converge on
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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
 handful of people had concerning the development of American Indian
studies as an academic discipline. Until recently, Indians had been stud-
ied largely by others, as vulnerable subjects in science, anthropology, so-
ciology, 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 stud-
ies. 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 cos-
mopolitan 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 publica-
tion 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
R E V I E W

politician, raising seven sons and one daughter. She was from the large
French and Indian Renville tiospaye of the Eastern Sioux. Her rela-
tive, Akipa, had assisted in the publication of the first dictionary of the
S A

Dakotah language long before I was born. Gran Eliza wrote in Dakotah
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and English for the missionaries who had invaded the Sisseton reserva-
tion, though she never spent a day in a classroom. She influenced me to
18 know that words have consequences. The $3,000 lease check from an
Indian land estate paid for the first two issues of the Wicazo Sa Review.
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The journal has been dedicated to her memory ever since.

In the years since 1984, there have been just three managing edi-
tors of this journal: myself, Dr. William Willard (recently retired from
Wazoo), and now Dr. James Riding In, a fact that probably accounts
for its consistent thematic dedication to developing Indian studies as
an academic discipline. Today, the journal has found a publishing home
at the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis, as well as an aca-
demic home with the American Indian studies program at Arizona State
University. Dr. Riding In, a long-time tenured faculty person at ASU,
has challenged the university to provide office space, technical support,
and a budget of its own, and the university has responded generous-
ly. For a journal that started with nothing and spent many years as an
“orphan” of the academic publishing world, a description for which we
thank Vine Deloria Jr., it doesn’t get any better than this!

R E V I E W
S A
W I C A Z O

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