"In Defense of Loose Translations is eyewitness testimony of what Native academics lived through as they infiltrated settler-colonial institutions of higher education, purposefully and diligently working to advance the inclusion of Native history, literature, politics, and environmental management into Western-based Euro-American pedagogy, unmasking pretenders who played Indian to advance themselves and jeopardize fledgling Native programs and scholars as they pursued their self-interests."—Kerri J. Malloy, American Indian Quarterly
“[Cook-Lynn] embodies a remarkable consistency and remains unflinching in her dedication to her truth. . . . The final chapters, hard meditations on the choices she has made as an [American] Indian academic, are especially poignant and contribute much to appreciating the intellectual core of American Indian studies. . . . What she presents is a meta memoir, one we will do well to digest and discuss—or dismiss to our detriment.”—Eric P. Anderson, Kansas History
“As a Native intellectual and a Dakota intellectual, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn constructs indigeneity as well as her own life while deconstructing U.S. settler-colonialism. She is one of the world’s experts on the subject area, which gives the subjective text a solid foundation. The book is beautifully written, poetic, lyrical, a signature style. It is truly a brilliant work.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, winner of the American Book Award
