Indianz.Com > News > Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: Zen and the art of COVID-19 motorcycling

Zen and the art of COVID-19 motorcycling
Monday, October 5, 2020
The annual week-long Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, which recently ended, began in 1938, I’m told, and there have been thousands of stories told about it since. Most locals believe, as I do, that its impetus was for the economic tourist development in the Black Hills.
Some more philosophical types would like to believe it began as some kind of existential spiritual journey through the sacred Paha Sapa, a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world as technology was bursting into our lives and people were beginning to worry, even then, that the modern world was marked for extinction. We’ve come a long way toward that eventuality since, yes?
It is no accident that the motorcycle itself depicted in this old story, a machine which began to sell wildly some twenty years later, a 1966 Super Hawk, is at the center of this book, which many of you have read and which I read during my college years titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a retired Professor of Native Studies. She taught at Eastern Washington University and Arizona State University. She currently lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She has written 15 books in her field. One of her latest is Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth, published by University of Illinois Press.
Note: Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
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