Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Book Signing

"We are pleased and honored to welcome notable local writer, poet, teacher, and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn to our store!

Please come meet and visit with her on Saturday, September 15 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm during her book signing".
- Mary Red Leaf, Prairie Edge Bookstore Manager

We will be featuring two of her books:

The re-release of From the River's Edge and her latest work A Separate Country, Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations.

From the River's Edge
Based on an actual trial, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has written an introspective appeal for Indians to retain their culture.

The time is the late sixties, and the Missouri River Power Project, just completed, is unleashing water on the lands that have nourished the Dakota, physically and spiritually for countless generations.

Like the dead trees [that] protrude from the white people's reservoir covering tribal land, John Tatekeya and other Dakota discover that, in 1967, their Indian roots are dying from modern society's encroachment. John wins a court case against a what man who rustled his cattle but is left uncompensated by the court and betrayed by Indians corrupted by the white world. - Library Journal

A Separate Country, Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn takes academia to task for its much-touted notion that "postcoloniality" is the current condition of Indian communities in the United States. She finds the argument neither believable nor useful - at best an ivory-tower initiative on the part of influential scholars, at worst a cruel joke.

In this fin de career retrospective, Cook-Lynn gathers evidence that American Indians remain among the most colonized people in the modern world mired in poverty and disenfranchised both socially and politically.

Using land issues and third-world theory to look at the historiography of the American Plains Indian experience, she examines colonization's continuing assault on Indigenous peoples. -Texas Tech University Press

About Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, was born in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and raised on the reservation. She is Professor Emerita of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington.

She was one of the founding editors of Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies (Red Pencil Review). She is also a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Authors Guild. Since her retirement, Elizabeth has served as a writer-in-residence at universities around the country.

For her own writing, she believes that "Writing is an essential act of survival for contemporary American Indians." Her writing and teaching centers on the "cultural, historical, and political survival of Indian Nations." She also says, "The final responsibility of a writer like me…is to commit something to paper in the modern world which supports this inexhaustible legacy left by our ancestors."