Cook-lynn, Elizabeth

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COOK-LYNN, Elizabeth

Born Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving, 17 November 1930, FortThompson, South Dakota

Daughter of Henry Renville and Hulda Petersen Irving; married Melvin T. Cook, 1953 (divorced 1970); Clyde J. Lynn, 1975; children: David, Mary, Lisa, Margaret

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is one of the leading figures in the 20th-Century Native American Literary Renaissance. As a writer, editor, teacher, and consultant in native studies, she has pursued literary, scholarly, and political interests that connect deeply to her heritage.

She was born in the Government Hospital on the Sioux Reservation at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and grew up in an extended family environment along the Crow Creek, a tributary of the James and Missouri rivers. She was named Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving after two grandparents, both of whom figured as influences and role models in her life and work. Her grandmother, Eliza Renville Irving, was from the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Reservation near the North Dakota/Canada border. During Cook-Lynn's childhood, she lived only a few miles away and they were able to spend a great deal of time together. She had been a bilingual writer who worked in the Dakotah language of her people and published in some of the early Christian newspapers. In her dedication to the written word, Cook-Lynn followed in the literary footsteps of her father, Gabriel Renville, a native linguist who was instrumental in developing early Dakotah language dictionaries.

Cook-Lynn's other namesake was her grandfather, Joe Bowed Head Irving, a tribal leader and someone she characterized as a "great talker." He was a longtime member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council. Cook-Lynn's father, Jerome Irving, was a rancher who also served as a member of the Council. Her mother, Hulda Irving, was a teacher whose example she would follow when she became involved in the educational field for many years.

In 1952 Cook-Lynn received a B.A. in English and journalism from South Dakota State College (now University). The next year she married Melvin Cook of Eagle Butte, South Dakota, a fellow student and a Sioux from the Cheyenne River Reservation. They started a family and had a son and three daughters. During this period, Cook-Lynn worked as a newspaper editor and writer from 1952 to 1964 in South Dakota and New Mexico. From 1965 to 1969, she pursued a career as a high school teacher. She did graduate studies at New Mexico State University and Black Hills State College and in 1971 received a Masters of Education in psychology and counseling from the University of South Dakota.

She and her husband were divorced in 1970 and Cook-Lynn accepted a professorship in 1971 at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. She remained on the faculty teaching English and Native American studies until 1990, when she was named Professor Emerita. While at EWU, she founded The Wicazo Sa Review in 1985 along with her colleagues Roger Buffalohead, Beatrice Medicine, and William Willard. Translated as "Red Pencil," Wicazo Sa is a journal focusing on the scholarship associated with developing Native American studies as an academic discipline. Cook-Lynn has served as the journal's editor and has contributed numerous articles on topics ranging from land issues to Native American literature.

In 1975 she married Clyde Lynn, a teacher and a Spokane Native American from Willpinit, Washington. The following year, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Stanford University. She also studied in the doctoral program in comparative literature at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1977 to 1978.

Cook-Lynn's work became widely recognized when her mixed-genre collection, Then Badger Said This (1977), had excerpts included in Geary Hobson's The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (1979) and was reissued in 1983. Then Badger Said This explores the theme of the destruction of native lands as a result of the damming of the Missouri River in 1952. It is influenced by the writing of Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday, an author Cook-Lynn admires for his pioneering technique of combining oral tradition, multiple genres, personal narrative, and tribal history to express a Native American worldview.

Over the years, Cook-Lynn has continued to create stories and poems that depict her people's way of life and at the same time show the effects white culture has had on it. In her novella From the River's Edge (1991), she explores her central concerns from the point of view of John Tatekeya, a cattleman who seeks reparation for the theft of 45 head of his cattle and finds himself the one accused in the white man's legal system.

From the River's Edge was reissued as the first work in the novella collection Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy (1999). It is followed by Circle of Dancers, which features a character from the first book, Aurelia Blue, John Tatekeya's lover of many years. Aurelia searches for her identity as a Dakotah Sioux woman even as she is trying to survive the consequences of the damming of the Missouri River, one of the worst environmental disasters ever visited on the region. In the final novella of the trilogy, In the Presence of River Gods, Aurelia has been witness to events including the birth of the American Indian Movement and the 1974 uprising at Wounded Knee. Her perspective spans the years 1930 to 1990, and like the Corn Wife of Sioux legends, she carries within her the history of her people.

In nonfiction, Cook-Lynn's political and cultural thinking achieved powerful expression in Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996), which received the Myers Center award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997. She was also the recipient in 1995 of the Oyate Igluwitaya award at South Dakota University, given by Native American students to those who aid in the ability of the people to see clearly in the company of each other.

Other Works:

Seek the House of Relatives (1983). The Power of Horses and Other Stories (1990). I Remember the Fallen Trees:New and Selected Poems (1998). The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1998).

Bibliography:

Allen, P. G., ed., Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989). Bruchac, J., and J. Witalec, eds., Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion (1995). Swann, B., and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Witalec, J., ed., Native North American Literature (1994).