Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Obituary – Death; Rapid City South Dakota Novelist, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Passed Away
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Obituary: South Dakotan author, 92, was declared dead on Wednesday. Before she passed away, she was a novelist, poet, essayist, and editor. Her parents were Crow Creek Sioux, and she was born “Elizabeth Irving” in 1930. She passed away on July 5, 2023.
Her death’s cause was kept a secret from the public. She is renowned for being outspoken when it comes to her views on Native American issues, particularly when they relate to the autonomy of indigenous communities.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Biography
Cook-Lynn was born on the Crow Creek Reservation in Fort Thompson, South Dakota. She belongs to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and is a Dakotan.[1] She went to school there on the Big Bend Reservation.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn came from a political and intellectual family; both her father and grandfather were elected to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council. Her grandma contributed to Christian newspapers in both English and Dakota. Gabriel Renville, a Native linguist who helped create the first dictionaries in the Dakota language, was her great-grandfather.[3]
Cook-Lynn received a BA in English and Journalism from South Dakota State College, which eventually changed its name to South Dakota State University. She was shocked to learn that the presence of Native Americans in the area was ignored in a history lecture about westward migration she studied in college.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn became passionate about speaking up for Native Americans as a result of this. According to Cook-Lynn, she started writing as a “act of defiance born of the need to survive… as Simon Ortiz says, it is an act that defies oppression.”
Cook-Lynn completed her doctoral program at the University of Nebraska in 1978 after beginning her graduate studies at New Mexico State University in 1966 and Black Hills State College in 1968. Cook-Lynn studied at Stanford University in 1976 as a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar before earning her doctorate.
Wazo a Review (also known as “Red Pencil”), a publication dedicated to Native American studies as a field of study, was co-founded by Cook-Lynn in 1985. Beatrice Medicine, Roger Buffalohead, and William Willard were the other original editors. In Cook-Lynn’s academic career, she has both written and taught.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has served as a visiting lecturer at the University of California Davis and has taught at other high schools in South Dakota and New Mexico. The most notable position held by Cook-Lynn was that of English and Native Studies professor at Eastern Washington University.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn left her job in 1971 and was made a professor emerita in 1990. She has also been a writer-in-residence at a number of colleges and universities. In 2000, she visited Arizona State University as a professor.