Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and I at the South Dakota Festival of Books. Deadwood, South Dakota. October 4, 2019.
No thinker has occupied as much space in my mind than Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Her writing could be sharp—sometimes biting—but always deeply principled. She once told me offhandedly, you have to own what you write. There is a great responsibility in that statement, the truth of which has grown heavier with experience. The weight carries into every draft, every footnote, every anxious moment before publication date.
Cook-Lynn’s influence wasn’t abstract for me. She was my first real critic, before I had published anything of significance. I had sent her my master’s thesis in 2013—a project on the Big Bend Dam and the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, inspired by her own writing about the flooding of Crow Creek just across the river. Our paths crossed years earlier in Rapid City, South Dakota, after a book signing for New Indians, Old Wars. She gave me her email, signed my book, and encouraged me to finish graduate school. Write me when you finish, she said. And I did.
Her response, when it came, was devastating in its brevity. In a few spare sentences she dismissed the thesis for failing to engage seriously with colonialism. That was it. No elaboration. No gentle let down.
She was right.
My training in history had been methodologically conservative—heavy on primary sources, light on critical analysis. I leaned on the archive, hoping evidence would speak for itself, reluctant to risk saying much more beyond the sources themselves. What was meant to be a fifty-page paper ballooned to over a hundred, stacked with footnotes, but lacking the clarity and courage of what makes a writer honest and authentic.
That criticism didn’t break me. It forced me to confront what I hadn’t yet embraced: that writing isn’t just about accuracy or detail— it’s about perspective, voice, and accountability. I wasn’t just reporting history; I was choosing how to frame it, what to emphasize, what to leave left out. I was shaping meaning.
What I admired most about Cook-Lynn was her unwavering belief that writing matters—even when we write in the language of the colonizer. For her, writing was never abstract. It had real, often painful consequences for Lakota and Dakota people. Ideas, once written, can uphold injustice. Treaties, federal Indian law, and U.S. policy—all of which have dispossessed us of land, resources, and sovereignty—were crafted in English, framed through foreign concepts, and enacted through foreign institutions. Language is not neutral. It can create power, and writing, even in the enemy’s tongue, is a battlefield. But only if you write with honesty, rigor, and yes—ownership.
She often reminded me she didn’t publish her first major work until she was in her forties. I always felt like there was a quiet admission tucked in there. Maybe it was self-doubt, or maybe just the realities of living life. Maybe you have to live a little before the words can catch up. Cook-Lynn once chastised memoirists, saying those in the genre often descended into navel gazing or lacked the life experience to offer something as profound as a book about one’s own life. Several years after saying this, the University of Nebraska published her memoir In Defense of Loose Translations.
Even now I find publication more nerve-wracking than writing itself. A stone sits in my stomach on the eve of a new release. I wonder if I said too much or not enough. The doubts get louder the closer to publication day.
With time, I’ve learned to not fear that discomfort. It’s part of the process. Anxiety, when it’s not overwhelming, can be useful. It reminds me to slow down, to check my sources, to think twice before making claims I can’t defend. The most dangerous thing anxiety can do is to not just distort your judgment but convince you that your voice doesn’t matter.
Writing is hard. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. It can be a painful process. Cook-Lynn took my writing seriously enough to invest in reading and criticizing it. She didn’t offer praise when it wasn’t earned. And she advised like a Native elder who didn’t mince words—words that sometimes came off harsh.
That kind of “tough love” can be toxic and unhelpful. That doesn’t mean you should be deceptive when something is wrong. You have a responsibility to get it right and to help others do so too. Other times, the stakes of getting it right are what compels us to adopt an unapologetic defensive stance towards writing and research attacking American Indian people and sovereignty. It is then our responsibility to unleash our pens and keyboards in defense of our nations. That’s what drew me to Cook-Lynn and why I joined the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society, an organization she co-founded in 1993. At the time, the Oak Lake Writers Society, as it was then known, was the first tribal writers’ society of its kind.
She once told me that one of her greatest inspirations was the writing of Chinua Achebe for his privileging of African oral traditions and storytelling and combining it with modern literary forms like the novel. Her interests were “narrow,” she reminded me—not in scope, but in focus. She had little patience for sentimentality. What mattered to her was seeing our people clearly: caught in the jaws of imperialism, misled by the language of inclusion and diversity. We are nations, not minorities, she would say. For her, the future of tribal nations was inseparable from our past—and just as bound up in the art and writing we produce. A collective authenticity is important in producing that necessary voice. It is no small undertaking.
These are the gifts Cook-Lynn left with me. I’ve carried them quietly, waiting for the right moment to put them into words. Since her passing in 2023, I’ve felt their weight more acutely. I had intended to write something sooner, but I hesitated. Our last meeting had ended in a small, friendly disagreement—one that feels trivial now, almost beside the point. What lingers isn’t the disagreement, but the depth of her conviction and clarity.
In the end, all we really have as writers are our words—and our words are only as strong as our humanity.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
The post Owning the words: Lessons on Writing from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn appeared first on CounterPunch.org.