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........

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