SOURCE: "Acts of Survival: An Interview with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, January-February, 1993, pp. 1, 6.

In the following interview, which was conducted during November 1992, Cook-Lynn discusses the characters, plot and Native American themes in From the River's Edge.

"Writing is an essential act of survival for contemporary Indians," Elizabeth Cook-Lynn says. As a teacher, essayist, poet, and more recently as a fiction writer, Cook-Lynn has made this survival her life work. A member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, she was born on the reservation at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, in 1930. From 1971 until 1989 she taught English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University. Since returning to South Dakota to write full-time, she has published a collection of short stories, The Power of Horses (1990), and a novel, From the River's Edge (1991). This latter work tells a story few Americans outside of South Dakota know: how the...