About
Lynne Spriggs O’Connor is the author of Elk Love: A Montana Memoir. While conducting research for her Ph.D. in Native American Art History from Columbia University in NYC, she spent ten consecutive summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation. After moving to live in Montana, she curated a three-year project called Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the C.M. Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past fifteen years, she has lived with her husband on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies. Her life centers around writing, family, and animals—dogs, horses, and cattle—as well as elk, mountain lions, beavers, bears, and other species in the surrounding National Forest. The ranch’s old-growth grasslands also provide habitat for over ninety bird species. In 2021, O’Connor and her husband partnered with the National Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative, utilizing regenerative grazing practices to help sustain this increasingly threatened habitat. Elk Love is her first memoir.
Educational Links
- Women in Ranching website
- Women in Ranching film
- Sacred Cow film, Diana Rodgers
- Finch Research Network blogs
- Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative
- Western Landowners Alliance
- Quivera Coalition
- America’s Grasslands: Status, Threats, and Opportunities. The First Biennial Conference on the Conservation of America’s Grasslands (2011)
- Harrison O’Connor — Instinctive Expressionist Paintings
