In recognition of his contributions to the Colorado and national literary and legal communities, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles F. Wilkinson received the Colorado Book Awards 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award in History. Wilkinson’s 14 books include the standard law casebooks on Indian law and federal public land law. He is a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, for Messages from Frank’s Landing (2000) and Blood Struggle—the Rise of Modern Indian Nations (2005).
Wilkinson, who retired as a full-time faculty member in 2018, earned his law degree from Stanford University in 1966. He moved to Colorado in 1971 to help found and serve as a staff attorney for the Native America Rights Fund and began teaching at Colorado Law in 1984, becoming the Moses Lasky Professor of Law in 1989. In 1997, he was named a Distinguished Professor by the Regents of the University of Colorado. In over 32 continuous years at Colorado Law, Wilkinson has become one of the most widely celebrated names in American Indian law, the history of the American west, public land law, water law, and environmental law—even being labeled by Outside magazine as “the West’s leading authority on natural resource law.”