“Everything Originates from the Oral Traditions”: A Close Reading of Cook-Lynn’s Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy

Abstract

Abstract:Over the past forty years, Dakota writer and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has published numerous books and articles that are foundational to Native American studies. Although much of Cook-Lynn’s scholarship focuses upon Native politics, law, and history, this article examines her often underappreciated, undervalued contributions to Native literature. In this article, I provide a close reading of Cook-Lynn’s 1999 book Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy, a collection of three novellas that quickly fell out-of-print after early literary critics dismissed it as too political and unrealistic. Indeed, Cook-Lynn’s trilogy is unapologetically political as she exposes the devastating effects of settler colonialism. However, I argue that early literary critics, who bristled at these accusations, also seemed to misinterpret this trilogy because they failed to acknowledge that it is firmly grounded in the Dakota literary tradition. Aurelia is a contemporary retelling of two traditional Dakota oral stories (o-hun-ka-ka tales) about the Corn Wife and the sacred river that remind contemporary Dakota people about their connection and responsibility to the land and each other. In this close reading, I explicate the content, style, and structure of these three novellas to show how Cook-Lynn re-imagines the Dakota oral tradition in a more modern form as print literature.