Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood: Cultural and Historical Pressures on Aesthetic Choice and Authorial Identity

Abstract

Mourning Dove is the pen name of Christine Quintasket, one of the foremothers of contemporary Native American women novelists. Her only novel to reach publication was western romance entitled Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, published in 1927, fifteen years after she began writing it. In Cogewea, Mourning Dove created some of the earliest heroic half-blood characters of Native American literature, anticipating by fifty years the recuperative theme of Leslie Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Paula Gunn Allen's Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). Mourning Dove's choice to identify herself and her fictional heroine, Cogewea McDonald, as half-blood raises interesting questions about her cultural and historical context. Why would (possibly) full-blooded Salishan woman center her first novel around the struggles of mixed-blood characters? And what might have induced her to create family tree for herself incorporating European and Native ancestry and to claim, as she does in her preface to Coyote Stories (1933), that her paternal grandfather was a hardy, adventurous Celt? These choices of mixed-blood identity are vital aspects of Mourning Dove's project in Cogewea, the Half-Blood: the creation of imaginative space in which to represent the reality of mixed-blood people, and concurrent creation of cross-cultural genre, complete with its own halfblood aesthetic. And, as critics have argued, while identity and authorship are complex aesthetic and personal issues for women writers outside the AngloAmerican mainstream, I want to suggest that some of the answers to questions about Mourning Dove's choices lie in her location in time and space the late nineteenth and early twentieth century near the western border between the United States and Canada. Contemporary Native author and critic Louis Owens (Choctaw-CherokeeIrish) is among those whose work engages the double perspective of Native authors who produce literary texts in European media and genres but who also draw on the traditions and contemporary realities of Native cultures. Owens writes of the meaning of mixed blood in Silko's Ceremony: