"This Story I Am Telling You Is True": Collaboration and Literary Authority in Mourning Dove's "Cogewea"

Abstract

In 1927, after more than fourteen years of rejection, delay, and uncertainty, Christine Quintasket's only novel was published under her Indian name, Mourning Dove.2 Cogewea, the HalfBlood documents an extraordinary collaboration, one through which Mourning Dove achieves one of the most vividly telling-and devastating-explorations of ethnic identity in American letters. During its lengthy passage to print, the original draft of the text was extensively revised and edited-perhaps even cowrittenby Mourning Dove's friend and mentor, Lucullus V. McWhorter, a white amateur ethnographer and activist for Native American rights in the Northwestern United States. Besides additions to the main narrative, McWhorter extensively footnoted Cogewea, added literary epigraphs to each chapter, inserted a biographical sketch of Mourning Dove, and included her photograph. The resulting text, dense with ethnographic information intended to add authenticity and to clarify information unfamiliar to a white readership, situates itself uncomfortably at the crossroads of fictional romance, ethnographic autobiography, and anthropological record. If Cogewea's readers desire tidiness, whether in the form of clear demarcations between the authors of this text, its representation of multiple histories, or simply in the unified presentation of a single literary genre, those desires are immediately frustrated. Even before the narrative proper begins, Cogewea announces the cultural work it will perform: to cast the European concept of literary authority granted by single authorship into the much more vexed and undefined literary space of collaboration. What's more, the