Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood: Cultural and Historical Pressures on Aesthetic Choice and Authorial Identity Author(s): Margaret A. Lukens Source: American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer, 1997), pp. 409-422 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185515 Accessed: 13-01-2016 22:45 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Indian Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 76.77.170.59 on Wed, 13 Jan 2016 22:45:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MourningDove and Mixed Blood: Culturaland Historical Pressureson AestheticChoice and AuthorialIdentity MargaretA. Lukens Mourning Dove is the pen name of ChristineQuintasket, one of the foremothers of contemporaryNative American women novelists. Her only novel to reach publicationwas a western romanceentitled Cogewea,the Half-Blood:A Depiction of the GreatMontana Cattle Range, published in 1927, fifteen years after she began writing it. In Cogewea,Mourning Dove createdsome of the earliestheroic "half-blood"characters of Native Americanliterature, anticipating by fifty years the recuperativetheme of LeslieSilko's Ceremony(1977) and PaulaGunn Allen's Woman Who Owned the Shadows(1983).