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Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood: Cultural and Historical Pressures on Aesthetic Choice and Authorial Identity Author(S): Margaret A

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Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood: Cultural and Historical Pressures on Aesthetic Choice and Authorial Identity Author(S): Margaret A 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). 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 a (possibly)full-blooded Salishan woman centerher first novel aroundthe struggles of mixed-blood characters?And what might have induced her to createa family tree for herself incorporating European and Native ancestry and to claim, as she does in her preface to CoyoteStories (1933), that her paternal grandfather was "a hardy, adventurous Celt"? These choices of mixed-blood identity are vital aspectsof Mourning Dove's projectin Cogewea,the Half-Blood:the creation of imaginative space in which to represent the reality of mixed-blood people, and a concurrentcreation of a cross-culturalgenre, complete with its own "half- blood aesthetic."And, as critics have argued,while identity and authorshipare complex aesthetic and personal issues for women writers outside the Anglo- American mainstream,I want to suggest that some of the answersto 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. ContemporaryNative author and critic Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee- Irish) is among those whose work engages the double perspective of Native authors who produce literarytexts in Europeanmedia and genres but who also draw on the traditions and contemporaryrealities of Native cultures. Owens writes of the meaning of mixed blood in Silko's Ceremony: [I]n the characterof Tayo, Silko turns the conventionallypainful predic- ament of the mixedblood around, making the mixedblood a metaphor MargaretA. Lukens is an associateprofessor in the Department of English at the Universityof Maine. American Indian Quarterly / Summer 1997 / Vol. 21(3) 409 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 MargaretA. Lukens for the dynamic, syncretic, adaptive qualities of Indian cultures that will ensure survival. the mixedblood is a rich source of power and something to be celebrated.... rather than mourned.' Often, the trope of cultural intersection is figured forth in half-blood fictional characters.Gerald Vizenor (mixed-bloodOjibwa) and PaulaGunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo-Sioux-Lebanese)have both combined the mythic figureof the earthdiver with the half-blood as a metaphor for survival.In Vizenor's Earthdivers(1981) and Allen's Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), half-blood people are responsible for creating a place where they - and everyone else - can survive. Vizenor explains in his preface to Earthdivers: [I]n the metaphorof the M&tisearthdiver, white settlersare summoned to dive with mixed-blood survivorsinto the unknown, into the legal morass of treatiesand bureaucraticevils, and to swim deep down and around through federal exclaves and colonial economic enterprisesin search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island.... M6tis trickstersand earthdiversare the metaphorsbetween new sourcesof opposition and colonial ideasabout savagismand civiliza- tion.2 Like the earthdiversof the widespread creation myth, who establish dry land on the back of the turtle, they provide a new habitable zone. In her study of the impact of genderand ethnicity on authorship,Pocahontas's Daughters (1986), Mary Dearborn discusses the necessity for a "female ethnic author" to rebel without seeming to, writing within a genteel literary tradition and with the express purpose of mediating between her culture and the dominant one, but maintaining a posture of rebellion by weaving subversioninto her text."3The subversion in the case of Cogeweathe Half-Bloodis essentially the claiming of space for mixed-blood people in a genre and during a period in history when white encroachmentleft little physical or literaryspace even for the people who defined themselves as fully Indian. In her novel, Mourning Dove maintains what Sidner Larson, in a recent article on Native American aesthetics,calls "an attitude of relationship,"which I understand to mean a valuing of kinship ties over blood quantum. This "attitude" offers an alternativeto the definitions of Native people imposed by white outsiders, whose interest often has been in shrinking the numbers of people who have rights to government subsidies or land allotments. Those outside definitions, saysLarson, are "in direct opposition to [the Native people's] former historical, place-oriented notion of themselves."4Native people's self- definitions tend toward inclusivenessrather than the exclusivenessand obsession with "authenticity"that are characteristicof white outsiders'definitions, whose purpose is to limit and "corral"the tribes. 410 American Indian Quarterly / Summer 1997 / Vol. 21(3) 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 MixedBlood For Mourning Dove the side-by-sideexistence of full-blood Okanogan and mixed-blood charactersis not only possible but necessary to present a full "depiction of the great Montana cattle range."In the novel Cogewea says, "The curseof the Shoyahpee [white man] seems to go with everything that he touches. We despised breedsare in a zone of our own and when we breakfrom the corral erected about us, we meet up with trouble."5Mourning Dove's novel not only redefinesNative people and half-bloods in their own terms, but also establishes a permanent space, an American homeland chosen by the mixed-blood people who embody that connection. In the search for identity and homeland, her project bearsa relationshipto the CanadianM6tis strugglefor autonomy which created the Province of Manitoba in 1870; there are both geographical and historical connections between those events and the life and work of Mourning Dove. She claimed to have been born in 1888 in a canoe crossing the Kootenai River near Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. In retrospect,her birth during that crossing came to symbolize for her "a life of transition."' Raised in a religious Catholic Okanogan-Colville family, she was educated by Jesuits at a mission school at Ward, Washington, but was reallytaught to read by an Irish-Americanteenager named Jimmy Ryan who had been adopted by her family. His favorite texts were "yellowbacknovels" (dime-store popular fiction) and thus an early taste for sensation and melodramawas inculcated in the young author. The plot of Cogewea,the Half-Blood, while it works like many western melodramas, also draws upon the traditional Okanagan tales "Little Chipmunk and the Owl Woman" and "Coyote Kills Owl Woman" and transformsthem into fiction. The main characterof these tales is Kots-se-we-ah,"a gay mischievous girl who frisks about without a care until trouble appears, then runs for shelter to her patient, hardworkinggrandmother." Kots-se-we-ah is pursued by Owl Woman, who tears out her heart, but the girl is brought back to life and Coyote plans revenge on Owl Woman. The transformationsthat convert the charactersinto the good guys and bad guys of cowboy melodramado not eradicatethe Okanogan basis of the story. Rather, the text itself stands as an example of the intersection of European romance and Okanogan myth.7 Whether Mourning Dove's own status was full-blood or mixed-blood has been a matter of some disagreementin the works of her two biographers,Dexter Fisher and Jay Miller. The conflict originates between Mourning Dove's own account of her genealogy and various readings of the historical record. In her 1979 dissertation, Dexter Fisher examined Mourning Dove and Zitkala-Sa as "transitionalAmerican Indian writers."In her introduction to the 1981 reprint of Cogewea,Fisher reportsfrom researchinto Mourning Dove's correspondence that her paternal grandfatherwas an Irishman named Haynes who "married her Indian grandmotherunder false pretenses in a tribal ceremony," and that after he left his wife, his son Joseph, Mourning Dove's father, "took the name of his stepfather,Quintasket."8 American Indian Quarterly / Summer 1997 / Vol. 21(3) 411 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 MargaretA. Lukens Miller, who published a biographicalarticle and edited Mourning Dove's autobiographicalwritings a decade later, gives a different story of Mourning Dove's father.
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