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. 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

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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.

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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 civilization.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.

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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

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Miller, who published a biographicalarticle and edited Mourning Dove's autobiographicalwritings a decade later, gives a different story of Mourning Dove's father. Miller's researchin census recordsand among other members of Mourning Dove's family indicatesthat her claim of a Europeanpaternal grandfather was a fiction; he posits that since her father was an orphan "she could imagine her grandfatheras she wished." He tells us that Joseph Quintasket "was an orphan whose mother was a Nicola, an Athapaskan-speakingtribe living among the Okanagans"and whose father was from the Canadian Okanagans.' More recently, too, Alanna K. Brown has shown that even the government allotment recordscontain discrepancies.In her article "Mourning Dove's Cana- dian RecoveryYears, 1917-1919," she points out that the recordsdate Christine Quintasket's birth in both 1882 and 1887 and also indicate the name of her father as "Haines." This evidence of confusion raises the question of whether Joseph Quintasket was Christine's biological father or her stepfather;Brown's researchsuggests that Mourning Dove might have had a higher percentage of European blood than she knew or claimed. Perhapsthe process of establishing Native identity by claiming the stepfather'sname took place in Mourning Dove's generation rather than in her father's, as Fisher has suggested. In any case, as Brown concludes, the parentswho raisedher had been raisedtraditionally (Lucy Stuikin, Colville, and Joseph Quintasket, Okanagan) and grounded Mourning Dove in a traditionalSalishan cultural background. Assuming that Mourning Dove was fully of Native heritage,Miller attempts to explain the author's Europeanizationof her heritage in two ways. He says she may have wished to keep her public authorialidentity separatefrom her true "ancestralSalish identity," since she neverused the name ChristineQuintasket to sign any of her published writings. Miller also suggests that "given the tenor of the times and region, her claims to some white ancestry probably gave her more freedom to move among her neighbors and to appeal to a broader readership."1' However, claiming half-blood status could have had preciselythe opposite effect on white readers.At best, as William Scheik has shown in his study of the half-blood as cultural symbol in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, half-blood status might have elicited ambivalence from a society characterizedby "unre- ceptivenessto the assimilationof alien individuals.""Anglo-Americans tradition- ally have held particularlyintolerant opinions of people with half-French and half-Native heritage,and have expressedthese views with venom over the years.12 Northwestern Montana, the setting of Cogewea,the Half-Blood,was the site of uneasy contact between half-bloods and whites near the time of Mourning Dove's birth in 1885. Refugee Metis from Manitoba, the adopted homeland of Canadian mixed-blood people, migratedsouthwest to Montana in the 1870s following political and economic pressures on their continuing livelihood as buffalo hunters. Samples of the views of white Montanans, who referredto the

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Metis as "breeds"or "the coyote French," are preservedin the newspapersof the time:

[The half-blood is] the meanest creaturethat walks. He is never equal in courage to his father. ... He surpasseshis mother in dishonesty and treachery. - GreatFalls Tribune, 16 July 188513

Such a representationof the half-blood as embodying the worst of both worlds was common in the nineteenth century and earlier.The assumption that men in these unions were non-Indian and women were Indian reflects not only the demographic history that at first European men went without women into Indian lands and therefore took Indian wives, but also the racist and sexist ideology of whites who guarded their "racialpurity" by denying the existence of unions between Indian men and European women. American hostility to half-blood people was heightened in the case of the CanadianMetis. The fact that mixed-blood people from Canada tended to have "a stronger sense of identity, a more highly developed culture and a stronger moral backgroundthan [their] American counterpart[s]... only made [them] more suspect" among Americanwhites.14 The recent history of agitation led by the Canadian Metis hero Louis Riel, and the creation in 1870 of the Province of Manitoba as a Metis province, attested to the strength of Metis identity and organization. And Canadian mixed-bloods held the added stigma of being French-speakingforeigners who owed no allegianceto the Americangovernment or to white American citizens in the project of subduing the Native inhabitants of the land. The editor of the Fort Benton (Montana) WeeklyRecord wrote about them thus:

A half-breed camp is nearly as great an attraction for hostile Indians as a herd of buffalo is to a pack of famishing wolves, and while the half-breedsare permitted to roam at will, the hostiles will never want for ammunition or whiskey, or cease to prowl on the outskirts of civilization and rob the white settlers of life and property .... These Canadian half-breedspay no taxes; they produce nothing but discord, violence and bloodshed wherever they are permitted to locate. They are a worthless, brutal race of the lowest species of humanity, without one redeeming trait to commend them to the sympathy or protection of any Government. - Fort Benton Record,17 October 187915

Attitudes among whites, then, are clearlyenough delineated. But while the views of Native American people toward half-blood people are more difficult to

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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 ascertain,it is certain that Christine Quintasket was born into a social climate among Native people of the United States Northwest where a consciousnessof the strugglesof Canada'sMetis still survived,at a time when it was possible for her to regard a mixed-blood heritage as romantic and worthy of pride and preservation.In fact, the year of her birth, if it was indeed 1885, was also the year of Louis Riel's execution by the Canadiangovernment for treason,an event which created him as a M&tismartyr. This ambience of Metis history might have been particularlystrong as she moved eastwardto Montana in 1904 to work and attend classes at the Fort Shaw Indian School in Great Falls. Just to the east of Great Falls lies the Judith Basin, where only two decades earlier, in 1883, Louis Riel had adopted American citizenship and had tried to create a coalition among the CanadianM6tis, the Americanmixed-bloods, and the full- blooded Native Americans living there. Mourning Dove refers to Canadian M&tishistory at various points in her novel. Some of the half-blood cowboys of the Horseshoe Bend Ranch, the setting of Cogewea,the Half-Blood,bear French names;Jaquis de Mont, a cook, is described as having "long been connected with the range."''And Cogewea's romanticcounterpart, James La Grinder,evokes French culture when he imagines a wedding celebration,with

fiddlers and an old fashioned dance at the big log house. No waltzes nor two-steps, ' cause he couldn't do 'em. Only the quadrillesand the "Virginiahoe-down" of other days ... And the light step to the tune of the "Red River Jig.""

Jim's taste runs to square and contra dances, the quadrillesand rigaudons still danced by French Canadians today. Mourning Dove's reference to the dance tune "Red River Jig" connects even more pointedly with Metis history. The Red River providesthe borderbetween Minnesota and North Dakota, and runs north through what is now the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. When Louis Riel first ascended to leadershipof the Canadian Metis, he was headquarteredin a settlement outside of Winnipeg known as Red River; the name "Red River" became equated with the political intentions of its inhabitants,just as the name of any nation's capitol carriessuch connotations today. Mourning Dove's use of the name of the dance suggestsa culturalmilieu in which the relativelyrecent memory of the Metis struggle and the Metis hero Louis Riel survived. Native Americansor half-blood people in the United States probablylearned the "Red River from Jig" Canadian Metis people during the buffalo hunts that brought the Metis west to Saskatchewanand south to Montana twice a year. According to Verne Dusenberry, the Metis from the Red River brought dance and music with them to their "frontier"buffalo hunting settlements along the Milk River in Montana: "The [fiddle] tunes were generallyadaptations of old French folk

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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 Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood songs while the dance itself was a lively number which in time became known as the Red River Jig."'" In Montana, Mourning Dove perceived the connection between the dwin- dling numbersof wild buffalo and the fate of the Native people whose traditional lifestyles centered around them. In 1908 she witnessed the roundup of the last herd of wild buffalo, which, on the occasion of the opening of the Flathead Indian lands to settlement, had been sold to the Canadian government. (Ironi- cally enough, that same year the U.S. government, under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, preserved the memory of this event by establishing a National Bison Rangeon the spot, on land purchasedfrom the FlatheadIndians.) The drama and pathos of the buffalo roundup affected Mourning Dove pro- foundly, symbolizing for her and for many others the violent circumscription of the lives of Native and mixed-blood people by encroachingwhite settlement. On the bison range she had a spiritual encounter, during which she believed she had acquired a personal spirit helper in the form of a voice issuing from a bison skull. This spirit helper found its way into her novel as the spirit helper of Cogewea herself. Likewise, Mourning Dove eulogizes the vanished buffalo repeatedlyin the novel, which is set in specificlocations throughout the Flathead Reservation. The intertwining imagery of the American bison and the "vanished or vanishing Native American"provides us with another key to Mourning Dove's choice of the half-blood over the full-blood as the center of her novel. Early in the story Cogewea is depicted as having a special connection with the buffalo early as she gazes around the ranch house:

[A]bove the bookcase leaned the mounted head of a mighty buffalo bull. Cogewea never looked upon this trophy without a pang of regret. The fixed glassy eyes haunted her, as a ghost of the past. With her people had vanished this monarch of the plains. The war-whoop and the thunder of the herd were alike hushed in the silence of the last sleep - and only the wind sighing a parting requiem.19

At all times three paths present themselvesbefore the girl, Cogewea: her Native heritage, her white heritage, and her actuality as a mixed-blood person. As the passage above suggests, her Native past is associated with extinction, with removal, with inability to survive. However, the existence of her spirit helper that speaks from the buffalo skull on Buffalo Butte and her very traditional grandmother's constant words of wisdom provide Cogewea with accessible sources of strength. Because she identifies herself as a half-blood person, she can draw upon her Okanogan heritage as much as she draws from the white education in which she excelled at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Mourning Dove gives heavy emphasis in the narrationof the book to the

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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 situation of half-blood people; Cogewea, Jim, and other half-blood characters bring forth impassioned soliloquies and carryon heartfeltconversations on the topic:

"The Indian is a peculiarlymysterious race; differing from all others," broke in Cogewea. "We breeds are half and half - American and Caucasion [sic] - and in a separatecorral. We are despised by both of our relatives.The white people call us 'Injuns'and a 'good-for-nothing' outfit; a 'shiftless,'vile class of commonalty [sic]. Our Red brotherssay that we are 'stuck-up'; that we have deserted our own kind and are imitating the ways of the despoilers of our nationality. But you wait and watch!" exclaimed the girl with animation. "The day will dawn when the desolate, exiled breed will come into his own." 20

Cogewea'sunrealized vision calls for space and self respect,denied to half-bloods by both sides of their heritage. Mourning Dove sets up a clear polarity between white and Native cultures, illustratedin the novel by events such as the Fourth of July segregated horse races for "ladies" and for "squaws" (both of which contests Cogewea wins, though she is forbidden by the judges to collect either of the prizes), and by the sharp contrast between the greedy desires of the white villain, Densmore, and the traditional Okanogan wisdom of Cogewea's grandmother.In the processof the story Mourning Dove takesCogewea through experiencesof the antitheticalnature of these cultures,and defines and constructs a middle ground where half-blood people can exist fully, without pressurefrom either the white or the Indian world. The Horseshoe Bend Ranch itself, although owned by a white rancher, emerges as the logical locus of the half-blood world, a liminal space where intersections occur and mixed heritage is tolerated, even fostered. Named for a distinct feature of the Flathead River, the Horseshoe Bend Ranch's name is often abbreviatedin the text as the H-B; my students have pointed out to me these letters are the initials of "half-blood."Cogewea's sisterJulia is marriedto the owner and is therefore herself part-ownerof the ranch; her two sisters and their maternal grandmother, the Stemteema, live nearby. The ranch is a safe place for Cogewea and her female relatives;there the third sister, Mary, and the Stemteemaare free to hold closely to Okanogan tradition. The owner, John Carter,is an extraordinarywhite man who does not try to erasehis wife's Native heritage, nor does he seem to bear ill feelings toward mixed-blood people generally, since most of his hired cowpunchers are half- or quarter-bloods. The H-B ranch is where James LaGrinder can be foreman over all the hired hands, mixed-blood and white, and where Cogewea can test the social, intellectual, and spiritual limits of who she is. Mourning Dove depicts her in search of identity and purpose: "Cogewea could not understand herself. She could find no place in life. Her mind burned with an undefinable restlessness.

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Her longings were vague and shadowy; as something not to be attained."21 Despite her firm connection to traditional Okanogan life through her grandmother and her success in the white-style education at Carlisle, or perhaps because the reality of her mixed blood validates her claim to both heritages, Cogewea is confused. The major locus of her confusion lies in her relationshipswith men. She has plenty of self-confidenceas a working member of the ranch and prospective "foreman," but the loving overtures of James LaGrinderset her off balance. Cogewea prefersto keep their relationshipon the level of a sibling relationship, and Jim acquiesces, because of their parallel half-blood status, in calling her "Sis" and other younger-sister nicknames. Mourning Dove announces Jim's warmth of feeling for Cogewea earlyin the novel, but for Cogewea this mirroring of each other as half-bloods obscures their romance at first. Cogewea's reaction to Jim is that he is too comfortable for her, and she attempts to try out the possibilities of her white heritage through marriageto a white man. Mourning Dove employs this plot device in reactionto a 1909 novel entitled The Brand, which Cogewea criticizes. In The Brand, the half-blood male hero denies his heritage in order to win the love of a white woman. "Bosh!"muses Cogewea,

Show me the Red "buck"who would slavefor the most exclusivewhite "princess"that lives. Such hash may go with the whites, but the Indian, both full bloods and the despised breedsknow differently.And, that a "hero" should be depicted as hating his own mother for the flesh and heart that she gave his miserable frame. What a figure to be held up for laudation by either novelist or historian!22

From start to finish the readerknows that the white man Cogewea tangles with is worse than unworthy of her. First of all, he is an Easterner and a "tenderfoot" who has tried to pass himself off as a rider; Cogewea, in her capacity as lieutenant foreman, has hired him as a joke. Mourning Dove allows us melodramaticglimpses of the deceptiveAlfred Densmore's reactions,starting with his first day at the ranch:

He was hardlysatisfied with his surroundings.Where were those pictur- esque Indians that he was promised to meet? Instead, he had been lured into a nest of half bloods, whom he had always understood to be the inferior degenerates of two races. He could not fathom the "forward"girl with the musical, though unpronounceablename. What was she?23

He bears all the stereotypical prejudices of an Anglo-American toward half- blood it is people; impossible to believe that he is anything but Mr. Wrong for

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Cogewea. He conceivesa plan to seduce her, believing that she is wealthy because of her relationship to the ranch family; he connives to marry her in a tribal ceremony which he can by U.S. law disregardlater, to steal her money, and even to createan "accident"to do awaywith her. The Stemteemauses traditional Okanogan tales and the image of the snake to characterizeDensmore's poisonous nature and warn Cogewea away from him. Seen in the light of his character, it is clear that to "whiten" the half-blood will be deadly in this case; Densmore is no John Carter. If Cogewea were to leave behind the Indian part of her heritage, Densmore would subjugate her body and spirit to the fulfillment of his greed. Mourning Dove exposes the way Densmore's sexual treacheryarises from his proprietaryorientation within an economic system in which women, land, and resourcesare commodified and exploited. Cogewea's decision to marryJim signifies her acceptanceof her half-blood identity as viable and central to herself. To marry another half-blood person is not an acquiescent and xenophobic "staying with your own kind," but rather it createsfor the futurea permanenceof the half-blood.The childrenof Cogewea and Jim will, like their parents,be exactlyhalf Europeanand half Native in blood, and by their marriageCogewea and Jim createa permanentplace of ownership and wealth for half-bloods.(John Carterhas promised to make Jim a partnerin the ranchwhen he becomes a marriedman, particularlyif Cogewea is his bride.) As Jim puts it, "Sis! I always did love you some, and now I like you like hell! S'pose we remain togetherin that there corralyou spoke of as bein' built 'round us by the Shoyahpee?I ain't never had no ropes on no gal but you."24 Critical readersof Cogewea,the Half-Bloodwill probably be puzzled by the novel's shifts in voice and, apparently,in genre, between novel, political tract, and ethnographic report. Mourning Dove is not entirely to blame for these irregularities,however; she had the fortune or misfortune to meet up with the ethnographer-journalistLucullus Virgil McWhorter in 1914, two yearsafter she began work on Cogewea,and he became her editor and mentor in the publishing process. During the winter of 1916 McWhorter provided a quiet place in his own house in Yakima,Washington, for Mourning Dove's revisionof the novel's first draft. Sharing Mourning Dove's frustrationand disappointment at delays and setbacksin the process, however, McWhorter took it upon himself to revise it again in 1922. And although McWhorter valued the book, as he wrote to a friend, because it "graphicallyportray[ed] the social status of the Indian, espe- " cially the half-bloods; or 'breeds,' he had no concept of Mourning Dove's half-blood aestheticand a relativelytepid interestin the pulp-fiction, Zane Grey- esque genre that had originally fired Mourning Dove's imagination.25In fact, McWhorter was inclined to create a tragic ending for the story, and, according to Alanna Brown, he chose the epigraphs heading all the chapters with the intention of leading up to the tragedy.26That aesthetic choice would have recapitulated generations of white representationsof half-bloods as unfit to survivebecause their mixed heritagecombined the worst of both worlds. Brown

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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 Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood emphasizes that McWhorter valued the novel because it was "true to Indian life,"27 but not for its manipulation of the western genre of fiction or for Mourning Dove's recuperationof the half-blood in a heroic role. In spite of McWhorter's additions to the text, Mourning Dove's Metis imagery and theme of the heroic potential of the half-blood remain intact. However, when Mourning Dove read the published version of the novel she had worked on for fifteen years, she wrote to McWhorter:

Dear Big Foot, I have just got through going over the book Cogeawea[sic], and am surprisedat the changes that you made. I think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressinglike a cook would do with a fine meal. I sure was interestedin the book, and hubby read it over and also all the rest of the family neglectedtheir houseworktill they read it cover to cover. I felt like it was some one elses [sic]book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it.28

If Mourning Dove's book is a type of the half-blood zone she was working to develop, then the literary,anthropological, and political intrusionsof "Big Foot" McWhorter are images of trespasson that zone. But the lesson of the novel's plot and of the meta-plot of its creation is that the half-blood is a survivor. Despite McWhorter's arguments in favor of a tragic ending for the book, Mourning Dove had the last word in creating a happy half-blood future for Cogewea and Jim, safe, empowered, and firmly rooted at the H-B Ranch. In its depiction of cowboy and Indian themes, its emphasis on the reality of half-blood people south of the Canadian border, and its presentation of a sensational romance alongside and thematically intertwined with traditional mythic tales from Okanogan society, Cogewea,the Half-Blood brings to the reader a picture of how cultures merge beyond the limits of the novel's plot. The story of Cogewea, while using the conventions of the Euro-Americangenre of western romance,works to establishthe sense of self relatedto place necessary and traditional for Native American people and integral to a Native American literary aesthetic. Mourning Dove's fictive establishmentof a permanent zone of safety and success for half-bloods is echoed exactly fifty years later by Leslie Silko in her recuperation of the half-blood in the novel Ceremony(1977).29 Silko's hero, Tayo, performs a ceremony of healing for himself which contains the seeds of salvationfor the entire world; it is his half-blood status that enables him to perform the function of deliverance,since his own body, his community of Laguna, and the Earth have all become sites of cultural intersection. For Mourning Dove and many other Native authorswho have followed her footsteps, the project of creating fiction leads inevitably to the imaginative zone of the half-blood, a resonant metaphor for the way Native cultures contain the seeds of adaptive and incorporativesurvival.

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Notes

1. Owens, OtherDestinies, p. 26. 2. Vizenor,Earthdivers, pp. x-xi. 3. Dearborn,Pocahontas's Daughters, p. 29. Dearborn'sdiscussion of "femaleethnic authorship"is of interest,although she characterizesMourning Dove's novel as "a slightlyschizophrenic book"and "a text gone crazy" (p. 20) largelybecause of theintrusions of LucullusVirgil McWhorter in the editorialprocess. It is evident,too, that recentliterary historical research, particularly work by AlannaBrown and Jay Miller,has broughtmore accurate details of MourningDove's life to light. Dearbornis moreconcerned, too, with intermarriage,rather than mixed-bloodedness, as an importantmetaphor in the ethnicwoman's creative process. 4. Larson,"Native American Aesthetics," p. 53. 5. MourningDove, Cogewea,p. 283. 6. Miller,"Mourning Dove: Author as Mediator,"p. 162. 7. Fisher,introduction, p. xii. 8. Ibid.,p. vii. "It is not surprising,"Fisher continues, "that the betrayalof Indianwomen by whitemen is centralto the plot of MourningDove's romantic novel, Cogewea." While I agree that this issuewas certainlyon MourningDove's mind as she composedCogewea, I would argue that it was moreimportant to her to recuperatethe imageof the half-bloodand to use marriage itselfas a way to achievethat recuperation. 9. Miller,Mourning Dove: Autobiography, p. xvi. "Okanagan"is the termused to distinguish CanadianOkanogans. 10. Miller,introduction to CoyoteStories, p. ix. 11. Scheik,Half-Blood, p. 4. 12. Ibid., p. 5. 13. Stanley,Louis Riel, p. 242. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. MourningDove, Cogewea,p. 153. 17. Ibid., p. 108. 18. Dusenberry,"Waiting for a Day,"p. 121. This articlelargely substantiates the presence of Metis peopleand culturein Montanaduring the last half of the nineteenthand firsthalf of the twentiethcentury. 19. MourningDove, Cogewea,p. 31. 20. Ibid.,p. 95. 21. Ibid.,p. 22. 22. Ibid.,p. 17. 23. Ibid.,p. 48. 24. Ibid., p. 283. 25. Brown,"Mourning Dove's Voice," p. 2. Perhapsbecause of his credentialsfrom the white world of education,research, and publishing,McWhorter felt no hesitationin asserting whathe thoughtshould go into the novel.His thrustwas both anthropologicaland political;the contenthe wantedto injectwas about"pure" Okanagan culture and traditions(along with a lot

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of irrelevant but equally "pure" ethnographic detail about the Blackfeet and the Nez Perce), as well as passagesof turgidly verbose rhetoric about the plight of Indians vis-i-vis the United States government. 26. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 27. Ibid., p. 3. 28. Fisher, introduction, p. xv. 29. Silko is really the next Native American woman novelist in U.S. publishing history; Ella Deloria first wrote Waterlilyin 1944, but the novel was not published until 1988.

References

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Clifton, James A., ed. Being and BecomingIndian: BiographicalStudies of North AmericanFrontiers. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989. Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas'sDaughters: Gender and Ethnicityin AmericanCulture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Deloria, Ella C. Waterlily.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Dusenberry,Verne. "Waiting for a Day that Never Comes: The Dispossessed Metis of Montana." The New Peoples:Being and Becoming Metis in North America. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985. Fisher, Dexter. Introduction to Cogewea,the Half-Blood, by Mourning Dove. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

- . [Alice Poindexter]. "The Transportationof Tradition:A Study of Zitkala?a and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American Indian Writers." Ph.D. diss., City College of New York, 1979.

Krupat, Arnold. For ThoseWho ComeAfter: A Study of Native AmericanAutobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. , ed. New Voicesin Native American Literary Criticism. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Larson,Sidner. "Native AmericanAesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship."MEL US 17 (fall 1991- 92).

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Miller, Jay. Introduction to MourningDove: A SalishanAutobiography, by Mourning Dove. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. --. Introduction to CoyoteStories, by Mourning Dove. Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1990. --. "Mourning Dove: The Author as Cultural Mediator." Being and BecomingIndian, James A. Clifton, ed. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989. Mourning Dove. Cogewea,the Half-Blood:A Depiction of the GreatMontana CattleRange. 1927. Reprint, with an introduction by Dexter Fisher, Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1981. --. CoyoteStories. 1933. Reprint, with an introduction by Jay Miller, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. -- . MourningDove: A SalishanAutobiography. Jay Miller, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understandingthe AmericanIndian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples:Being and BecomingMetis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985. Riel, Louis. The CollectedWritings of Louis Riel/LesEcrits completsde Louis Riel. Vol. 2, 1875- 1884. Gilles Martel, ed. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985. Ryker, Lois. "Hu-mi-shu-ma: Mourning Dove Was the Sweet Voice of the Indians of Eastern Washington." Seattle Times, 18 February 1962. Scheik, William J. The Half-Blood:A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Fiction. Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Silko, Leslie. Ceremony.New York: Viking Penguin, 1977. Stanley, George F. G. Louis Riel. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1985. Vizenor, Gerald. Earthdivers:Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

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