On its surface, Cogewea, the Half-Blood is a classic western romance. The novel follows its eponymous heroine as she navigates the rough world of a Montana cattle ranch and attempts to do the same in the even rougher world of the traditional love triangle. As one of the best riders at the Horseshoe Brand Ranch, Cogewea (which means “little chipmunk” in Okanogan) wins the admiration of Jim LaGrinder, the ranch foreman and, like Cogewea, the descendant of a biracial marriage. His bid for Cogewea’s hand is thwarted, however, by the foppish Alfred Denismore, a white Easterner who travels to the ranch in the hope of actualizing his romantic notions of the West. Much to Jim’s dismay, Cogewea agrees to leave with Denismore with the hope of realizing her dream of marrying a well-read man who would appreciate her attempts at domesticity.
Denismore, on the other hand, has very different plans in mind. After persuading Cogewea to withdraw her inheritance from the local bank, he leads her away from the ranch. On their journey, Denismore reveals his true colors, beating Cogewea, stealing her small fortune, and leaving her gagged and bound to a cottonwood tree. She is rescued by Jim and, two years later, they marry in a conclusion characterized by Arnold Krupat as of the classic canonical “‘comic’ type, like those found in western narratives such as William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well” (Krupat, 128).
However, as Susan Bernardin rightly observes, the novel’s deceptively traditional form also contains a revolutionary combination of oral culture, social critique, and political commentary. For Mourning Dove, “the western romance provided a primary site for the ongoing negotiation of dominant cultural anxieties about miscegenation, ‘blood mixture,’ and its implications for national identity” (Bernardin, 488).
The daughter of an Indian mother and a Caucasian father, Cogewea exists as a liminal figure, not able to subscribe to the traditions of either white or Indian cultures. As such, she is “deeply bound up in the contradictions of her age” (Krupat, 132). Cogewea’s marginal status is perhaps best exemplified in the novel’s treatment of an annual fair and horse race held near the ranch. There, she wins both the white “ladies’” race and the “squaws’” competition. But in spite of her adroit riding and her claim to both ethnicities, Cogewea is denied both prizes as a result of her complicated racial identity.
Like her heroine, Mourning Dove was also the daughter of a biracial relationship. Born Christine Quintasket, Mourning Dove was the daughter of Joseph Quintasket, a first-generation Irishman, and Lucy Stukin, a full-blooded Colville Indian (Fischer, introduction to Cogewea, vi). Mourning Dove spent much of her young adult life collecting the stories of her people and garnering a deep appreciation for the complexities these stories represented. In the words of editor Jay Miller, when setting out to write Cogewea, she insisted that she wanted to create a work of fiction that would convey “the emotional depth and range of Native peoples to counter the stoic stereotype she found so offensive” (Miller, 71).
One powerful way Mourning Dove accomplishes this goal is through the characterization of Cogewea’s family. As the middle child, Cogewea also stands metaphorically between her two sisters and their divergent attitudes concerning the future of Native American people in the United States. Cogewea’s older sister, Julia, advocates a system of assimilation into white culture, and she tells her sister that “civilization is the only hope for the Indian” (274). Mary, the youngest daughter, stands much more closely aligned with her very traditional grandmother. As such, she represents a foil to Julia and, in so doing, “voices a criticism that certainly pertains to Julia and may serve as a warning to Cogewea” (Krupat, 132).
This warning is reified by Cogewea’s grandmother, The Stemteemä. The most traditionally Indian of all the characters, The Stemteemä represents the past glory of the Okanogan culture. Some of the richest moments of the novel come in the form of The Stemteemä’s extended frame narratives. There, we hear the story of Indians such as Green-Blanket Feet, who ran off with a white husband only to be beaten and left for dead. This story is told to Cogewea as a warning about her relationship with Denismore and, by the novel’s end, we also realize that it is a painful foreshadowing of her own fate.
Cogewea’s blending of oral tradition with the western romance allows Mourning Dove to transcend the limitations of both genres and to create a highly effective amalgamation of them. According to Alanna Brown, Mourning Dove thereby “became the first Native American to organically include Indian culture and oral literature, as well as Indian social dilemmas” (51).
Although many scholars rightfully contend that Cogewea is the first novel written by a Native American woman, that authorship is not without controversy. Cogewea was published only after Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a historian and publisher with strong ties to Native American communities in the Northwest, heavily edited Mourning Dove’s story and then began a publicity campaign on her behalf.
McWhorter’s additions and revisions were substantial, and the end result was a novel described by Mourning Dove in an oft-quoted letter as “some one elses book and not mine at all” (Fischer, xi).
Scholars differ in their accounts of McWhorter. Some, like Kathleen Donovan, describe him as approaching Mourning Dove and her writing “with missionary zeal” (Donovan, 110). Others see Cogewea as authored by two different writers, no doubt alluding to Mourning Dove’s desire to write romantic fiction and McWhorter’s insistence that she include criticism of the American government’s mishandling of Indian affairs. Yet a fair number of critics insist that these objectives need not be at odds with one another. As Carol Miller argues, the conclusion of the novel represents the actualization of an emotional and spiritual whole: “in both structure and theme, the story resolves itself in the restoration of lives in a harmonious adaptive balance” (Carol Miller, 146).
Sources
Bernardin, Susan K. “Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood,” American Literature 67 (1995): 487–509.
Donovan, Kathleen. Feminist Readings of Native American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998.
Krupat, Arnold. “From Half-Blood to Mixedblood: Cogewea and the ‘Discourse of Indian Blood,’” MFS 45, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 120–145.
Miller, Carol. “Meditation and Authority: The Native American Voices of Mourning Dove and Ella Deloria.” In Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action, edited by James A. Banks, 141–155. New York: Teacher’s College, 1996.
Miller, Jay. “Mourning Dove: The Author as Cultural Mediator.” In Being and Becoming an Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers, edited by J. A. Clifford, 160–182. Chicago, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1989.
———. “Mourning Dove: Editing in All Directions to ‘Get Real,’” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 65–72.
Mourning Dove. Cogewea, The Half-Blood, introduction by Dexter Fischer, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
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