Christine Quintasket, writing under the name Mourning Dove, was the first American Indian woman to write a novel. Cogewea: The Half-Blood had actually been completed in 1916, but it took another decade to find a publisher for it. The novel remained an obscure piece of Native American literature until it was republished in 1981.
In a short biographical sketch in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Jay Miller writes:
“At the turn of this century, when few Native Americans and fewer women were authors, Mourning Dove decided to produce fiction exploring the emotional range of native peoples living in the West; in doing so, she became a pioneering Native American woman novelist.”
The setting for Cogewea is the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Mourning Dove was not from the Flathead Reservation, but from the Colville Reservation in Washington. She was born in a canoe about 1885 when her mother was crossing the Kootenay River in Idaho. Her father was Joseph Quintasket, an Okanagan from British Columbia and her mother was Lucy Stukin, a Salish Colville from north central Washington. In his biographical sketch of Mourning Dove in Notable Native Americans, Russell Hellstern reports:
“Her grandfather, Seewhelhken, was head chief of the Colville tribe for many years.”
When her mother died in 1902, she became responsible for raising a younger brother and two younger sisters. When her father remarried in 1904, these siblings were then raised by their step-mother.
Mourning Dove was not well-educated. As a child, she was sporadically enrolled in the Sacred Heart School at the Goodwin Catholic Mission in Ward, Washington. Her first experience with school was so traumatic that she became deathly ill and had to return to her reservation home. She reports that she was lonely and that she was punished for speaking only Salish.
Later she attended the Fort Spokane School for Indians and then she worked in exchange for classes at the Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana. While at Fort Shaw in 1908 she saw the last roundup of a wild buffalo herd.
In 1909, she married Hector McLeod, a Flathead from Montana, whom she met at Fort Shaw. He was abusive and they divorced a few years later. In 1919, she married Fred Galler, a Wenatchee from Washington.
Sometime after she learned English, she began reading the so-called “dime novels” and these influenced her later writings.
While living in Portland, Oregon in 1912, she began working on her novel and the idea of becoming a writer began to grow. In order to pursue her goal of becoming a writer, she briefly attended the Calgary Business School in Alberta, Canada so that she could learn to type.
To support herself she worked as a migrant farm laborer, picking fruit and vegetables by day, then trying to write in her camp tent at night. Her life was often one of poverty and physical hardship. Jay Miller writes:
“Her private life was primarily spent picking crops; she would steal time to write only at night after long days in the orchards and fields.”
She started writing using the pen name Morning Dove. According to Colville oral tradition, Morning Dove was the wife of Salmon who welcomed his return each spring. However, while visiting a museum in Spokane, Washington she happened to see a mounted bird with the label “mourning dove” and decided to use this name which added some tragic overtones to her pen name.
About 1914 or 1915, Mourning Dove met Lucullus V. McWhorter at the Walla Walla Frontier Days Celebration. McWhorter was a businessman and Indian-rights advocate and became her literary mentor. The Yakama tribe had high regard for McWhorter as he had helped them obtain compensations from past government promises. The Yakamas gave him the name Hemene Kawan (Old Wolf). He was also known as Big Foot.
McWhorter encouraged Mourning Dove to collect traditional Colville and Okanogan stories and edited her first novel, Cogewea. At the time of their first meeting, she had already completed an initial draft of the book. By the time she had a final draft ready for publication, World War I interrupted the publishing scene.
The influence of McWhorter is easily seen in Cogewea. At times the novel is written in the style of a dime novel romance (reflecting her early fascination with this writing form) and at other times it takes a more academic, anthropological approach to explaining Indian culture. Russell Hellstern writes:
“Quintasket did not have a full command of the English language because of her limited education; therefore, some interpretation was usually needed from McWhorter.”
In 1933 her second book, Coyote Stories, was published. This is a collection of traditional Okanogan stories. However, working with an editor who was primarily concerned with reaching a non-Indian audience, these stories are presented in a fashion that would be acceptable for this audience. Thus, stories about incest, transvestism, and infanticide were omitted from the collection. The alterations in the stories to make them appeal to a non-Indian audience often makes them unrecognizable to the traditional Okanogan from which they came.
As her fame as an author increased during the 1930s, there were non-Indians who doubted her ability to write novels and who felt that non-Indians must have written them for her.
Throughout her life she was active in reservation politics. She helped in organizing the Colville Indian Association. In 1935, she was elected to the Colville Tribal Council, becoming the first woman to serve as a council member. She was often a public speaker on issues of tribal welfare and women’s rights. Russell Hellstern writes:
“She found these long trips tiring and expensive since she paid for most of the travel expenses herself.”
With regard to the Colville Indian Association, Russell Hellstern writes:
“Through their efforts, unresolved land claims, past due payments for lands purchased, and money owed the tribe on leases for land, timber, and water rights, were secured for the tribe.”
She died in 1936. Her personal and cultural memoirs—Mourning Dove, a Salishan Autobiography—was published posthumously fifty-four years after her death.
Indians 101
American Indian women are often invisible in many American and Canadian histories. Yet Indian women were political and spiritual leaders, healers, and entrepreneurs. More biographies of American Indian women from the Indians 101 series:
Indians 101: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Writer, Musician, and Activist
Indians 101: Susette La Flesche, Indian Activist
Indians 101: Ilchee, a Powerful Chinook Woman
Indians 101: Sacagawea (Sacajawea)
Indians 201: Dr. Susan LaFlesche, Omaha Physician
Indians 201: Natawista, a Trader's Wife
American Indian Women: Sarah Winnemucca
American Indian Women: Sarah Ainse
The “201” designation indicates that the essay has been expanded and revised from an earlier essay.