American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At the same time that the genteelly raised Pauline Johnson explored mixed-blood identity in wide-ranging performance tours of Canada and Europe, the less privileged writer Mourning Dove, in her novel Cogewea, The Half-Blood, did the same more locally from the inland Northwest. A member of the first generation of Colvilles to be raised on a reservation, Mourning Dove had determined to write a book “for her people, for herself, and for the Euro-Americans who understood so little about those they had conquered.” She completed the first draft of Cogewea in 1914. Set on a ranch in the frontier of turn-of-the-century Montana-a site of contestation between Native Americans, ranchers, and homesteaders-the novel tells the tale of its half-white, half-Okanogan heroine Cogewea, wooed for her money by the white easterner Densmore. Now best known as the first female Native American novelist, with the publication of Cogewea in 1927. Mourning Dove “announced explicitly what was to become the dominant theme in novels by Indian authors: the dilemma of the mixed blood, the liminal ’breed’ seemingly trapped between Indian and white world."