November 15, 2023 • 37 mins
In 1916, Mourning Dove gave an interview that described the book she had written as soon to be published, but it turned out to still be years away. Part two covers the years it took to get that book published, and her life after it.
Research:
- American Folklore Society. “Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-ma / Christine Quintasket).” https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/portfolio/mourning-dove-hum-ishu-ma-christine-quintasket/
- Arnold, Laurie. “More than Mourning Dove: Christine Quintasket—Activist, Leader, Public Intellectual.” Montana The Magazine of Western History, Spring 2017, Vol. 67, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26322854
- Brown, Alanna Kathleen. “Mourning Dove's Voice in ‘Cogewea.’” Wicazo Sa Review , Autumn, 1988, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1988). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1409273
- Brown, Alanna Kathleen. “The Evolution of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories.” Studies in American Indian Literatures , Summer/Fall 1992, Series 2, Vol. 4. Via JSTOR. http://www.jstor.com/stable/20736610
- Brown, Alanna Kathleen. “The Evolution of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories.” Studies in American Indian Literatures , Summer/Fall 1992, Series 2, Vol. 4. Via JSTOR. http://www.jstor.com/stable/20736610
- Brown, Anna Kathleen. “Reviewed Work(s): Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove and Jay Miller; Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography by Jay Miller.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 3, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20736517
- Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. “Texts by and about Natives: Commentary. 9. Christine Quintasket (Mourning Dove or Humishuma).” University of Washington. https://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Reading%20the%20Region/Texts%20by%20and%20about%20Natives/Commentary/9.html
- Johnson-Roehr, S.N. “Christine Quintasket.” JSTOR Daily. 10/10/2022. https://daily.jstor.org/christine-quintasket/
- Karell, Linda K. “’This Story I Am Telling You Is True’: Collaboration and Literary Authority in Mourning Dove's ‘Cogewea.’” American Indian Quarterly , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 19, No. 4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1185559
- Kennedy, Kara and Sarah Werner. “Cogewea’s Blog: An Analysis of One of North America’s First Novels Written by a Female Indigenous Author.” 7/31/2010. https://cogewea.wordpress.com/
- Lamont, Victoria. “Native American Oral Practice and the Popular Novel; Or, Why Mourning Dove Wrote a Western.” Source: Western American Literature , Winter 2005, Vol. 39, No. 4. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43022337
- Miller, Jay. “Mourning Dove: Editing in All Directions to "Get Real".” Studies in American Indian Literatures , Summer 1995, Series 2, Vol. 7, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20736849
- Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame. “Michael Pablo 1844-1914, Charles A. Allard 1852-1896.” https://mtoutdoorhalloffame.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Charles-Allard.pdf
- Mourning Dove. “Coyote Stories.” Edited and illustrated by Hester Dean Guie, with notes by L.V. McWhorter (Old Wolf) and a foreword by Chief Standing Bear.” University of Nebraska Press. 1934 (Reprinted 1990).
- Mourning Dove. “Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography.” Edited by Jay Miller. University of Nebraska Press. 1990.
- Nisbet, Jack and Claire. “Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) (ca. 1884-1936).” HistoryLink.org. 8/7/2010. https://www.historylink.org/File/9512
- Spokane Spokesman-Review. “Colville Indian Girl Blazes Trail to New Conception of Redmen in Her Novel, ‘Cogewea,’ Soon to be Published.” 4/9/1916. https://www.newspapers.com/image/566560963/
- Strong, Robert. “5 – The Uncooperative Primary Source: Literary Recovery versus Historical Fact in the Strange Production of Cogewea”. Keshen, Jeff, and Sylvie Perrier. Building New Bridges - Bâtir de nouveaux ponts: Sources, Methods and Interdisci
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our
episode on Morning Dove, who is also known as Christine Quintasket.
But I'm going to say it's a surprise two parter,
both in that when I started writing it, I didn't
expect it to be two parts, and also in that
at the beginning of part one, I don't think I
(00:32):
said that it was going to be a two parter.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
But it is. Surprises abound.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yes. So she was a novelist, an ethnographer, and an activist.
And in part one we talked about some context involving
the Confederated tribes of the Callville Reservation and that context
had just a huge impact on her family and the
indigenous nation they were part of. And then we also
talked about her early life and her introduction to a
(00:59):
man named Lucullas Virgil McWhorter, who was sort of her editor,
literary agent and friend. Where we left off, she had
written a book and they thought that book was going
to come out soon, but it was not published yet.
She did a newspaper interview in nineteen sixteen that described
the book as soon to be published that publications turned
(01:22):
out still to be years away, but we are picking
up where we left off in nineteen sixteen. In part one,
we talked about how Mourning Dove often earned a living
by doing agricultural work, and at times she also supported
herself through domestic work. In nineteen sixteen, while working as
a housekeeper in Pulse, in Montana, she developed a serious illness.
(01:44):
It was described as influenza and inflammatory rheumatism. She was
sick for weeks and she thought she was going to die,
but eventually an aunt came to look after her and,
in her words, quote doctored me up with Indian medicines.
She wasn't well enough to go back to the kind
of physical labor involved with agricultural or domestic work, so
(02:07):
she got a job working as a teacher at a
school for indigenous children in all of our British Columbia.
She had a sister who lived nearby, and she was
able to live with her sister. Eventually she used some
of her pay to buy her own typewriter. After a while,
she also built a small shack adjacent to her sister's house.
It's kind of her writing shack. She contracted the flu
(02:29):
again during the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic and was hospitalized
for two weeks. In nineteen nineteen, she got married to
Fred Galler, who was an enrolled member of the Callville
tribe and also had Winnatchi and white ancestry. This relationship
seems to have been less tumultuous than her first marriage,
but at times it could still be a struggle. They
(02:51):
often worked together as migrant farm laborers, which was exhausting
and sometimes very painful work for very little money. It
also seems like he didn't get the way of her
aspirations as a writer, but he didn't really support them either,
and they had their own internal conflicts in the relationship.
She especially did not like.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It when he drank.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
By this point, she had known Luke Ellis mcwarter for
almost five years and their working relationship had evolved into
one of mutual trust and support. She described him as
having an Indian heart and he was really her biggest
source of encouragement as a writer. Often he was the
person she turned to in order to keep herself focused
(03:33):
and working on her writing.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
There were still some challenges, though. We mentioned in Part
one how mcworder was much older than she was, and
as a white man, he had a much different type
of power and access to different connections than she did.
Beyond that, while they were both focused on Indigenous stories
and on her novel, which was focused on Indigenous characters,
(03:55):
they were coming at it from very different perspectives. Aside
from the obvious difference in their ethnicities and their life experience,
mcwarter was really approaching things as an ethnographer while Mourningdove
was a storyteller. They also had some huge differences of
opinion regarding language. McWorter wanted Mourning Dove's English to be
(04:16):
as polished as possible so that her work might dispel
stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as ignorant and uneducated, but sometimes
she would kind of look at his edits or material
that he had written on her behalf and basically say
she could not understand it without a dictionary.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
At the same time, the two of them did really
learn a lot from one another over the course of
their work together. As they worked through Indigenous stories and
Mourning Dove's fiction, he learned more about Salish languages In
the community's worldview, and she learned from him about how
to communicate with English speakers in English. In nineteen twenty one,
(04:54):
while visiting a museum in Spokane, Washington, Morningdove saw a
mounted specimen of the the American Mourning Dove, the bird
you might remember from part one. She had originally been
spelling her pen name Mourning MLR and ing. In a
letter to mcwarter, she said she had made a sad
mistake with that spelling, and from that point on she
(05:14):
spelled her name with the U.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
In Mourning Mourning Dove's novel Coogawea the Half Blood, a
depiction of the Great Montana cattle range, was published by
the Four Seas Company in Boston in nineteen twenty seven.
It had taken so long to get the book published,
and four Seas was concerned that it would not turn
a profit, so it required Mourning Dove and McWhorter to
(05:36):
provide part of the funding for its printing. For his part,
McWorter was ultimately not very impressed with this publisher, and
he would refer to them as four pubbles. Kogiea is
very very approximately the word for chipmunk in the Incialchen language.
The first syllable in that language especially, is a little
(05:57):
different in a way, I have trouble replicated as somebody
who doesn't speak that language. And the plot of this
novel was inspired in part by a story called Chipmunk
and Owl Woman. The story would also be part of
Mourning Dove's book Coyote Stories, which will be talking about
more in a bit. This story is a Western romance,
(06:17):
and in a lot of ways it's about identity. Parts
of it were inspired by Mourning Dove's own life and experiences.
The main character, Kogawea, had both white and indigenous ancestry.
It lives both between and in both of these worlds.
The book explores the differences between her life and experiences
and that of her sisters, one of whom marries a
(06:40):
white man and lives mostly in a white man's world,
and another who is raised in indigenous traditions by a grandmother. Overall,
the novel's indigenous central characters are the most fully realized.
Many of the white characters are more one dimensionally good
or bad, and there are also stereotyped cowboys who mostly
provide comic relief. Those differences between Mourning Dove's and McCarter's
(07:05):
approaches played a huge part in this book, and a
lot of that happened after the last time Mourning Dove
saw it. Before it went to print, she had really
been focused on writing a romance one that she thought
would humanize Indigenous people to white readers when they read it.
But McWorter really wanted the book to be an ethnographically
(07:27):
accurate portrayal of her culture and to include more history
and ethnography, so he added in notes on ethnography and
other material, including a section on Indigenous music that was
apparently plagiarized from another author named Anna Hurst. A lot
of the literary discussion around Kogaweya has focused on mcworter's
(07:48):
involvement with it and his influence on it. Even at
the time, there were people who claimed that Mourning Dove
had simply put her name on a white man's work,
and McWorter did make meaningful changes to her work. A
lot of articles about this book and about their relationship.
Quote one passage from a letter that she wrote to
him in nineteen twenty eight, after she had read the
(08:09):
published book, she said quote, I felt like it was
someone else's book and not mine at all. In fact,
the finishing touches are put there by you, and I
have never seen it, so that sounds terrible.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
But the lines before those sentences put it in a
kind of different light.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I have just got through going over the book Kochieeah
and am surprised at the changes that you made. I
think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressing
like a cook would do with a fine meal. I
sure was interested in the book, and Hubby read it over,
and all the rest of the family neglected their housework
till they read it cover to cover. Later on, in
(08:50):
nineteen thirty three, she wrote him another letter, Uh, this
has some interesting typos in it, so we're going to
read it as written.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Quote. I frequently think how fortunate that I met you.
My book of Kogaweyah would never had been anything but
the cheap, full skep paper that was written on if
you had not helped me get it in shape. I
can never repay you back. I am sure, while we
are here in this old planet too poor.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That you can tell from that particular excerpt the kinds
of things that she still struggled with a little bit
in English, even at this point in her life. A
lot of things that you read that quote from letters
sort of edit all of that out, and so it's
harder to get a sense.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Of like how she actually wrote.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
We will talk about her other work and her continuing
relationship with McWhorter after a sponsor break. Morning Dove's novel
was not the financial success that she and Lucaalas mcwarter
(09:58):
had hoped that it would be, and then after it
was published, most of her income continued from doing agricultural
and domestic labor a lot of the time, with her
and her husband working together harvesting things like apples and hops.
To be clear, she had critics in both white and
Indigenous communities, but publishing this book was also something that
(10:19):
a lot of people saw as an accomplishment and something
to be respected. After it came out, she became an
honorary member of the Eastern Washington State Historical Society and
a lifetime member of the Washington State Historical Society. White
newspapers noted that she was the first Indigenous woman to
publish a novel and cited her as an authority on
(10:40):
indigenous subjects. For example, a nineteen twenty eight article that
was reprinted in a lot of newspapers was about the
history of smoking and whether the plant known as kinikinik
was the same as tobacco. It described her as resenting
the idea that indigenous people had migrated to North America
from China or Japan, saying, quote, neither of these people
(11:01):
nor any other smoked until they learned it directly from us.
It went on to paraphrase her as saying that quote,
the finding of pipes and burial mounds are no proof
to her that another race occupied this country before her own.
The newspaper also quoted from Kogawea and its descriptions of
Indigenous smoking practices and uses for pipes. This idea of
(11:25):
prehistoric migration to the Americas from Asia is going to
come up again in a moment, and it's an idea
that is still contentious or even offensive among indigenous communities
whose oral histories placed them on these continents since time immemorial.
This also actually ties into recent archaeological research into fossilized
footprints that date back to before migrations from Asia are
(11:49):
believed to have happened. In the case of footprints found
in White Sand's New Mexico, research suggests that they are
at least ten thousand years earlier, before migration and from
Asia is believed to have happened. Mourning Dove also started
doing a lot of work as an activist, advocating for
other Indigenous people and for people who made their living
(12:10):
doing agricultural labor. The Wild Sunflower Indian Women's Club in Omak, Washington,
promoted Indigenous arts and crafts, and Mourning Dove served as
its president for three years. In nineteen twenty eight, she
was one of nine founders of the Eagle Feather Club,
which was focused on the social welfare and equitable treatment
of Indigenous peoples. She was also continuing her work trying
(12:34):
to preserve Indigenous stories and traditions, which she called folklores
with an es on it, which I kind of love
as her term for this. And this work had some complexities.
The stories that she was collecting are part of a
sacred body of cultural knowledge, and there are protocols around
how and when they should be shared and who they
(12:55):
should be shared with. Different indigenous nations all have their
own protocols preferences around these things, and it seems like
there were people who had no concerns at all about
sharing their stories with Mourning Dove. Like her, a lot
of them were afraid that this knowledge was going to
be lost otherwise, but other people seem to have been
(13:16):
more reluctant, and some of Morningdove's letters suggest that she
thought people wouldn't be willing to talk to her if
they knew their stories were going to wind up in
a book. Mourning Dove definitely wasn't the only person trying
to preserve and record indigenous cultural knowledge and heritage in
this part of North America at this point. Another was
James Alexander Tate. Tate had been born in the Shetland Islands,
(13:40):
and after immigrating to Canada, he had married a Lake
of Pomaic woman named Lucy Artco. He became immersed in
Lake of Pomac knowledge and traditions, both as a spouse
and as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Anthropologist Franz Boas also
hired Tate as part of the American Museum of Natural
History's Jesup Expedition, which ran from eighteen ninety seven to
(14:01):
nineteen oh two and involved teams in both the Pacific
Northwest and Siberia recording languages and cultural practices on both
sides of the Bearing Straight. The stated purpose of this
expedition was to gather evidence that indigenous peoples had migrated
to the Americas from Asia across a land bridge, but
for Boas, the priority was documenting these cultures as they
(14:24):
were increasingly threatened by the kinds of assimilationist and destructive
government policies and other actions that we have been talking about.
Mourning Dove became immensely frustrated when she learned that Tate
was paying people in the area five dollars for their stories.
From her perspective, he was an outsider, and she also
could not afford to do the same, so she was
(14:45):
frustrated about the fact that he was paying people for
their stories and that he was doing this work at all.
But eventually she found more common ground with Tate. Like McWhorter,
who she'd been working with a really long time at
this point, he had to this part of North America
from somewhere else, and he wasn't indigenous, but he did
have a sincere interest in preserving indigenous cultures and in
(15:09):
advocating for indigenous peoples, including advocating for indigenous land rights.
In August of nineteen twenty nine, mccorter's wife Anne died.
They had been married for almost thirty five years, and
he was understandably devastated. His working relationship with Mourning Dove
had developed into a mutually supportive friendship over the years,
(15:29):
and she was worried about him after his wife's death.
Within a few months, though, they were hard at work
on the collection that would be published as the book
Coyote Stories in nineteen thirty three. By that point, McCord
had introduced Mourning Dove to his friend, Heister Dean Gooey
known as Dean, who was initially brought on to work
as a proofreader. Dean became more deeply involved with the
(15:51):
book over time, though, along with his wife, Geraldine, who
was one of the first people to graduate from the
University of Washington's anthropology program.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
While they were all.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Working on this book, Mourning Dove was also continuing her advocacy.
In nineteen thirty she was one of the founders of
the Calville Indian Association, which worked to get money for
land claims that had never been paid for. In nineteen
thirty three, Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act as
part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, trying to address
(16:23):
the economic hardships of the Great Depression. This established the
work relief program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and
then legislation was passed establishing an Indigenous division of the
Civilian Conservation Corps not long afterward, But initially most of
the foreman and supervisors who were hired for this division
(16:44):
were not Indigenous. Mourning Dove and the Calville Indian Association
fought for these positions to be filled with Indigenous workers
as well, with Mourningdove saying that she would take the
matter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs if it wasn't resolved.
Over the span of a year, the number of Indigenous
managers in the Corps rose from a little over forty
(17:05):
percent to about sixty percent. She was also doing a
lot of public speaking for schools, colleges, community organizations, and
the like, often sharing her culture, traditions and stories with
a mostly white audience. She typically spoke wearing her traditional
Callville clothing, including a beaded buckskin dress and moccasins. We
(17:27):
have talked in the past about Indigenous writers and speakers
who adopted a costume as part of their stage presence,
in part because that seemed to be a way to
get the interest of white audiences, but this was not
a costume for Mourning Dove. These were her clothes, and
she wanted to normalize what she wore and show that
it was an everyday part of life and not something
(17:47):
that should be exoticized or discouraged. Mourning Dove's book Coyote
Stories was published in nineteen thirty three, so named because
the figure of coyote was central to most of the
stories in the book. The title page read Coyote Stories
by Mourning Dove Humishuma, edited and illustrated by heisterdine Gui,
(18:08):
with notes by L. V. McWhorter, Old Wolf, and a
forward by Chief Standing Bear Oglala Sue. This book sold
really well and it was reprinted within a year. It
would have been impossible for one book to capture a
fully authentic recording of these stories. Although the figure of
coyote is present in the stories and traditions of many
(18:28):
indigenous peoples, especially across the western part of North America,
the stories themselves have nuances among different tribes, nations, and bands,
even down to the level of versions that have been
passed down within individual families. They are stories to have
a long history of being told aloud for specific reasons,
at particular times of year or for specific events. It's
(18:52):
just not something that a book can fully encompass. But
beyond that, this book was a lot different from what
Mourning Dove and had envisioned when they first met one
another eighteen years before. Rather than a straightforward recording of
Indigenous cultural knowledge, under Guy's direction, it had evolved into
a work that was meant more as bedtime stories for children.
(19:16):
This was not what McWhorter had originally had in mind
at all. In addition to wanting to preserve the stories themselves,
he was worried that presenting Indigenous cultural knowledge as children's
stories would reinforce the damaging stereotypes that Indigenous people were childlike.
Mourning Dove had also removed parts of the stories that
(19:37):
she described as ugly. At the same time, though working
on this book was an act of cultural preservation in
a different way, Mourning Dove and her collaborators had lengthy
and wide ranging discussions about language, down to find nuances
about how different words were used in different contexts. They
had extensive conversations about the best ways to render and
(20:00):
oral tradition spoken in Salish language into English print. Along
the way, they essentially created a dictionary that included pronunciations, definitions,
and notations about usage, and this work went on to
influence McCord's own work as an anthropologist and an ethnographer.
Traveling around the plateau to collect these stories had also
(20:23):
given Mourning Dove the opportunity to interact with a lot
of people, to build connections with them and find out
what their concerns were, and this connected to work that
she did on behalf of John Collier, Commissioner of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, which we will talk about after
a sponsor break. To briefly recap something we talked about
(20:51):
in Part one. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century,
much of the US federal government's policy toward Indigenous peoples
involved forcibly removing people from their ancestral homelands to reservations.
This was a violent, destructive, and genocidal process, and it
often followed active warfare. So treaties signed between the US
(21:14):
and indigenous nations formally ended a conflict, with the indigenous
nations ceding land to the United States in exchanged for
an end to the fighting and then reservation land somewhere
else on the continent. The General Allotment Act of eighteen
eighty seven, also called the DAWs Act, shifted the United
States approach from one establishing reservations and removing people to them,
(21:39):
to one of allotment and assimilation. Reservation land was broken
up and allotted to people individually, with purportedly excess land
allowed to be sold to non indigenous people. This was
again deeply destructive, with indigenous peoples losing a lot of
what had been reservation land. It was also paired with
things like the boarding school system for indigen and his
(22:00):
students that was meant to force children to abandon their
languages and cultures and assimilate with white society. There's more
about both of these periods of history in our two
part episode on the Occupation of Alcatraz that came out
in twenty nineteen. In nineteen thirty four, the federal approach
shifted again with the Indian Reorganization Act, also called the
(22:22):
Wheeler Howard Act, which was part of a collection of
efforts known as the Indian New Deal. This legislation followed
the Miriam Report, also called the Problem of Indian Administration,
which had come out in nineteen twenty eight. There is
some debate about whether the Miriam Report directly led to
the Indian Reorganization Act, but this was a scathing report
(22:45):
on conditions across reservations in twenty six states, detailing serious
problems involving poverty, inadequate health care, and an overall lack
of funding. The report characterized decades of federal policy toward
Indigenous peoples, including that policy of allotment, as at the
root of these issues, and it called for massive reforms.
(23:09):
The US government slowed down on issuing land allotments soon
after this report was published, and the Indian Reorganization Act
followed a little more than five years later. This legislation
certainly was not perfect. Among other things, it didn't apply
in the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, and it was
focused on the idea that tribes would be governed by
(23:30):
tribal councils that would be accountable to the US Bureau
of Indian Affairs. And it could not undo the centuries
of history that had already passed. But it did start
to move the US government toward a policy that focused
on self governance and self determination for Indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
It also shifted the focus from one of assimilation with
white culture toward one of preserving indigenous cultures and traditions.
John Collier had been named Commissioner of the Bureau of
Indian Afas the year before the Indian Reorganization Act was passed.
He was one of the people who helped get the
Act through Congress. This act abolished the allotment program that
(24:11):
had been set up in the Dawes Act, and it
provided funding to Indigenous nations to purchase land that had
been taken from them. Because part of the focus here
was indigenous nation's own self determination, tribal members had the
right to vote on whether to accept the terms of
the Act, and John Collier, possibly having heard about Mourning
(24:32):
Dove through her publication of Coyote Stories, contacted her to
ask for help and outreach to the people of the
Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove was in favor of the Indian
Reorganization Act. She thought that it would help protect tribal
lands and might even lead to the restoration of the
north half of the Callville Reservation, which had been returned
to the public domain in the late nineteenth century. The
(24:55):
law also included provisions for additional funding and support, all
of which she thought would benefit her people, among other things.
She spoke at a conference in Oregon that brought together
representatives from eight reservations, saying, quote, I fought for twenty
five years for the cause of Indian people. The reason
I have fought for my people is this, I owe
(25:17):
it to them, old men and women of the Callville Indians.
Let us hope that this new form of government will
not be imposing on our old people. That you younger
men and women will have a voice in the government
of the US. Let us try a new deal. This
vote was contentious for many of the tribes and bands
(25:37):
that lived in and around the Callville Reservation and other
places as well. Some who opposed it wanted full autonomy instead,
not to be governed by a council that essentially reported
to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some in the interior
Pacific Northwest wanted a return to the social structure of
small autonomous bands, not the collection of bands that had
(25:59):
been unilaterally grouped into one reservation and recognized as one
tribe under an executive order in eighteen seventy two. The
Indian Reorganization Act also incorporated the idea of blood quantum
into its definition of who was or was not indigenous.
The idea that you had to have a certain amount
of quote native blood to be indigenous was really foreign
(26:23):
to many Indigenous peoples, and it was totally contrary to
long standing cultural practices of intermarriage and adoption. So opponents
to this law included people who objected to the use
of blood quantum for a range of reasons. When the
Callville Tribe voted, there were four hundred and twenty one
votes in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act and five
(26:45):
hundred and sixty two votes against it, but more than
seven hundred people who were eligible did not cast a vote.
The initial wording of the Act had been that fifty
one percent of eligible voters had to vote again against
the act in order for a tribe to reject it,
and Carville Superintendent Harvey K. Meyer and the Office of
(27:07):
Indian Affairs had told tribal members that votes that were
not cast would be counted in favor of the act.
But in nineteen thirty five, the Act was amended to
require a majority of votes cast in favor in order
to pass the act, and this standard is what was
applied to the vote of the Confederated Tribes of the
Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove and other supporters of the Indian
(27:31):
Reorganization Act argued that the earlier standard had to have
influenced whether people had decided to vote or not, and
that changing the criteria after the fact meant that there
needed to be a new vote. The tribe drafted a
new constitution, which was passed in February of nineteen thirty eight,
but because of that vote, Congress did not accept it
(27:52):
as having been created under the Indian Reorganization Act's terms,
and the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, including its
land protections, consequently did not apply to the Callville Reservation.
Mourning Dove was deeply upset by this outcome and was
one of the people who thought the way the vote
had been handled was unfair. She continued to advocate for
(28:15):
another vote that the federal government would recognize. She was
also elected to the Council of the Confederated Callville Tribes
in nineteen thirty five, but in late July of nineteen
thirty six, she became ill and severely disoriented. Family members
took her to Medical Lake State Hospital, which was a
psychiatric hospital and she died there on August eighth, at
(28:38):
the age of about forty eight. Her cause of death
was given as exhaustion from manic depressive psychosis, But this
was really kind of a catch all diagnosis that was
used for a lot of people who died while in
the hospital's care. Like it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
My read of this is that she was ill, and
that her illness was caught causing psychiatric symptoms, and then
she was given this cause of death that did not
actually shed any light onto what was really going on.
According to obituaries, she was survived by her husband, her father,
four brothers, and three sisters.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
In the years before her death, Mourning Dove had been
working on an autobiography, mainly about her life until roughly
the year nineteen hundred. She wrote a lot about her family,
how they lived in traditions and practices, involving things like
her first menstrual period, or preparing for marriage and caring
for children. She described gathering berries, fishing for salmon, hunting,
(29:38):
and winters full of singing, dancing, and storytelling. She also
wrote about an incredibly difficult winter she survived in eighteen
ninety two and eighteen ninety three due to both blizzards
and flooding, and she wrote about her people's history.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
She wasn't able to finish a completed draft before her death,
and when she died, her notes for the book were
with Dean and Geraldine Kowey. Apparently Dean had planned to
turn these notes into an actual book after he retired,
but then he died in nineteen seventy eight without having
done so. Geraldine later gave the notes to her former
anthropology professor and friend, Erna Gunter, who, ultimately, after working
(30:16):
with them a bit, returned them back to Geraldine. More
than four decades after her death, Mourning Dove's notes, contained
in about twenty folders, were given to J. Miller, who
at that point had been working with Calville tribe elders
on recording their stories for about five years. Miller edited
the notes for print. His introduction states that he would
(30:37):
not have been able to turn her notes into a
book without his experience working with Calville elders, which he
continued to do as he worked with the autobiography. He
had been working with the people whose first language was
an interior Salish one, but whose words were being written
down in English. In an essay, he described this as
thinking in Salish and writing in English. The same was
(30:59):
true of Mourning Dove, who was always more fluent in
Insucchin than in English. Her writing in English often reflected
thought processes and structures that came from the syntax of
her first language and her indigenous culture. Miller also made
changes based on how the Callville people he was working
with in the nineteen eighties were writing and speaking like.
(31:19):
In some cases, the language she had used fifty or
more years before had come to be seen as antiquated
or referencing stereotypes. This book, Mourning Dove, a Salition Autobiography,
came out in nineteen ninety. There have been criticisms of
Miller's work with this autobiography. For example, in her review
of both the autobiography and of a new printing of
(31:42):
Coogiuea that came out in nineteen ninety, Alana Kathleen Brown
argues that Miller downplayed the significance of Mourning Dove's achievements
and undermined her authority as the narrator of her own life.
She frames Miller's portrayal of Mourning Dove as misogynist and
argues that his no votes that were part of the
nineteen ninety edition of Coyote Stories were patronizing and pedantic.
(32:06):
She also disagrees with his decisions to edit Mourning Dove's
work into Standard English, saying that doing that took away
a lot of her thought and nuance. This review is
really pretty scathing, but at the same time, Brown also
notes that the autobiography itself is really important as a
work by an Indigenous woman talking about her own life
(32:27):
from her own perspective at that point in history. Today,
the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation is a federally
recognized tribe with more than nine thousand yearrolled members, and
it is still affected by the outcome of the Indian
Reorganization Act vote that Morning Dove was connected to in
the nineteen thirties. In twenty eleven, then tribal chairman Michael
(32:50):
Finley spoke about the ongoing legacy of the vote before
the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs during oversight hearings on
the seventy fifth anniversary of the Act. As one example,
since the tribe wasn't able to reacquire lands under the Act,
parts of the reservation are sort of a checkerboard, which
creates problems related to whether the tribe or another community
(33:10):
has jurisdiction in terms of things like law enforcement and
public safety. He also noted that the lack of protections
from the Act gave the tribe less negotiating power during
the construction of the Grand Cooley Dam. The dam was
finished in nineteen forty two and was built partly on
reservation lands and flooded roughly eighteen thousand acres of reservation land,
(33:32):
including people's homes and burial sites.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
So, even though this has happened right at the end
of her life, something that she sort of I think
would have continued to advocate for had she lived longer,
something that's still having just a lot of ongoing impact today,
almost one hundred years later. Yeah, and I have a
(33:57):
little bit of listener mail we wrap up today's episode.
This is from Aaron, who says, Hello, Holly and Tracy,
thank you for the hard work you guys put into
the podcast. I'm currently renovating my home in Wilmington, North Carolina,
and catching up on missed episodes has kept me company.
I really enjoyed your latest six Impossible episodes on Ghosts.
(34:19):
I'm from Wilmington about twenty five minutes north of where
the Makeo light has been seen. My father in law
used to go out with his friends in the early
seventies and try to see the light. He swears he's
seen it twice, and one of those times he says
he's seen the shadow of a man swinging the light.
He loves telling the grandkids about it in the spookiest
voices he can muster. We all love it, especially this
(34:41):
time of year. It's so fun to hear the history
of things so close to home. I would love to
hear more about the eighteen ninety eight coupdeta. I admit
I have not looked to see if another host has
done it already. Attached is my pet tax, my sweet
baby boy Bagheera. He is every bit the giant protective panther.
He's named for not going to feel bad about ending
that sentence with a preposition because all the rules are
(35:04):
made up and the points don't matter. That is my
mom holding him the first picture. She is not that small.
Baggy pants is just huge.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Much loved.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Aaron. I wrote back to Aaron and said, actually, Holly
and I did a two part podcast on the eighteen
ninety eight Coupdeta in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
I do not remember exactly when that came out, and.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
So I love these cat pictures for a couple of reasons.
One is that the cat that I grew up with
as a child was a gray tabby that had some
similar markings and colorings to this kitty cat. That cat, however,
was much smaller. It is truly enormous cat, according to
(35:56):
the picture, very big. I want to pet this kiddy always,
So thank you, so so much, Erin for these wonderful
cat pictures.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
And for the story.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
I love hearing about people, people's family stories, about the
make up light and whatever other ghost stories that we
talked about in that episode.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So if you would like.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
To send us a note about this or any of
their podcast we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
We're all over social media. Missed in History, which is
where you'll find our Facebook, our x thing, our Instagram,
that kind of stuff. You can send us a note
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, which I might
have said already, and you can subscribe to our show
(36:40):
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to
get your podcasts stuff. You missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite OSM.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our
episode on Morning Dove, who is also known as Christine Quintasket.
But I'm going to say it's a surprise two parter,
both in that when I started writing it, I didn't
expect it to be two parts, and also in that
at the beginning of part one, I don't think I
(00:32):
said that it was going to be a two parter.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
But it is. Surprises abound.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yes. So she was a novelist, an ethnographer, and an activist.
And in part one we talked about some context involving
the Confederated tribes of the Callville Reservation and that context
had just a huge impact on her family and the
indigenous nation they were part of. And then we also
talked about her early life and her introduction to a
(00:59):
man named Lucullas Virgil McWhorter, who was sort of her editor,
literary agent and friend. Where we left off, she had
written a book and they thought that book was going
to come out soon, but it was not published yet.
She did a newspaper interview in nineteen sixteen that described
the book as soon to be published that publications turned
(01:22):
out still to be years away, but we are picking
up where we left off in nineteen sixteen. In part one,
we talked about how Mourning Dove often earned a living
by doing agricultural work, and at times she also supported
herself through domestic work. In nineteen sixteen, while working as
a housekeeper in Pulse, in Montana, she developed a serious illness.
(01:44):
It was described as influenza and inflammatory rheumatism. She was
sick for weeks and she thought she was going to die,
but eventually an aunt came to look after her and,
in her words, quote doctored me up with Indian medicines.
She wasn't well enough to go back to the kind
of physical labor involved with agricultural or domestic work, so
(02:07):
she got a job working as a teacher at a
school for indigenous children in all of our British Columbia.
She had a sister who lived nearby, and she was
able to live with her sister. Eventually she used some
of her pay to buy her own typewriter. After a while,
she also built a small shack adjacent to her sister's house.
It's kind of her writing shack. She contracted the flu
(02:29):
again during the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic and was hospitalized
for two weeks. In nineteen nineteen, she got married to
Fred Galler, who was an enrolled member of the Callville
tribe and also had Winnatchi and white ancestry. This relationship
seems to have been less tumultuous than her first marriage,
but at times it could still be a struggle. They
(02:51):
often worked together as migrant farm laborers, which was exhausting
and sometimes very painful work for very little money. It
also seems like he didn't get the way of her
aspirations as a writer, but he didn't really support them either,
and they had their own internal conflicts in the relationship.
She especially did not like.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It when he drank.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
By this point, she had known Luke Ellis mcwarter for
almost five years and their working relationship had evolved into
one of mutual trust and support. She described him as
having an Indian heart and he was really her biggest
source of encouragement as a writer. Often he was the
person she turned to in order to keep herself focused
(03:33):
and working on her writing.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
There were still some challenges, though. We mentioned in Part
one how mcworder was much older than she was, and
as a white man, he had a much different type
of power and access to different connections than she did.
Beyond that, while they were both focused on Indigenous stories
and on her novel, which was focused on Indigenous characters,
(03:55):
they were coming at it from very different perspectives. Aside
from the obvious difference in their ethnicities and their life experience,
mcwarter was really approaching things as an ethnographer while Mourningdove
was a storyteller. They also had some huge differences of
opinion regarding language. McWorter wanted Mourning Dove's English to be
(04:16):
as polished as possible so that her work might dispel
stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as ignorant and uneducated, but sometimes
she would kind of look at his edits or material
that he had written on her behalf and basically say
she could not understand it without a dictionary.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
At the same time, the two of them did really
learn a lot from one another over the course of
their work together. As they worked through Indigenous stories and
Mourning Dove's fiction, he learned more about Salish languages In
the community's worldview, and she learned from him about how
to communicate with English speakers in English. In nineteen twenty one,
(04:54):
while visiting a museum in Spokane, Washington, Morningdove saw a
mounted specimen of the the American Mourning Dove, the bird
you might remember from part one. She had originally been
spelling her pen name Mourning MLR and ing. In a
letter to mcwarter, she said she had made a sad
mistake with that spelling, and from that point on she
(05:14):
spelled her name with the U.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
In Mourning Mourning Dove's novel Coogawea the Half Blood, a
depiction of the Great Montana cattle range, was published by
the Four Seas Company in Boston in nineteen twenty seven.
It had taken so long to get the book published,
and four Seas was concerned that it would not turn
a profit, so it required Mourning Dove and McWhorter to
(05:36):
provide part of the funding for its printing. For his part,
McWorter was ultimately not very impressed with this publisher, and
he would refer to them as four pubbles. Kogiea is
very very approximately the word for chipmunk in the Incialchen language.
The first syllable in that language especially, is a little
(05:57):
different in a way, I have trouble replicated as somebody
who doesn't speak that language. And the plot of this
novel was inspired in part by a story called Chipmunk
and Owl Woman. The story would also be part of
Mourning Dove's book Coyote Stories, which will be talking about
more in a bit. This story is a Western romance,
(06:17):
and in a lot of ways it's about identity. Parts
of it were inspired by Mourning Dove's own life and experiences.
The main character, Kogawea, had both white and indigenous ancestry.
It lives both between and in both of these worlds.
The book explores the differences between her life and experiences
and that of her sisters, one of whom marries a
(06:40):
white man and lives mostly in a white man's world,
and another who is raised in indigenous traditions by a grandmother. Overall,
the novel's indigenous central characters are the most fully realized.
Many of the white characters are more one dimensionally good
or bad, and there are also stereotyped cowboys who mostly
provide comic relief. Those differences between Mourning Dove's and McCarter's
(07:05):
approaches played a huge part in this book, and a
lot of that happened after the last time Mourning Dove
saw it. Before it went to print, she had really
been focused on writing a romance one that she thought
would humanize Indigenous people to white readers when they read it.
But McWorter really wanted the book to be an ethnographically
(07:27):
accurate portrayal of her culture and to include more history
and ethnography, so he added in notes on ethnography and
other material, including a section on Indigenous music that was
apparently plagiarized from another author named Anna Hurst. A lot
of the literary discussion around Kogaweya has focused on mcworter's
(07:48):
involvement with it and his influence on it. Even at
the time, there were people who claimed that Mourning Dove
had simply put her name on a white man's work,
and McWorter did make meaningful changes to her work. A
lot of articles about this book and about their relationship.
Quote one passage from a letter that she wrote to
him in nineteen twenty eight, after she had read the
(08:09):
published book, she said quote, I felt like it was
someone else's book and not mine at all. In fact,
the finishing touches are put there by you, and I
have never seen it, so that sounds terrible.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
But the lines before those sentences put it in a
kind of different light.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I have just got through going over the book Kochieeah
and am surprised at the changes that you made. I
think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressing
like a cook would do with a fine meal. I
sure was interested in the book, and Hubby read it over,
and all the rest of the family neglected their housework
till they read it cover to cover. Later on, in
(08:50):
nineteen thirty three, she wrote him another letter, Uh, this
has some interesting typos in it, so we're going to
read it as written.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Quote. I frequently think how fortunate that I met you.
My book of Kogaweyah would never had been anything but
the cheap, full skep paper that was written on if
you had not helped me get it in shape. I
can never repay you back. I am sure, while we
are here in this old planet too poor.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That you can tell from that particular excerpt the kinds
of things that she still struggled with a little bit
in English, even at this point in her life. A
lot of things that you read that quote from letters
sort of edit all of that out, and so it's
harder to get a sense.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Of like how she actually wrote.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
We will talk about her other work and her continuing
relationship with McWhorter after a sponsor break. Morning Dove's novel
was not the financial success that she and Lucaalas mcwarter
(09:58):
had hoped that it would be, and then after it
was published, most of her income continued from doing agricultural
and domestic labor a lot of the time, with her
and her husband working together harvesting things like apples and hops.
To be clear, she had critics in both white and
Indigenous communities, but publishing this book was also something that
(10:19):
a lot of people saw as an accomplishment and something
to be respected. After it came out, she became an
honorary member of the Eastern Washington State Historical Society and
a lifetime member of the Washington State Historical Society. White
newspapers noted that she was the first Indigenous woman to
publish a novel and cited her as an authority on
(10:40):
indigenous subjects. For example, a nineteen twenty eight article that
was reprinted in a lot of newspapers was about the
history of smoking and whether the plant known as kinikinik
was the same as tobacco. It described her as resenting
the idea that indigenous people had migrated to North America
from China or Japan, saying, quote, neither of these people
(11:01):
nor any other smoked until they learned it directly from us.
It went on to paraphrase her as saying that quote,
the finding of pipes and burial mounds are no proof
to her that another race occupied this country before her own.
The newspaper also quoted from Kogawea and its descriptions of
Indigenous smoking practices and uses for pipes. This idea of
(11:25):
prehistoric migration to the Americas from Asia is going to
come up again in a moment, and it's an idea
that is still contentious or even offensive among indigenous communities
whose oral histories placed them on these continents since time immemorial.
This also actually ties into recent archaeological research into fossilized
footprints that date back to before migrations from Asia are
(11:49):
believed to have happened. In the case of footprints found
in White Sand's New Mexico, research suggests that they are
at least ten thousand years earlier, before migration and from
Asia is believed to have happened. Mourning Dove also started
doing a lot of work as an activist, advocating for
other Indigenous people and for people who made their living
(12:10):
doing agricultural labor. The Wild Sunflower Indian Women's Club in Omak, Washington,
promoted Indigenous arts and crafts, and Mourning Dove served as
its president for three years. In nineteen twenty eight, she
was one of nine founders of the Eagle Feather Club,
which was focused on the social welfare and equitable treatment
of Indigenous peoples. She was also continuing her work trying
(12:34):
to preserve Indigenous stories and traditions, which she called folklores
with an es on it, which I kind of love
as her term for this. And this work had some complexities.
The stories that she was collecting are part of a
sacred body of cultural knowledge, and there are protocols around
how and when they should be shared and who they
(12:55):
should be shared with. Different indigenous nations all have their
own protocols preferences around these things, and it seems like
there were people who had no concerns at all about
sharing their stories with Mourning Dove. Like her, a lot
of them were afraid that this knowledge was going to
be lost otherwise, but other people seem to have been
(13:16):
more reluctant, and some of Morningdove's letters suggest that she
thought people wouldn't be willing to talk to her if
they knew their stories were going to wind up in
a book. Mourning Dove definitely wasn't the only person trying
to preserve and record indigenous cultural knowledge and heritage in
this part of North America at this point. Another was
James Alexander Tate. Tate had been born in the Shetland Islands,
(13:40):
and after immigrating to Canada, he had married a Lake
of Pomaic woman named Lucy Artco. He became immersed in
Lake of Pomac knowledge and traditions, both as a spouse
and as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Anthropologist Franz Boas also
hired Tate as part of the American Museum of Natural
History's Jesup Expedition, which ran from eighteen ninety seven to
(14:01):
nineteen oh two and involved teams in both the Pacific
Northwest and Siberia recording languages and cultural practices on both
sides of the Bearing Straight. The stated purpose of this
expedition was to gather evidence that indigenous peoples had migrated
to the Americas from Asia across a land bridge, but
for Boas, the priority was documenting these cultures as they
(14:24):
were increasingly threatened by the kinds of assimilationist and destructive
government policies and other actions that we have been talking about.
Mourning Dove became immensely frustrated when she learned that Tate
was paying people in the area five dollars for their stories.
From her perspective, he was an outsider, and she also
could not afford to do the same, so she was
(14:45):
frustrated about the fact that he was paying people for
their stories and that he was doing this work at all.
But eventually she found more common ground with Tate. Like McWhorter,
who she'd been working with a really long time at
this point, he had to this part of North America
from somewhere else, and he wasn't indigenous, but he did
have a sincere interest in preserving indigenous cultures and in
(15:09):
advocating for indigenous peoples, including advocating for indigenous land rights.
In August of nineteen twenty nine, mccorter's wife Anne died.
They had been married for almost thirty five years, and
he was understandably devastated. His working relationship with Mourning Dove
had developed into a mutually supportive friendship over the years,
(15:29):
and she was worried about him after his wife's death.
Within a few months, though, they were hard at work
on the collection that would be published as the book
Coyote Stories in nineteen thirty three. By that point, McCord
had introduced Mourning Dove to his friend, Heister Dean Gooey
known as Dean, who was initially brought on to work
as a proofreader. Dean became more deeply involved with the
(15:51):
book over time, though, along with his wife, Geraldine, who
was one of the first people to graduate from the
University of Washington's anthropology program.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
While they were all.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Working on this book, Mourning Dove was also continuing her advocacy.
In nineteen thirty she was one of the founders of
the Calville Indian Association, which worked to get money for
land claims that had never been paid for. In nineteen
thirty three, Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act as
part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, trying to address
(16:23):
the economic hardships of the Great Depression. This established the
work relief program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and
then legislation was passed establishing an Indigenous division of the
Civilian Conservation Corps not long afterward, But initially most of
the foreman and supervisors who were hired for this division
(16:44):
were not Indigenous. Mourning Dove and the Calville Indian Association
fought for these positions to be filled with Indigenous workers
as well, with Mourningdove saying that she would take the
matter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs if it wasn't resolved.
Over the span of a year, the number of Indigenous
managers in the Corps rose from a little over forty
(17:05):
percent to about sixty percent. She was also doing a
lot of public speaking for schools, colleges, community organizations, and
the like, often sharing her culture, traditions and stories with
a mostly white audience. She typically spoke wearing her traditional
Callville clothing, including a beaded buckskin dress and moccasins. We
(17:27):
have talked in the past about Indigenous writers and speakers
who adopted a costume as part of their stage presence,
in part because that seemed to be a way to
get the interest of white audiences, but this was not
a costume for Mourning Dove. These were her clothes, and
she wanted to normalize what she wore and show that
it was an everyday part of life and not something
(17:47):
that should be exoticized or discouraged. Mourning Dove's book Coyote
Stories was published in nineteen thirty three, so named because
the figure of coyote was central to most of the
stories in the book. The title page read Coyote Stories
by Mourning Dove Humishuma, edited and illustrated by heisterdine Gui,
(18:08):
with notes by L. V. McWhorter, Old Wolf, and a
forward by Chief Standing Bear Oglala Sue. This book sold
really well and it was reprinted within a year. It
would have been impossible for one book to capture a
fully authentic recording of these stories. Although the figure of
coyote is present in the stories and traditions of many
(18:28):
indigenous peoples, especially across the western part of North America,
the stories themselves have nuances among different tribes, nations, and bands,
even down to the level of versions that have been
passed down within individual families. They are stories to have
a long history of being told aloud for specific reasons,
at particular times of year or for specific events. It's
(18:52):
just not something that a book can fully encompass. But
beyond that, this book was a lot different from what
Mourning Dove and had envisioned when they first met one
another eighteen years before. Rather than a straightforward recording of
Indigenous cultural knowledge, under Guy's direction, it had evolved into
a work that was meant more as bedtime stories for children.
(19:16):
This was not what McWhorter had originally had in mind
at all. In addition to wanting to preserve the stories themselves,
he was worried that presenting Indigenous cultural knowledge as children's
stories would reinforce the damaging stereotypes that Indigenous people were childlike.
Mourning Dove had also removed parts of the stories that
(19:37):
she described as ugly. At the same time, though working
on this book was an act of cultural preservation in
a different way, Mourning Dove and her collaborators had lengthy
and wide ranging discussions about language, down to find nuances
about how different words were used in different contexts. They
had extensive conversations about the best ways to render and
(20:00):
oral tradition spoken in Salish language into English print. Along
the way, they essentially created a dictionary that included pronunciations, definitions,
and notations about usage, and this work went on to
influence McCord's own work as an anthropologist and an ethnographer.
Traveling around the plateau to collect these stories had also
(20:23):
given Mourning Dove the opportunity to interact with a lot
of people, to build connections with them and find out
what their concerns were, and this connected to work that
she did on behalf of John Collier, Commissioner of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, which we will talk about after
a sponsor break. To briefly recap something we talked about
(20:51):
in Part one. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century,
much of the US federal government's policy toward Indigenous peoples
involved forcibly removing people from their ancestral homelands to reservations.
This was a violent, destructive, and genocidal process, and it
often followed active warfare. So treaties signed between the US
(21:14):
and indigenous nations formally ended a conflict, with the indigenous
nations ceding land to the United States in exchanged for
an end to the fighting and then reservation land somewhere
else on the continent. The General Allotment Act of eighteen
eighty seven, also called the DAWs Act, shifted the United
States approach from one establishing reservations and removing people to them,
(21:39):
to one of allotment and assimilation. Reservation land was broken
up and allotted to people individually, with purportedly excess land
allowed to be sold to non indigenous people. This was
again deeply destructive, with indigenous peoples losing a lot of
what had been reservation land. It was also paired with
things like the boarding school system for indigen and his
(22:00):
students that was meant to force children to abandon their
languages and cultures and assimilate with white society. There's more
about both of these periods of history in our two
part episode on the Occupation of Alcatraz that came out
in twenty nineteen. In nineteen thirty four, the federal approach
shifted again with the Indian Reorganization Act, also called the
(22:22):
Wheeler Howard Act, which was part of a collection of
efforts known as the Indian New Deal. This legislation followed
the Miriam Report, also called the Problem of Indian Administration,
which had come out in nineteen twenty eight. There is
some debate about whether the Miriam Report directly led to
the Indian Reorganization Act, but this was a scathing report
(22:45):
on conditions across reservations in twenty six states, detailing serious
problems involving poverty, inadequate health care, and an overall lack
of funding. The report characterized decades of federal policy toward
Indigenous peoples, including that policy of allotment, as at the
root of these issues, and it called for massive reforms.
(23:09):
The US government slowed down on issuing land allotments soon
after this report was published, and the Indian Reorganization Act
followed a little more than five years later. This legislation
certainly was not perfect. Among other things, it didn't apply
in the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, and it was
focused on the idea that tribes would be governed by
(23:30):
tribal councils that would be accountable to the US Bureau
of Indian Affairs. And it could not undo the centuries
of history that had already passed. But it did start
to move the US government toward a policy that focused
on self governance and self determination for Indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
It also shifted the focus from one of assimilation with
white culture toward one of preserving indigenous cultures and traditions.
John Collier had been named Commissioner of the Bureau of
Indian Afas the year before the Indian Reorganization Act was passed.
He was one of the people who helped get the
Act through Congress. This act abolished the allotment program that
(24:11):
had been set up in the Dawes Act, and it
provided funding to Indigenous nations to purchase land that had
been taken from them. Because part of the focus here
was indigenous nation's own self determination, tribal members had the
right to vote on whether to accept the terms of
the Act, and John Collier, possibly having heard about Mourning
(24:32):
Dove through her publication of Coyote Stories, contacted her to
ask for help and outreach to the people of the
Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove was in favor of the Indian
Reorganization Act. She thought that it would help protect tribal
lands and might even lead to the restoration of the
north half of the Callville Reservation, which had been returned
to the public domain in the late nineteenth century. The
(24:55):
law also included provisions for additional funding and support, all
of which she thought would benefit her people, among other things.
She spoke at a conference in Oregon that brought together
representatives from eight reservations, saying, quote, I fought for twenty
five years for the cause of Indian people. The reason
I have fought for my people is this, I owe
(25:17):
it to them, old men and women of the Callville Indians.
Let us hope that this new form of government will
not be imposing on our old people. That you younger
men and women will have a voice in the government
of the US. Let us try a new deal. This
vote was contentious for many of the tribes and bands
(25:37):
that lived in and around the Callville Reservation and other
places as well. Some who opposed it wanted full autonomy instead,
not to be governed by a council that essentially reported
to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some in the interior
Pacific Northwest wanted a return to the social structure of
small autonomous bands, not the collection of bands that had
(25:59):
been unilaterally grouped into one reservation and recognized as one
tribe under an executive order in eighteen seventy two. The
Indian Reorganization Act also incorporated the idea of blood quantum
into its definition of who was or was not indigenous.
The idea that you had to have a certain amount
of quote native blood to be indigenous was really foreign
(26:23):
to many Indigenous peoples, and it was totally contrary to
long standing cultural practices of intermarriage and adoption. So opponents
to this law included people who objected to the use
of blood quantum for a range of reasons. When the
Callville Tribe voted, there were four hundred and twenty one
votes in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act and five
(26:45):
hundred and sixty two votes against it, but more than
seven hundred people who were eligible did not cast a vote.
The initial wording of the Act had been that fifty
one percent of eligible voters had to vote again against
the act in order for a tribe to reject it,
and Carville Superintendent Harvey K. Meyer and the Office of
(27:07):
Indian Affairs had told tribal members that votes that were
not cast would be counted in favor of the act.
But in nineteen thirty five, the Act was amended to
require a majority of votes cast in favor in order
to pass the act, and this standard is what was
applied to the vote of the Confederated Tribes of the
Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove and other supporters of the Indian
(27:31):
Reorganization Act argued that the earlier standard had to have
influenced whether people had decided to vote or not, and
that changing the criteria after the fact meant that there
needed to be a new vote. The tribe drafted a
new constitution, which was passed in February of nineteen thirty eight,
but because of that vote, Congress did not accept it
(27:52):
as having been created under the Indian Reorganization Act's terms,
and the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, including its
land protections, consequently did not apply to the Callville Reservation.
Mourning Dove was deeply upset by this outcome and was
one of the people who thought the way the vote
had been handled was unfair. She continued to advocate for
(28:15):
another vote that the federal government would recognize. She was
also elected to the Council of the Confederated Callville Tribes
in nineteen thirty five, but in late July of nineteen
thirty six, she became ill and severely disoriented. Family members
took her to Medical Lake State Hospital, which was a
psychiatric hospital and she died there on August eighth, at
(28:38):
the age of about forty eight. Her cause of death
was given as exhaustion from manic depressive psychosis, But this
was really kind of a catch all diagnosis that was
used for a lot of people who died while in
the hospital's care. Like it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
My read of this is that she was ill, and
that her illness was caught causing psychiatric symptoms, and then
she was given this cause of death that did not
actually shed any light onto what was really going on.
According to obituaries, she was survived by her husband, her father,
four brothers, and three sisters.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
In the years before her death, Mourning Dove had been
working on an autobiography, mainly about her life until roughly
the year nineteen hundred. She wrote a lot about her family,
how they lived in traditions and practices, involving things like
her first menstrual period, or preparing for marriage and caring
for children. She described gathering berries, fishing for salmon, hunting,
(29:38):
and winters full of singing, dancing, and storytelling. She also
wrote about an incredibly difficult winter she survived in eighteen
ninety two and eighteen ninety three due to both blizzards
and flooding, and she wrote about her people's history.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
She wasn't able to finish a completed draft before her death,
and when she died, her notes for the book were
with Dean and Geraldine Kowey. Apparently Dean had planned to
turn these notes into an actual book after he retired,
but then he died in nineteen seventy eight without having
done so. Geraldine later gave the notes to her former
anthropology professor and friend, Erna Gunter, who, ultimately, after working
(30:16):
with them a bit, returned them back to Geraldine. More
than four decades after her death, Mourning Dove's notes, contained
in about twenty folders, were given to J. Miller, who
at that point had been working with Calville tribe elders
on recording their stories for about five years. Miller edited
the notes for print. His introduction states that he would
(30:37):
not have been able to turn her notes into a
book without his experience working with Calville elders, which he
continued to do as he worked with the autobiography. He
had been working with the people whose first language was
an interior Salish one, but whose words were being written
down in English. In an essay, he described this as
thinking in Salish and writing in English. The same was
(30:59):
true of Mourning Dove, who was always more fluent in
Insucchin than in English. Her writing in English often reflected
thought processes and structures that came from the syntax of
her first language and her indigenous culture. Miller also made
changes based on how the Callville people he was working
with in the nineteen eighties were writing and speaking like.
(31:19):
In some cases, the language she had used fifty or
more years before had come to be seen as antiquated
or referencing stereotypes. This book, Mourning Dove, a Salition Autobiography,
came out in nineteen ninety. There have been criticisms of
Miller's work with this autobiography. For example, in her review
of both the autobiography and of a new printing of
(31:42):
Coogiuea that came out in nineteen ninety, Alana Kathleen Brown
argues that Miller downplayed the significance of Mourning Dove's achievements
and undermined her authority as the narrator of her own life.
She frames Miller's portrayal of Mourning Dove as misogynist and
argues that his no votes that were part of the
nineteen ninety edition of Coyote Stories were patronizing and pedantic.
(32:06):
She also disagrees with his decisions to edit Mourning Dove's
work into Standard English, saying that doing that took away
a lot of her thought and nuance. This review is
really pretty scathing, but at the same time, Brown also
notes that the autobiography itself is really important as a
work by an Indigenous woman talking about her own life
(32:27):
from her own perspective at that point in history. Today,
the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation is a federally
recognized tribe with more than nine thousand yearrolled members, and
it is still affected by the outcome of the Indian
Reorganization Act vote that Morning Dove was connected to in
the nineteen thirties. In twenty eleven, then tribal chairman Michael
(32:50):
Finley spoke about the ongoing legacy of the vote before
the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs during oversight hearings on
the seventy fifth anniversary of the Act. As one example,
since the tribe wasn't able to reacquire lands under the Act,
parts of the reservation are sort of a checkerboard, which
creates problems related to whether the tribe or another community
(33:10):
has jurisdiction in terms of things like law enforcement and
public safety. He also noted that the lack of protections
from the Act gave the tribe less negotiating power during
the construction of the Grand Cooley Dam. The dam was
finished in nineteen forty two and was built partly on
reservation lands and flooded roughly eighteen thousand acres of reservation land,
(33:32):
including people's homes and burial sites.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
So, even though this has happened right at the end
of her life, something that she sort of I think
would have continued to advocate for had she lived longer,
something that's still having just a lot of ongoing impact today,
almost one hundred years later. Yeah, and I have a
(33:57):
little bit of listener mail we wrap up today's episode.
This is from Aaron, who says, Hello, Holly and Tracy,
thank you for the hard work you guys put into
the podcast. I'm currently renovating my home in Wilmington, North Carolina,
and catching up on missed episodes has kept me company.
I really enjoyed your latest six Impossible episodes on Ghosts.
(34:19):
I'm from Wilmington about twenty five minutes north of where
the Makeo light has been seen. My father in law
used to go out with his friends in the early
seventies and try to see the light. He swears he's
seen it twice, and one of those times he says
he's seen the shadow of a man swinging the light.
He loves telling the grandkids about it in the spookiest
voices he can muster. We all love it, especially this
(34:41):
time of year. It's so fun to hear the history
of things so close to home. I would love to
hear more about the eighteen ninety eight coupdeta. I admit
I have not looked to see if another host has
done it already. Attached is my pet tax, my sweet
baby boy Bagheera. He is every bit the giant protective panther.
He's named for not going to feel bad about ending
that sentence with a preposition because all the rules are
(35:04):
made up and the points don't matter. That is my
mom holding him the first picture. She is not that small.
Baggy pants is just huge.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Much loved.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Aaron. I wrote back to Aaron and said, actually, Holly
and I did a two part podcast on the eighteen
ninety eight Coupdeta in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
I do not remember exactly when that came out, and.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
So I love these cat pictures for a couple of reasons.
One is that the cat that I grew up with
as a child was a gray tabby that had some
similar markings and colorings to this kitty cat. That cat, however,
was much smaller. It is truly enormous cat, according to
(35:56):
the picture, very big. I want to pet this kiddy always,
So thank you, so so much, Erin for these wonderful
cat pictures.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
And for the story.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
I love hearing about people, people's family stories, about the
make up light and whatever other ghost stories that we
talked about in that episode.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So if you would like.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
To send us a note about this or any of
their podcast we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
We're all over social media. Missed in History, which is
where you'll find our Facebook, our x thing, our Instagram,
that kind of stuff. You can send us a note
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, which I might
have said already, and you can subscribe to our show
(36:40):
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to
get your podcasts stuff. You missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite OSM.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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