The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Chapter 4. Half-Breeds and Homesteaders: Native/American Alliances in the West

4 / Half-Breeds and Homesteaders: Native/American Alliances in the West I have now illustrated several variations of the racial romance as used by women authors to urge their U.S. readers to recognize nonwhite minorities as members of the national family. Fictions featuring mulattos, halfcastes , and mestizos made visceral the nation’s history of exploitation, while also modeling more egalitarian social relations. Mourning Dove’s novel Cogewea: The Half Blood, A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range features the mixed-race offspring of Native American and white parentage. This novel’s version of the racial romance emerges in response to the particular historical inequalities facing Native Americans in the United States in the age of allotment, and offers distinct identification strategies. Mourning Dove repeatedly rejects the biological essentialism of turn-of-the-twentieth-century racial discourse. She refuses to accept blood as the only measure of identity, opposing the prominent discourse of “blood quantum” in U.S.–Native American policy. Her novel defines Native American identity as American identity, shaped equally by biology and culture, nature and nurture, blood kinship and adoption, endogamy and exogamy. Refusing the trope of Native Americans as tragic and vanishing Noble Savages, Mourning Dove depicts contemporary Native Americans as survivors who maintain tribal culture and traditions by creating hybrid identities. Mourning Dove aligns the early twentiethcentury Native American with the European immigrant settler, imagining new (and future-oriented) forms of kinship and national belonging. Cogewea imagines a new model of familiality in the West, made up of half-breeds, immigrant cowboys and homesteaders, and other outsiders. 120 / half-breeds and homesteaders I read Mourning Dove as expanding both Native American and U.S. identities for the twentieth century through her vision of a half-breed ranch in the American West. She expands Native American identity by insisting that the half-breed is a legitimate heir who honors tribal traditions while participating in mainstream (white-identified) U.S. culture. And her vision of a multicultural, adoptive family in the West is an alternative to assimilationist and Nativist policies toward American Indians. Rejecting any notion of racial or ethnic “purity,” Cogewea suggests that all modern Americans would do well to forge new identities out of many cultural influences. Accordingly, the novel defines kinship through shared endeavor, not shared blood, in order to plot a multicultural future in the American West. Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-ma) is the Salish name of Christine Quintasket, a Native American woman of mixed Okanogan and Colville descent.1 Throughout her life, she self-identified as a “mixed blood,” though there is disagreement as to whether she had a white biological father, grandfather, or stepfather.2 Regardless, Mourning Dove identified with both Native American and “white” cultures, asking her readers , as Martha L. Viehmann puts it, to “rethink the divisions between the two cultures and between ‘pure’ and ‘amalgamated’ individuals.”3 Mourning Dove was an activist in Native women’s organizations, as well as on behalf of Native American rights. Intimately familiar with the challenges of living “between two worlds,” she was also a dispute mediator. Like the other writer-reformers I have discussed, Mourning Dove merged political activism with mainstream publishing in order to draw attention to minority rights in an age of rampant U.S. expansion. By the early twentieth century, Native Americans had been thoroughly marginalized and oppressed by the U.S. government, with the ideology of Manifest Destiny justifying white settlement and Native American displacement from coast to coast. Well aware of literature’s capacity to influence public sentiment— a connection made vividly by the publication of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), which sought to be a Native American version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) through its illustration of the plight of displaced tribes in California—Mourning Dove used popular fiction to gain sympathy for and draw attention to Native American rights. In Cogewea, Mourning Dove shows the marginal position of Native Americans, particularly those of mixed blood, in the early twentieth century. Her novel combines the stock plots of a dime novel with Okanogan oral traditions, both evoking and criticizing the myth of the Vanishing Indian. Mourning Dove first half-breeds and homesteaders / 121 drafted her novel in 1912, though failed to find a publisher. She revised the novel in 1916 with the assistance/collaboration of Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a folklorist committed to documenting Native American history and culture. McWhorter dramatically altered...