Lower secondary School English Language Teacher Training

"Mourning Dove’s Cogewea as a Rewriting of Western Romance"

The notion of the “Indiannes” was conceived in the minds of whites who projected into it their own ideas of what the Indian should be. Whether sympathetic or hostile toward Native Americans, Euro-Americans ignored the variety of Native American ways of living, customs and beliefs that differed from tribe to tribe, and developed a set of features and values that according to them were typically Indian. Those stereotypes were created and maintained chiefly through written texts. Native American writers have employed various strategies in order to shake the authority of the white man’s texts that invented Indians. In my presentation I will outline the strategy used by Mourning Dove in her novel Cogewea that is written in the genre of western romance. Although many critics assess Cogewea as an example of literary assimilation, I will suggest a different reading: Mourning Dove used the genre of western romance creatively and subversively and thus undermined its stock assumption about Native Americans and mixed-bloods.

Annotated Bibliography:

• Berkhofer, R. F. (1978) The white man's Indian : images of the American Indian from Columbus to the present. New York : Vintage Books.

In this study Robert Berkhofer depicts the history of the image that Euro-Americans have of Native Americans and outlines the reasons why Euro-Americans imagined Indians only as Noble Savages or bloodthirsty savages. Berkhofer explores these images in different fields: in religion, anthropology, environmentalism, and others.

In my presentation I will mainly draw on the chapter “Imagery in Literature, Art and Philosophy” in which Berkhofer discusses the images of Indians in fiction and poetry, including western novels. I will contrast those images with Native American characters in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea.

• Cawelti, J. (1976) Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

As the title implies, this book deals with genres of popular literature. Each chapter introduces one genre. Cawelti first provides a short historical survey of the genre, outlines the main features and then provides several sample analyses of classic examples of the genre.

Chapter 8 discusses westerns and its typical features. I will look at some of these features and compare/contrast them with the way Morning Dove used them in Cogewea.

• Owens, L. (1992) Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

This study by Louis Owens, a Native American scholar and writer, gives a comprehensive survey of Native American novels: from the first novel by a Native American author published in 1854, through Native American Renaissance to contemporary writers. Owens identifies some themes explored by the writers like mixed-blood characters and trickster characters.

In chapter 2 called “Origin Mists: John Rolling Ridge’s Masquerade and Mourning Dove’s Mixedbloods” Owens analyzes Mourning Dove’s Cogewea. While viewing favourably her depiction of mixedblood characters, Owens critiques Dove’s employment of the genre of western romance and the happy ending. In my presentation I will introduce Owens’s standpoint on Mourning Dove’s Cogewea and add my interpretation.

• Scheick, W. J. (1979) The Half-Blood: a Cultural Symbol in 19th Century American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

In his study Scheick explores the presence of half-blood characters in the 19th century popular literature. Since Morning Dove read popular novels and in her novel Cogewea subversively re-wrote them, I will compare half-blood characters from popular romances of that time, their features, manners and fates, with mixed-blood characters created by Mourning Dove.