Making It New: 1900–1945 475at the University of Oklahoma, he is then involved in the early days of aviation. But,
after World War I, he is unable to find a place in his community or a satisfying
vocation; and he succumbs to the seductive attractions of white society, notably
alcohol. Returning to the reservation, he tells his mother that he will make something
of himself. “I’m goin’ to Harvard law school, and take law,” he boasts, “– I’m gonna
be a great orator.” But his mother remains unconvinced; she knows, instinctively,
that there is little hope for him. This account of the personal failure of the protagonist
is framed by a narrative of social decline as the tribe, in general, succumbs to the
corruptions of white society. “The black derricks crept further west,” the reader is
told. And those oil derricks represent the terrible consequences of instant wealth
brought by the exploitation of resources on the reservation. The tribe becomes rich
for a while and then, as the oil money begins to run out, falls into poverty, cultural
dereliction, and despair. As “the all-powerful life that had come with the creeping
black derricks” begins “to recede to the east,” the Native peoples try to convince
themselves that the good times, “the fever brightness of the Great Frenzy,” will one
day return. But that hope is as clearly without foundation as Chal’s boastful dream
of the future. Both the protagonist and his tribe have lost touch with the old,
indigenous culture and found no true place in the new. They are people who do not
seem to belong anywhere.
While Matthews, along with McNickle and Whitecloud, concerned himself with
the dilemma of living in the collision of cultures, Mourning Dove was more
interested in trying to recover and reaffirm the culture of her ancestors. Born in
Idaho and descended from an ancient line of warrior chiefs, her paternal grandfather
was Irish. Her maternal grandmother, however, with whom she lived for much of
her adolescence, taught Mourning Dove about the oral traditions of her people, the
Okanogans. Mourning Dove received little in the way of a formal education from
white society but, from the stories her grandmother told her, she developed a lively
and informed interest in her indigenous culture. And one early result of that interest
was Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927),
the first novel written by an American Indian woman. The book was produced in
collaboration with a white friend and mentor, Lucullus McWhorter, a scholar of
Indian traditions who had been adopted into the Yakima tribe. McWhorter was well
aware of the expectations of white readers, and the book bears the marks of his
intervention, such as a sometimes stilted lyricism and a self-conscious use of slang,
poetic epigraphs, and detailed notes on the traditions of the Okanogans. Still, despite
this, and despite its conventional romance plot, Cogewea offers an intimate portrait
of tribal life. It also anticipates the direction the later work of Mourning Dove was
to take toward a retelling of the stories of the Native peoples that is at once
conscientious and quietly passionate, scholarly and personal.
The book that Mourning Dove published six years after Cogewea, Coyote Stories,
was also produced with the help of McWhorter. Heister Dean Guie, another white
colleague, received credit on its title page for illustrating and editing the stories;
Chief Standing Bear, the author of two popular autobiographies at the time, provided
a foreword; and both Guie and McWhorter insisted on standardized spelling andGGray_c04.indd 475ray_c 04 .indd 475 8 8/1/2011 7:54:02 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 02 AM