A History of American Literature

476 Making It New: 1900–1945

verification of the details Coyote Stories contained about Okanogan beliefs, since

they did not regard Mourning Dove as an authority. Nevertheless, this second

publication bears much more clearly the marks of Mourning Dove’s own personality

and is stamped with the authority of her knowledge, To that extent, this collection

of folk tales is much more unambiguously her own work. “The Animal People were

here first – before there were any real people,” Mourning Dove announces in her

preface. “Coyote was the most important,” she explains, “because, after he was put to

work by the Spirit Chief, he did more than any of the others to make the world

a good place to live.” Before rehearsing a series of stories that have Coyote as their

protagonist, she then goes on to explain her own involvement: how she was told

them as part of the heritage of her family and her tribe, and how she learned from

them of the subtle connections between her people and the vitality and the mystery

of their natural surroundings. Coyote emerges from these stories as a sharer in both

the vitality and the mystery. A comically cunning but vulnerable trickster, he is also,

thanks to the Spirit Chief, a being of divine power. He comes out, too, as the source

and origin of the traditions of “the New People, the Indians”: “You are to be chief of

the tribes,” the Spirit Chief tells him. Showing how such rituals as the sweat lodge, a

mystic shrine for physical and spiritual cleansing, emerged thanks to the activities of

its protagonist, Coyote Stories is at once a series of lively tales and a passionate

affirmation of tribal identity. The Native American past lives in the present,

Mourning Dove intimates, a source of personal and communal power. And, as long

as acts of narrative restoration like this continue, it can survive on into the future.

The literature of the New Negro movement and beyond

Among those other Americans who had, for many years, formed part of the nation,

the African-Americans, a pivotal event in literature was the publication of The New

Negro in 1925. Conceived and edited by Alain Locke (1886–1954), it grew out of a

special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic in March of that year devoted to the

district of Harlem in Manhattan. And it served as a catalyst for a growing sense of

confidence that black America was on the verge of a second Emancipation – the

consequence this time, not of government action, but of the will and achievements

of the people, and, in particular, the artists and intellectuals. Migration from the

South into such urban centers as New York, Chicago, and Detroit, and the opening

up of new economic and cultural opportunities, the challenge of continued racism

and racial violence (the summer of 1919, for instance, was marked by some of the

bloodiest anti-black riots in American history) – all this served as a stimulus and

challenge to those who wanted to make the voice of African-Americans heard. The

term the New Negro was not coined by Locke, nor did it appear for the first time in

print in his anthology. It had been in use since at least the late 1890s. Nevertheless, it

was this book that gained it currency as the term of choice to describe a new sense

of racial pride and personal and cultural selfhood. The New Negro was the first

major literary attempt to revise the collective portrait of black America painted by

W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. Others, perhaps, had an equal claim to be

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