identify where the novel’s two registers meet, explain what each one is doing, and cite specific passages as evidence rather than relying on general impression.
Instruction
Christine Quintasket, who published as Mourning Dove, was born around 1884 and was Colville — Sylix and Okanogan. She wrote Cogewea in the years around 1912-1916 while working as a migrant farm laborer, typing at night on a second-hand typewriter after days picking fruit.
She sent the manuscript to Lucullus McWhorter, a white rancher and amateur ethnographer who supported Native causes and who became her editor. He worked on it for years, sought a publisher through the First World War and after, and it finally appeared in 1927.
And he had added a great deal. When Mourning Dove finally saw the printed book she wrote to him that she had just read it — and that she “could not have written it.” Parts of her own novel were unfamiliar to her.
That is the problem this unit is built on, and it is a gift for teaching.
Why it is a gift. Every literature course tells students that a text is made, that a voice is constructed, that point of view is a choice. Usually you have to take that on faith. Here you can see it, because the two hands do not sound alike, and scholars have mapped the difference in detail.
Mourning Dove’s prose carries the novel’s action: ranch work, horses, a race, a courtship, a swindle, the daily texture of a place she knew. It is concrete, fast, and occasionally awkward in the way first novels are.
McWhorter’s insertions are recognizable by three features. They are explanatory — they stop the story to tell a presumed white reader what something means. They are political in a different register — sustained denunciations of the Indian Bureau in formal, periodic sentences. And they are lexically elevated — vocabulary and rhythm that do not appear anywhere in Mourning Dove’s letters.
What you are not being asked to do. You are not being asked to decide that McWhorter ruined the book, or that he rescued it, or to conclude that Mourning Dove was a victim without agency. She chose to work with him, pressed him for publication for a decade, and wrote a second book afterward. The situation is more interesting than any of those verdicts, and the second Essential Understanding — that identity and position are individual and not generic — applies as much to her as to anyone.
What you are being asked to do. Read for the seam. When the prose changes, mark it. Then ask the structural question: what does the book gain and lose at that seam?
One thing to hold. Scholarship has identified many insertions with confidence and some only tentatively. Where the attribution is uncertain, say so. Overstating what is settled is the error this unit is most likely to produce, and the rubric checks for it.
Reading: Cogewea — the ranch, and an interruption
Mourning Dove / Christine Quintasket (Colville), Cogewea, the Half-Blood (Boston, 1927), with editorial insertions by Lucullus V. McWhorter · Public domain
Read both passages aloud. Mark every sentence where the vocabulary, the rhythm or the intended reader changes.
Passage A. The morning was crisp and the range stretched away in folds of brown. Cogewea rode out early, her hair loose under the wide hat, and the mare took the first rise at a run. … There was work to be done with the cattle and the Sunday races were a week off.
Passage B. It is the dark page of the Government’s dealing with a helpless and dependent people; a chapter written in cupidity and administered through an agency whose record of maladministration constitutes an indictment which no apologist has yet succeeded in answering…
Who writes here now
Mourning Dove wrote at night after farm work, and her book reached print through someone else’s hands. Every nation has writers now — poets, novelists, journalists, playwrights, people publishing in tribal newspapers and online — who reach print on their own terms.
This slot is the writers of your own nation who are publishing now — poets, novelists, journalists, playwrights, people writing for the nation’s own paper. Your school may bring their work to you, and a writer’s own nation is the best guide to who those writers are. Meanwhile, take one of the three routes below; all three earn full credit. Write in the present tense: Mourning Dove’s position in 1927 is not the position of a Native writer today, and a course that reads only historical texts leaves the impression that Native writing is something that happened.
Your route — choose one. All three earn full credit.
- Route A — The nation’s own newsroom — From the Tribal Leaders Directory (bia.gov/service/tribal-leaders-directory), open the nation’s own website and find its newspaper, newsletter or newsroom — many nations publish one, in print and online. Read four pieces published in the last year and log each one’s writer, date and subject. Then write 200 words on what a nation’s own paper covers that an outside paper does not, and on what it means that the writer, the editor and the readers are all citizens of the same nation. Quote no more than a sentence from each, with a full citation. If the nation does not publish a paper, say so, name what you checked, and move to Route B.
- Route B — Living Nations, Living Words (Library of Congress) — When Joy Harjo became the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, she built Living Nations, Living Words at the Library of Congress: a map and an audio collection of 47 contemporary Native poets, each marker giving a poet, their nation, a biography and a recording of the poet reading and talking about their own poem. Start at loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/living-nations-living-words/ and open the story map. Find a poet from your own nation, or from a nation in your state, listen to the recording, and write 200 words on the poem — and on what changes when you hear the poet say what it is about in their own voice rather than reading a critic on it.
- Route C — Native journalism, nationally — ICT (ictnews.org), published by the nonprofit IndiJ Public Media, is a national free-to-read newsroom staffed by Native journalists. Search it for your own nation’s name and read three recent pieces. Then find each writer’s byline page and note which nation they are a citizen of. Write 200 words on what you can tell about this reporting from the fact that Native journalists are doing it: which questions get asked, whose words open the story, what background the writer does not have to explain. Then name one story about your nation that you would expect its own paper to carry and a national outlet not to.
For the school — how this slot gets filled
Who holds this: The tribal college, the tribal newspaper or communications office, a language program, or a local writer willing to visit.
- Start with the tribal college or the tribe’s communications office; they usually know who is publishing and who is willing to speak to students.
- If a writer visits or contributes work, agree a fee or honorarium. Asking a working writer to supply material for a course without payment is asking them to subsidize it.
- Agree what may be reproduced in the course and what may only be read in class — contemporary work is under copyright and the writer holds it.
- Where a text is in copyright, link to where it can be legally read rather than copying it into the course.
Formative check
Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.
Mourning Dove wrote to McWhorter after seeing the printed book that she “could not have written it.” Before reading on — what does that make possible for a reader?
What most clearly marks Passage B as an editorial insertion rather than the novel’s narration?
Scholars have identified every insertion in Cogewea with certainty.
Distinguishing two hands within one text is separation; the level of formality and vocabulary a passage uses, which signals its intended reader, is its .
Find three places in the opening chapters where the register shifts. Quote a sentence from each side of the seam with chapter citations. For each, say in one sentence what the passage is doing and who it is addressed to. Then answer: pick the seam that costs the book the most, and say what is lost there.
Name one theme of Cogewea in a full sentence — not a topic word such as “identity,” but a claim the novel makes. Then trace it: quote the passage where it first emerges, one where it is shaped by a specific detail, and one where it is complicated. Finish with an objective summary of the first third of the novel in 100 words, containing no judgment of the book and no mention of McWhorter.
How confident are you that you can identify a shift of register in a text and describe what changes, using the sentences rather than my impression?