Mourning Dove, aka Christine Quintasket, Pt. 1

still stuck in that book. That trip happened in twenty sixteen, so that gives an indication of how long it can take to go from like a potential podcast idea to a podcast episode. Mourning Dove was an activist, an ethnographer, and a novelist, and one of the first, if not the first, indigenous women in the United States to publish a novel. She was known by a lot of names. One was Christine Quintasket, and at various points she also

signed letters as Crystal, Christina, and Catherine. She was married twice, and during those marriages she also used each of her husband's surnames. As an adult, she usually used the last name Quintasket at home among the Confederated tribes of the Carville Reservation, but she usually used one of her husband's surnames with outsiders, whichever marriage was in existence at that point.

She wrote under the name Mourning Dove, which was sometimes printed along with the name Humushuma, which is sort of an approximated English spelling of the Insulction word for mourning dove. That is the Salish language that she grew up speaking, and then she was also given other names in that language at different points in her life. And these were really names that she used within her community and not with the wider public. And really there's not one right

name for her. She was raised in a culture in which people have and use different names in different contexts and for different times in their lives. We will mostly call her Christine Quintasket or Mourning Dove, since that's what was on her published work. Christine Quintasket gave the year of her birth as eighteen eighty eight, although there are other years from the mid to late eighteen eighties noted

as various government and school records. She was the oldest of seven children born to Joseph Quintasket, who is Okanagan, and Lucy Stuchan, who was Calville. These are two of the twelve bands that are part of the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation, which is federally recognized as one tribe today. The name comes from Fort Calville, which was named after Hudson's Bay Company Governor Andrew Calville, and members of the tribe voted to keep this name in twenty eighteen.

Although twelve bands composed the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation today, historically there were more than fifty living in this part of North America. The area includes land that's now described as Canada's Interior Plateau and the Columbia Plateau,

and the United States. These people spoke a number of different languages and dialects, most of them in the Interior Salish language group, and while many of these are still living languages and are spoken and taught today, the entire Salish language group is considered to be critically endangered. As we just said, this plateau is in both the US and Canada, so the establishment of these two nations created

an international border through this ancestral homeland. Unlike many of the other reservations that we've talked about on the show before, the Callville Reservation on the US side of the border was not established through a treaty between these indigenous peoples and the United States. It was established by executive order by President Ulysses S. Grant on April ninth, eighteen seventy two.

F A. Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, had written a letter the day before outlining the need for a reservation for eight named tribes as well as quote scattering bands who were not party to a treaty with the United States. Acting Secretary of the Interior B. R. Coen forwarded this

to Grant, and the executive order simply read quote. It is hereby ordered that the tract of country referred to in the within letter of the Acting Secretary of the Interior and designated upon the accompanying map, be set apart for the bands of Indians in Washington Territory named in communication of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs dated the eighth instant, and for other such Indians, as the Department of the

Interior may see fit to locate thereon. But less than two months later, on July second, Grant issued another ord restoring that land to the public domain and designating different land for the reservation instead. This new piece of land was described as quote the country bounded on the east and south by the Columbia River, on the west by the Okanagan River, and on the north by the British possessions.

The British possessions, of course, being Canada. This new reservation was a lot smaller than the previous one had been. It was about two point eight million acres of land, and for comparison, these tribes territories had historically covered about thirty nine million acres of land, and then from there the reservation got progressively smaller. In eighteen eighty seven, Congress

passed the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act. Previously, reservation land had been held by tribes collectively, and there are some nuances about who was legally considered to be holding the land, but the overall idea was that it belonged to the tribe as a group. That laws act allowed for that land to instead be divided up and allotted to individual members of the tribe. This was ostensibly to protect indigenous people's land rights, but in practice it

did the opposite. People who were allotted land were expected to assimilate with white culture and to do things with it like farm it using European methods, but in many cases the land itself really wasn't conducive to being used in this way, and even if it was, people were expected to give up their traditional culture and practices in

order to receive it. The law also called for supposedly extra land that was not allotted to anyone to be sold to non indigenous people, and a lot of the indigenous people who were allotted land wound up losing it for all kinds of reasons. This was devastating and destructive to Indigenous peoples and their communities. Starting in the eighteen eighties, mining companies also started trying to get access to the

mineral rich northern part of call the reservation. A federal delegation was dispatched to the reservation to negotiate an agreement with the tribes, and that was signed on May ninth, eighteen ninety one. The tribes agreed to seed roughly one point five million acres of land to the federal government in exchange for one point five million dollars. The tribes also successfully negotiated to keep the right to hunt, fish,

and gather on the land that was being seated. However, while Congress passed an act removing everything from Township thirty four north to the Canadian border from the reservation in eighteen ninety two, Congress did not start passing legislation to actually pay the one point five million dollars until nineteen oh seven, and then that nineteen oh seven legislation did

not appropriate the entire amount. Congress appropriated three hundred thousand dollars a year for five years until nineteen eleven.

and fishing rights. This loss of land and the emphasis on farming were both devastating to the bands and tribes who are part of this community. Traditionally, these peoples had moved according to the season, so fishing for salmon and hunting gathering things like roots and berries from the forests, in a pattern that is sometimes described as the seasonal round. To be clear, there is not just one seasonal round. The specifics really vary even within the same region and

from one community to another. Farming was a totally different way of life from this, and again, a lot of the land that was part of the Calvill Reservation wasn't really usable as farmland, and the loss of the north half affected Mourning Dove's family directly. People who had been allotted land on the north half lost those allotments, and the Quintaskets family's land allotments had been there. We will get some Mourning Doves life after a sponsor break, as

we said before. Christine Quintasket or Mourning Dove, was born around eighteen eighty eight and was the first of her parents' seven children.

she was going to walk until she died. Mourning Dove described Teacult as another grandmother. Christine's mother wanted her to have this indigenous education and to learn the traditions of her people's really important to her, and at the same time,

Lucy Quintasket was devoutly Catholic. She thought Her daughter, Risin also needed to get a formal Western style education and Catholic religious training to help her survive in a world that was increasingly dominated by white people and the US government. So in eighteen ninety four, Christine was sent to the Sacred Hearts School at Goodwin Catholic Mission in Ward, Washington, not.

Christianize Indigenous children as early as the seventeenth century. Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act in eighteen nineteen, which provided government funding for these schools. Later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boarding schools were established to physically remove

indigenous students from their families, languages, and cultures. Schools like Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana, both of which we have talked about in prior episodes.

and force them to assimilate with white Christian culture. These schools were built near the end of centuries of active warfare between the United States and Indigenous nations, but they were another way to try to eliminate the indigenous population. General Richard Henry, that, superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools, summed it up as quote, killed the Indian in him and save the man. Got boarding schools and day schools.

Indigenous children weren't allowed to speak their own language or wear their own style of dress. They were forced to speak English and wear European style clothing. There were people involved in these schools who were motivated by a charitable or humanitarian impulse. They thought that they were helping these children, but this whole mindset was racist and genocidal, and there were also people involved with running these schools who were

not altruistic at all. Children faced widespread abuse and deprivation, and it is likely that thousands or even tens of thousands of children died at these schools. And this was also interconnected with federal policies meant to break up reservations, abolish tribal governments, and take over indigenous lands. It was all part of the attempt to eliminate the indigenous population

of the United States. Yeah, when we say it's likely that thousands or tens of thousands of children died, there is no question about the fact that many, many children died, like the possibility there is that the actual concrete number is not known. The US made attendance at these schools compulsory in eighteen ninety one, with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs empowered to enforce this law. Federal policy toward indigenous nations had been so destabilizing and violent that there were

children who basically had nowhere else to go. There were also cases in which federal officials used children as hostages, especially the children of indigenous leaders, so placing children in schools far from their families to try to keep their parents compliant. At the same time, there were also families like Christine's who believed that going to one of these schools would help their children survive in a rapidly changing world.

She described Father Derouge, a Jesuit priest who told her mother that she should be sent to school, as somebody that the people of the Calville Reservation respected. When Christine Quintasquets started at Goodwin Catholic Mission School, she only spoke the Interior Salish language of Insirichen or Calville, Okanagan, and she was punished for not speaking English. In his introduction to a reprinting of one of her books, editor Jay Milner points out an added layer to all of this.

She was being punished for not speaking English by nuns whose first language was French. Eventually, she became too ill to finish the school year.

in nineteen oh two when she was about fourteen. After her mother's death, she stayed home and she helped take care of her younger siblings until her father remarried in nineteen oh four to a woman named Cecilia. At that point, Christine went to Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana, where she stayed for three years and worked as a teacher's aid. She was able to come and go from the school at least to an extent, and visit a grandmother who

lived nearby. We have a lot more about Fort Shaw Indian School in our two parter on the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls basketball team that came out in twenty seventeen, and it also has more detail about the boarding schools system. In nineteen oh eight, while in Montana, Christine saw the roundup of some of the last free ranging bison in the United States. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, there had been an estimated thirty million bison also called buffalo

in North America. Today, bisoner associated primarily with the Great Plains and the West, but they live on much of the continent. But by the early nineteenth century their population was in sharp decline. The word over hunting does not go nearly far enough to describe why this was an intentional slaughter carried out by both federal troops and private hunters, meant to deprive indigenous peoples of a critical source of food.

By the late eighteen eighties, bison were nearly extinct in North America, aside from a few small herds that were mostly on private ranches. One free ranging herd that remained had been developed largely by two men, Charles A. Allard and Michelle Pablo, who bought some orphaned bison calves from an indigenous hunter known as Sam Walking Coyote. Allard and Pablo each had an Indigenous mother and had grazing rates on the Flathead Indian Reservation, which is home to the

Confederated Salish and Coutiney tribes. By the time Alard died after a fall from a horse in eighteen ninety, the herd had grown to about three hundred, and by nineteen oh six there were seven hundred. By that point, Pablo was concerned about the safety of the herd because more and more homesteaders were moving into the area where they ranged. He initially tried to sell the herd to the US government, which refused to buy them, so he sold them to

Canada instead. He shipped about five hundred bison to Alberta's Buffalo Park between nineteen oh eight and nineteen ten, so the roundup that Christine saw was part of the process of gathering up the bison to send them to Canada. Seeing this had a huge impact on Christine Quintasket. Buffalo had played such a key part in the cultures and life ways of indigenous peoples all over North America and had been intentionally hunted nearly to extinction as an active genocide.

Now she was seeing some of the few that remained on the range terrified and struggling as they were rounded up to be taken somewhere far away. This would also become one of the inspirations for her novel, which we will get to after a sponsor break. In nineteen oh nine, Christine Quintasket started working on a novel. That same year, she married Hector MacLeod, who she had met at Fort Shaw Indian School. This marriage seems to have been turbulent.

McLeod could be violent and spent a lot of time around bootleggers, one of whom reportedly shot off one of his hands. They also struggled financially. We mentioned earlier that the land that had been allotted from the Callville Reservation often wasn't good for farming, so rather than farming their own land, a lot of Indigenous people in the region wound up as wage laborers doing agricultural work for other

people on other land that was more farmable. This included Christine in her husband, who worked as migrant agricultural laborers around the Pacific Northwest. There are accounts of her life that make this sound almost like the romanticized life of a struggling artist, that she would work in the fields and orchards during the day and write in a tent at night. But the reality was that this work was exhausting and it took most of the daylight hours. She

mostly wrote when she wasn't doing agricultural work. By nineteen twelve, she was estranged from her husband and living in Portland, Oregon. She started using the name morning Dove on her work at that point, spelled mornng like the coming of the day. She wanted to write in English, Specifically, she wanted to write about her own culture and people for an English speaking audience. The novel that she was working on was a Western romance, and it was one that she thought

would humanize indigenous people for white readers. She was also collecting indigenoust but since she grew up speaking a Salish language and her English classes had been kind of spread across eight years at three different boarding schools, she still struggled with various aspects of English. So from nineteen thirteen to nineteen fifteen she moved to Calgary, Alberta to attend Calgary College Business School. She studied things like typing, shorthand,

and bookkeeping while also working on her English. In nineteen fifteen, she attended the Frontier Days Festival in Walla Walla, Washington, where she met Lucullis Virgil mcward. Mcward had been born in Virginia eighteen sixty and had become a rancher after moving west in nineteen oh three. He had also become an advocate for the rights of indigenous people and communities, and had been adopted into the Yakama Nation after helping

them fight for their land and water rights. He had been given Indigenous names that translated to old Wolf and Bigfoot. A mutual friend named j. W. Langdon and later encouraged Mourning Dove to reach out to McCord for some help with her writing. Morningdove had almost finished a draft of the novel that would eventually be published under the name Kogiwa, but at first she and McCord talked about the notes that she had collected on twenty two indigenous stories and legends.

They had both seen the effects of the federal government's destructive policies on Indigenous communities, and they both thought that if these stories were not intentionally preserved in writing, they would be lost. McCord thought that Mourning Dove was an ideal person to do this, so he encouraged her, maybe even pressured her to record the knowledge and culture of

her people. He started out acting essentially as her editor and literary agent, but over time they developed a working relationship and a friendship that lasted for the rest of Morningdove's life. This relation was complex. Mcwerdour was more than twenty years older than Mourning Dove, and he was a man, and he was white, so there were some clear power disparities involved. He made additions and changes to her novel that we're going to talk about more in Part two.

Sometimes without talking to her about those changes, and once the two of them did start to talk about working on a novel, he started arranging interviews and a speaking tour for her. Mourning Dove would eventually become known for her speaking, but initially she found this prospect terrifying. She was really worried about her ability to speak English well in front of an audience and what their response to her would be. She eventually got sick and the tour

was indefinitely postponed. By nineteen sixteen, they were ready to find a publisher, and Mourning Dove wrote a letter to their mutual friend JP MacLean about the finished draft of the book, saying, quote, we both worked hard on it, and we sometimes almost went on the warpath, but we always patched up a piece and continued friends. He helped me with Kogie wea, but next time I am going to let him make the plot and I will help him.

In nineteen sixteen, she did an interview with a Spokane newspaper about what McWhorter thought was her soon to be published novel. This ran in The Spokesman Review on April ninth, and it was reprinted two days later when it was picked up by other newspapers all over the country, including

the Washington Post. This article covered about the top third of a page, and it featured a full length picture of her in indigenous dress and a smaller one with quote, her hair done up on her head and wearing garments of her white sisters. This article illustrates so much about Mourning Dove and about the presumably white writer's attitudes about her and about Indigenous people. It describes her as quote as Indian wealth goes wealthy because she had leased some

land she had been allotted to white farmers. She definitely was not wealthy in any way that involved money, though, as we said earlier, she was often working as an agricultural laborer to try to make ends meet. The writer's description of her is both flattering and infantilizing, like she's described as a quote, stout hearted Indian girl, but if she was born in eighteen eighty eight, she would have

been twenty eight when this article came out. It also describes her as speaking faultless English quote, as is usually the case with those to whom the tongue did not come naturally but who have been diligent students. A later part of the article also describes the color of her skin and eyes, as well as her weight.

white woman, find comfort and relief in tears. She was pushing back on the stereotype that Indigenous people were stoic, and the idea of using her writing to dispel stereotypes about Indigenous people would be an ongoing theme in her work, and in this article.

In this article, Mourning Dove also described civilization as bringing both good and bad to her people, with one example being an increase in divorce, which had previously been almost unheard of, and she described her tribe as continuing to change. For example, her stepmother would speak to her children in her language and they would understand but answer in English.

She also said that her stepmother had given land from her allotment to build a school, one that was now attended by her children, with all the rest of the pupils being white. This article ends with a passage about Mourning Dove's experience at the Buffalo roundup that we mentioned earlier, although this reporter places it as at five years previously,

which would have been in nineteen eleven. She again returned to the idea of the depth of feeling of indigenous people, contrary to this stereotype of their being stoic and emotionless. Quote one magnificent fellow fought like a lion as they tried to crowd his wonderful shaggy head into a box car. In some way, he broke through the bear on the opposite door of the car, fell down between the trains and broke his neck. Cry. I saw some old, wrinkled,

dried up Indians sob like babies. It is wrong this saying that Indians do not feel as deeply as whites. We do feel, and by and by some of us are going to be able to make our feelings appreciated, and then will the true Indian character be revealed. As we said earlier, this article was meant as publicity for her book. The headline describes that book as soon to be published, but its publication was not soon at all. Eleven years would pass between this article and Cogaweya coming

into print, and we'll get to that next time. Yeah. I think usually when we do two part episodes, I say at the beginning that it's gonna be two parts, and I don't think I said this this time, so surprise, surprise, it's a two parter because you know, in addition to her life being really fascinating to me, there's a lot of context we want to make sure we want to include with this one. I have listener mail fantastic before we close out. This is from Lauren. Lauren wrote after

our unearthed installment recently saying Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've listened to the podcast since shortly after becoming a stay at home parent in twenty twelve. I've wanted to write to you, and the perfect opportunity presented while listening to Unearthed in Autumn twenty twenty three, Part one when you mentioned the study about the adaladdle as an equalizer in spear throwing skill.

at KSU. Doctor Beber and her colleague, doctor Aaron showed us around the lab, did a stone tool making demonstration, explained doctor Beber's research, and we even got to use adladdles to throw spears. Needless to say, it was amazing. Doctor Beber's wonderful and does amazing research. I was starstruck having had a once in a lifetime opportunity to hang out with two leading scientists in the experimental anthropology field. Then imagine my excitement as I heard doctor Beber's research

mentioned on the podcast. It was the coolest thing ever. I know they've been featured on History Channel shows, etc. But hearing you talk about research I had just personally had explained by the researcher was the most exciting thing ever. Thanks Amelian for putting so much time and effort into the podcast. It's truly wonderful. In a highlight of my day. Best Lauren ps. I've attached picks of my two standard colleagues. Matilda Tilly is the fluffy girl and Clementine clem is

the smooth coated girl. Let's look at these collies.

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