...lonesome, as a child for its mother. I become heart-sick for a sight of those snow shrouded peaks, so rich in legendary lore. [...] Leave the land where our braves rest in their last sleep? Never! I could not be content elsewhere." --Mourning Dove, Cogewea, The Half-Blood

Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range is a novel that speaks to the concerns faced by Native people in the 1920s and 30s of the American West. The novel, written by a Native American woman, (1) explores the complexities of mixed-raced and gendered identities, concerns about the land and its plundering under white imperialism, and problems of tradition (the past) and breaking away from tradition. Mourning Dove, through the genres of the dime store novel--a popular pleasure intended for the masses--the western, and the frontier narratives, non-conventional genres that focus on the landscape, as well as romance genres, is able to expertly situate urgent political commentary in a popular textual context. Cogewea, The Half-Blood is a novel about male camaraderie and female subjectivity; as well, the text employs the voice of Great Spirit, the "god" figure, who appears for Cogewea when she makes the "right" moral moves. In this essay, I want to explore how Cogewea, The Half-Blood has come to be seen as a modernist text. I ask: what definition(s) of modernity are useful for an appropriate analysis of Cogewea, The Half-Blood? Secondly, I ask: what kind of modernity, if any, does Cogewea, The Half-Blood employ? Later in the essay, I introduce an ecocritical framework as a supplement to traditional understandings of modernity, suggesting that thinking about the rural, or the land, in the context of modernity complicates its definition. I see Mourning Dove and Cogewea, The Half-Blood doing this work of transformation. Consequently, both of the frameworks that become central to my analysis, modernity and ecocriticism, influence my reading of Cogewea, the character, as a modern Aboriginal subject. My argument for Cogewea, The Half-Blood is most explicitly situated in the context of landscape and the effects of landscape on Cogewea's subjectivity.

I attempt here to understand Mourning Dove's work through three complementary lenses. First, my aim is to (re)figure definitions of modernity for an analysis of Cogewea, The Half-Blood. Second, I underscore how Cogewea's subjectivity is constructed by and through landscape, and I gesture towards the problems and possibilities involved in reading Cogewea through her connection to land. Third, I position Cogewea as a modern subject-object on the "wilderness" scene, an analysis I enact by using the theoretical material offered by Liz Conor in her important book The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s.

Rita Felski, in her book The Gender of Modernity, argues that "appeals to modernity have [...] been used to further a multifarious range of political and cultural interests. Rather than identifying a stable referent or set of attributes, 'modern' acts as a mobile and shifting category of classification that serves to structure, legitimize, and valorize varied and often competing perspectives" (14). She continues, "My analysis thus begins with the assumption that modernity embraces a multidimensional array of historical phenomena that cannot be prematurely synthesized into a unified Zeitgeist [...]. Rather than inscribing a homogeneous cultural consensus, the discourses of modernity reveal multiple and conflicting responses to processes of social change" (14-15). Felski's definition of the modern works for understanding Cogewea, The Half-Blood--the idea of the modern period points out both the fluidity of the period and its own inherent conflictedness. This conflictedness of the definition of the modern is key, especially in a text like Cogewea, The Half-Blood where a marked response to the destructive forces of the modern for Indigenous peoples explicitly occurs. Felski's definition of the modern is the one that most interacts with my own conceptualization of the period. I argue that Cogewea, The Half-Blood, as a novel that reacts and responds to social change, also reworks stereotypical Indigenous connections to, and associations with, the modern period. However, the locus of this modern lies in Cogewea's connection to the land, a geographical place that Cogewea simultaneously defends and calls home. Cogewea's adamant refusal to accept modernization's destruction speaks to her viability as a modern subject. Cogewea's "modern" is caught up in the land she defends. Cogewea, here, is an advocate for the land and the wildlife that inhabits this land, a political agent and active speaker against the wounds and damage that her land has suffered.

In that Cogewea, The Half-Blood is a text that responds to social change in a place other than the city, I feel that Cogewea, The Half-Blood's modernity is potentially subversive. Modern art is usually perceived as occurring in urban spaces. In his book, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, Raymond Williams argues: "Paris, Vienna, London, New York took on a new silhouette as the eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for art made by the restlessly mobile emigre or exile [...]." He goes on to note that the modernist artist is epitomized by the image of "the lonely writer gazing down on the unknowable city from his shabby apartment. The whole commotion is finally and crucially interpreted and ratified by [...] New York" (34). Obviously masculinist, this geographical and artistic rendering of modernity is very specific in that, one, its focus is on and in the city, and two, its artist is isolated, an omnipotent observer of everyday capitalistic life. With this in mind, I ask: could Montana, and the rurality of its land, ever be considered a significant modern location? Would Cogewea, The Half-Blood's--what I will call--"modernist strategies" ever legitimately be rendered modern? I argue a strong "no" for a traditional modern, but an imaginatively confident "yes" for a modern as outlined by Felski. My purpose lies in positioning Cogewea's Aboriginal subject status, and how that subjectivity connects to the ecological, at the fore of a novel that has mostly been talked about in terms of authorial ownership.

Moreover, Cogewea, The Half-Blood is not a text that "repudiate[s] the past," (as Felski notes is evident in traditional modernism) but it is a text that is...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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