Mourning Dove [Humishuma, b. Christine Quintasket; m.Christal McLeod, Christine Galler] (April 1882 [?]-August 8, 1936)

Mourning Dove was the first Native American novelist to organically incorporate aspects of the daily life, the oral traditions, and the religious perspectives of an Indian people into a novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927). With Coyote Stories (1933), she also was one of the first Indian writers to collect and publish Indian legends, thereby preserving much of their oral integrity. With the recent publication of Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (1990), a collection of her final unpublished papers, Mourning Dove also will come to be recognized as an important contemporary voice on the severe disruption of Indian life at the turn of the last century. Nonetheless, such achievements have not been appropriately recognized because of the extensive editing, even cowriting, of her books by L.V. McWhorter, Dean Guie, and now Jay Miller. The primary critical problem remains how to distinguish Mourning Dove’s work from that of her editors in order to accurately assess her place in the literary canon.