Cogewea, The Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range

"Cogewea is considered one of the earliest novels written by a Native American woman. Its author was a Salish writer known as Mourning Dove, or Hum-Ishu-Ma. She was named Christine Quintasket at birth. Her Western novel is really a reminder of how the genre is a diverse form that has the ability to address a range of ideas and sentiments. The novel basically offers a critique of the ‘savagery-civilisation’ binary by showing the corrupt policies of the US government and the ways in which white settlers often tried to cheat Native Americans out of their land. The book was published in the early 20th century and takes place on the Flathead Reservation in Montana in the early days of the Allotment Era. This was a time when the US government sought to assimilate indigenous peoples by breaking up the reservations and giving the land to individual Native Americas. Indigenous peoples continued to lose land as a result, and today we can clearly see how this history of dispossession has had a devastating impact on Native American communities. Early in the novel, we learn that her white father has abandoned the family. Likewise, her mother dies when she is young, so she’s raised by her Native American grandmother. Cogewea is a talented horsewoman who attracts the attention of Densmore, an unscrupulous white settler from the East. He believes that Cogewea is wealthy, so he tries to take advantage of her by stealing her land. “Western adventure tales were part of a larger group of narratives that took place in contact zones and colonial spaces across the globe” The novel is a ‘Western romance’ that uses the genre’s codes and conventions as a way of critiquing settler colonialism. So, rather than featuring the upright cowboy who brings ‘civilisation’ and order to the West, the main cowboy figure in this novel is someone motivated by greed and manipulation. The novel centers on and critiques these settler sentiments. There are many moments in the novel where the author shows that the so-called ‘benevolence’ of the federal government has actually been quite harmful to Native Americans. I think it’s a remarkable text that in many ways anticipates the themes we see in later books like David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon , about the Osage murders. Some folks might classify it as a national allegory. The conflicts taking place among characters and within families symbolise the US and larger struggles over land and national development as well as Indigenous resistance to that."