Colville contra Washington: Mourning Dove and the Contested Borders of Regionalism

• In Event: All-Too-Human Borders / More-Than-Human Planet (HYBRID)

Abstract

This presentation asks a foundational question: What might American literary regionalism look like if retold through the perspectives of Native writers working in spatial proximity to the regions being defined? Literary regionalism discursively carves out internal borders within a larger nation-state, contributing to a national identity while asserting a distinct, localized exclusivity. But what happens when we juxtapose this framework with Native authors also carving out (or rather, reclaiming) spaces within the political, legal, and economic confines of the American state? How do concepts of "region" intersect with Native nationhood, especially in the early 20th century, when Native writers were navigating these overlapping borders? My presentation examines these questions through the lens of the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century—a region uniquely significant in Native literary studies as the birthplace of the Okanogan author Mourning Dove’s Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927), generally regarded as the first novel published by a Native woman in the United States. While Cogewea has received considerable attention for its gendered critique and engagement with the Western novel genre, this presentation explores its role as a specifically regional work: Mourning Dove grew up on the Colville Reservation in north-central Washington. Mourning Dove’s novel belongs to a broader tradition of early 20th-century Pacific Northwest literature, yet it challenges settler-driven literary regional projects. Placing Mourning Dove in dialogue with now-obscure contemporaries—Washington poet Ella Higginson (Mariella of Out-West [1902]), and H.L. Davis of Oregon (Honey in the Horn [1935])—allows us to see how Mourning Dove’s spatial imagination resisted and developed in tandem with her specific regional literary atmosphere. Cogewea reclaims the Pacific Northwest (rather than, say, U.S. territory in general) as a site of Native cultural production, asserting the region as a borderland where Native perspectives reframe belonging.

Author

• Lloyd A Sy, Yale University