Co-Ge-We-A, The Half-Blood.
Inscribed
Mourning-Dove. [Hum-ishu-ma.] Co=Ge=We=A. The Half-Blood. A depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range. Given through Sho-Pow-Tan. With notes and biographical sketch by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter… Boston: The Four Seas Company, (1927).
8vo.; errata slip affixed to half-title; glue residue to front endpapers; frontispiece slightly detached; red cloth, stamped in black and gilt.
First edition of the first novel by a Native American woman – published 11 years after its completion; with errata slip affixed to half-title. A presentation copy, inscribed on the verso of the frontispiece: Omak Wash. May 23, 1932 / To Pal Clark a lover of Western / History. From the Author / Mourning Dove. With a TNS to Clark dated May 23, 1932, from Pasco, Washington, forwarding the book and thanking him “for your kindness.”
Co=Ge=We=A is the story of a mixed blood young woman coming of age in the rural west in the early 1900's. Co-ge-we-a is caught between the pull of her roots to Okanogan culture and the pressure to assimilate into the encroaching white world … Mourning Dove takes the reader into Co-ge-we-a’s private world of thought and feeling. She is a spirited woman, who, like her creator, chafes against the constraints of her gender, race and class identities ... Woman Writing Culture, pp. 132-142.
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