Mourning Dove

Name Quintasket was born between 1884 and 1888 to Joseph Quintasket She also was given an indigenous name, Humishuma.

Mourning Dove was a pen name chosen in adulthood when Quintasket decided to become a writer. The name was based on Colville traditional stories, Mourning Dove being the wife of Salmon who is the sustenance of life. Initially using the spelling Morning Dove, she corrected it after having visited a museum in Spokane.

Background Humishuma, also known as Christine Quintasket, was born "in the Moon of Leaves" (April) 1888 in a canoe on the Kootenai River near Bonners Ferry, Idaho.

Her mother Lucy Stukin was of Sinixt (Lakes) and Colville (Skoyelpi) ancestry. Lucy was the daughter of Sinixt Chief Seewhelken and a Colville woman. After reading The Brand: A Tale of the Flathead Reservation by Theresa Broderick, she was inspired to become a writer. In 1919, she married again, to Fred Galler of the Wenatchi.

Quintasket died from the flu on 8 August 1936 at the state hospital in Medical Lake, Washington.

Mourning Dove agreed to the changes, later writing to him: "My book of Cogewea would never have been anything but the cheap foolscap paper that it was written on if you had not helped me get it in shape. I can never repay you back."

Front cover (dust jacket) of the Caxton Printers 1933 first edition of the book Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove.

Coyote Stories In 1933, Mourning Dove published Coyote Stories, a collection of legends told to her by her grandmother and other tribal elders.

The foreword by Chief Standing Bear in this book includes these words: "These legends are of America, as are its mountains, rivers, and forests, and as are its people. They belong!"

Literary influences Mourning Dove learned storytelling from her maternal grandmother, and from Teequalt, an elder who lived with her family when the girl was young.

Legacy and impact Mourning Dove is considered one of the first Native American women to publish a novel in the United States. Her work has been recognized for contributing to early Native American literature and for presenting Indigenous perspectives during a period when such voices were often excluded from mainstream publishing. Scholars have noted her role in bridging Indigenous storytelling traditions and Western literary forms. Her work has also been studied in the context of early 20th-century Indigenous resistance to assimilation policies and literary marginalization.

Works Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927) Coyote Stories (1933) (27 stories) (229 pages) In Spanish as: Cuentos Indios del Coyote, Paloma Triste (Mourning Dove) Shorter (17 stories) English version as: Mourning Dove's Stories (117 pages) (1991) Tales of the Okanogans (1976) Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (1990)