Artist Statement

Mourning Dove was the pen name of Christine Quintasket, an Interior Salish woman who collected tribal stories among Northern Plateau peoples in the early twentieth century. She described... centuries-old traditions with the authority of first-hand knowledge.

Mourning Dove’s reputation as a female ethnographer and writer has grown steadily over the past few decades. Her novel, Cogewea, written in 1915 when she studied typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and composition at the Calgary College business school, is the first known published novel by a Native American woman.