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Christine Quintasket (Hum-ishu-ma), better known by her pen name, Mourning Dove (1884 - 1936) was a Native American author. Born in a canoe on the Kootenai River, Quintasket was the daughter of a Sinixt Chief and a mixed-raced Okanagan. Quintasket would learn the art of storytelling from her maternal grandmother and be inspired to become a writer due to her education at the Sacred Heart School of Goodwin Mission. Forced to give up her language and being exposed to derogatory representations of Indigenous people in books, Quintasket desired to combat racist stereotypes through the written word. Like Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Quintasket’s 1927 novel Cogewea the Half Bood was one of the earliest novels written by a Native American women and published in the United States as well as one of the earliest novels by a Native American author to feature a female protagonist. Six years after this, she would go on to publish Coyote Stories which collects over two dozen legends that she heard from her grandmother and tribal elders. Quintasket would marry twice before her death in 1936 and remains an important figure in Native American literary history.
