Christine Quintasket is a major influence on Seven Fables.

Under her pen name, Mourning Dove, she documented the perspectives of Salish-speaking peoples of the Pacific Northwest. She struggled for decades to write in her own voice while negotiating terms of collaboration with allies and editors.

Quintasket’s efforts resulted in three books: a novel, a story collection, and an autobiography. All of them reflect the compromises she had to make in order to get published. But to me they are among the most wonderful books in the world.

Essential Works

Cogewea, The Half Blood (1927)
• Scan of the 1927 original (library website / read online).
• Digital reformat of the 1927 original (academic website / free).
• 1981 scholarly edition (publisher’s website / purchase).
• 1981 scholarly edition (library website / read online).

Coyote Stories (1933)
• Scan of the 1933 original (library website / read online).
• Full-color scan of the 1933 original dust jacket (academic website / free).
• 1990 scholarly edition (publisher’s website / purchase).
• 1990 scholarly edition (library website / read online).

Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (1990 posthumous publication)
• 1994 paperback edition (publisher’s website / purchase).
• 1994 paperback edition (preview pages / read online).

Essential Scholarship

Several scholars have studied Christine Quintasket. The most prolific is Alanna Kathleen Brown. Here is a selection of Brown’s work available on JSTOR (academic database / read online).

• “Mourning Dove’s Voice in Cogewea” (1988)
• “Mourning Dove (Humishuma)” (1989)
• Review of the 1990 scholarly edition of Coyote Stories (1991)
• “The Evolution of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories” (1992)
• “Collaboration and the Complex World of Literary Rights” (1997)

Essays by other scholars are also available on JSTOR. Here is one example.

• Laurie Arnold, “More than Mourning Dove: Christine Quintasket – Activist, Leader, Public Intellectual” (2017)

(Reminder: JSTOR offers a free account with limited but decent reading privileges.)

Extra Links

• Photos of Christine Quintasket from the collection of her friend and collaborator Lucullus McWhorter (academic library website / free).

• Quintasket’s Coyote Stories was included as one of five “masterpieces” in Willis Regier’s Masterpieces of American Indian Literature (library website / read online).

• Quintasket’s brother Charles is featured in Salish Myths and Legends: One People’s Story (2008) (purchase / read online).