Behind the Scenes Minis: Mourning Dove in Context

Tracy and Holly discuss elementary school experiences with Mourning Dove's work, and Tracy ponders whether her story intersected with other topics from the show. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Friday. We spent the whole week talking
about mourning, though we sure did. This is someone I

(00:22):
had not heard of when I found this book at
the book Barn. I'm laughing at my own foolishnists, but
I'll explain in a moment. Okay, So this was a
lovely little trip several years ago, day trip that I
and two friends took out to the book barn. And

(00:42):
for whatever reason, one of the friends has moved away
since then, but we like, we haven't made another book
Barn trip, and I periodically will be like book Barn,
that's the thing that we should do. I came home
with two books from that trip, and one was a
book that I bought at the book barn, and the
other was a book that won one of my friends
was going to sell at the book barn but instead

(01:04):
said maybe you would like this book, and I brought
it home with me, and I am pretty sure the
Morning Dove Autobiography is the one that I bought. Like
the receipt is tucked in there but you know, it's
been sitting on my desk for so long, waiting, waiting
to be an episode. One reason it took this long

(01:25):
is that it was clear it was going to be challenging,
and it turned out to be a lot more challenging
than I expected. Oh isn't that always fun? Yeah? Yeah, it.
There were many many sources for the episode besides just
the autobiography, and one of the reasons that I wanted

(01:46):
to do this episode was like having somebody's own thoughts
about their own life, which is especially important when we
are talking about indigenous people living in the Americas with
the history that we have here, and so sort of
finding out what the editing process had been like and

(02:08):
that there are some criticisms of that editing process kind
of like shed a whole different light on the autobiography itself.
It is a fascinating book, though this topic unlocked too fuzzy.
Are these real memories for me? Okay? The first is
the book barn uh huh, because I don't know. I

(02:29):
couldn't find anything rapidly on how long they have been
in business, but many moons ago I worked in acquisitions
at a college library, and I swear we used to
order from them, and if not, it was another vendor
called book Barn that's in the Northeast. But I just
remember unloading packages from them and cataloging them for the library. Yeah,

(02:51):
so if it was them, hooray. The other thing was
that I went to grades one, two, a little bit
of four in the Pacific Northwest, and I think that
my third grade teacher read us stuff from Coyote Stories.
Totally possible. Yeah. When I was doing research for this,

(03:15):
I found some lesson plans around Coyote Stories. Yeah. I
mean this would have been the seventies, so yeah, yeah,
it would have been the older version of it, like
not a newly edited edition of it or anything, but
that added context. But I just was like, oh wait,

(03:37):
oh wait, missus Kempton. Yeah, and there are so many
complexities with that book right like it was. I mean,
I didn't perceive any of that at the age of so,
and I'm sure I would not either. Yeah. I feel
like so much of her work has all of these

(03:59):
nuances to it, things that are simultaneously groundbreaking and things
that you know to some extent in today's context, like
today's context has some differences to roughly a century ago
when the US was like actively pursuing federal policies meant

(04:20):
to eliminate Indigenous culture. So the idea of somebody recording
these stories to share them has a little bit different
tone than today, when I'm not saying everything's perfect, but
there has been more of a focus on like self
determination Indigenous nations stressing with their own protocols are and

(04:42):
how they do or do not want work to be shared.
And that is why, like we did not get into
in depth descriptions of the figure of coyote or what
is in these books, like that doesn't belong to you
and me. So that's that's that's why that we you know,
we talked about her work with that without going into
detail about it. So yeah, totally possible that that was

(05:07):
in the nineteen seventy eight seventy nine school year. Anywhere
goes Yeah. So a thing that I'm curious about that
I was not able to find the answer with is
whether she had any involvement at all with the basketball team,
the girls' basketball team at Fort Shaw Indian School. So

(05:27):
we did a two part podcast about the Fort Shaw
Indian School girls basketball team. So a while back, she
was there at the same time that some of that
was happening, and she was working as a teacher's aid,
which I think is how she had a little bit
more freedom to come and go out of the school
than students who were like full time students might have.

(05:51):
But I do not know if she had any involvement
like with the team beyond potentially being a teacher's aid
for some of the some of the players. And I
am curious and I do not know the answer. I also,
as I was trying to find the original article, that

(06:17):
nineteen sixteen article that we talked about in part one
that was done as promotion for her forthcoming book when
the book was more than a decade away, which they
did not know obviously when they were trying to promote it.
I had seen people like mentioning this article, and I
was trying to find the actual article, and I wound
up on a page of a different a different paper,

(06:37):
which was the Spokane Chronicle, different newspaper. It had come
up in a search result was not actually relevant to
Mourning Dove. The words mourning and dove were on the page.
It was not about the Mourning Dove who these episodes
were about. But I was fascinated by the other headlines
that were on the page that was not ultimately relevant

(07:01):
to the episode because they were just in all capital
letters for all of them. Part of human body found
in stomach of huge shark. Yeah, I'm sorry, that's terrible tragedy,
bombay clothes to missus, Annie Bessant, and epidemic shows slight decrease.

(07:22):
And those were three to me, dramatic headlines connected to
things we have talked about on the show, or past
hosts have talked about on the show. Because that part
of the human body being found in the stomach of
the huge shark was about the nineteen sixteen Jersey Shore
shark Tacks, which is an episode about We've talked about
Annie Bessant in some of our I think the London

(07:43):
match Girls strike was the one where we talked about
Annie Bessant. If I am conflating two different labor stories,
I'm sorry. And then the epidemic being described, I thought
until I read the article might have been encephalitis lethargica.
I think it was actually polio, though this was a
time when there could be big polio outbreaks. So anyway,

(08:08):
three very dramatic headlines connected to things we've covered on
the show on this one page of newspaper. I'm really
fascinated by Morning Doves story, and a lot of the
writing about her, both academically and non dates back to
about the nineteen nineties, like when this autobiography is being published,

(08:32):
new edition of Coyote Stories coming out, that kind of stuff.
There were papers that pointed out that so much of
the literary criticism slash slash research on her work has
really been about McWorter and mcworter's influence on it and

(08:55):
not about the work itself. But it doesn't seem I'm like,
it doesn't seem like that ever, like spurred a lot
more research into the work itself, and I don't know
if that will ever happen. Sometimes it seems like there
are people that we talk about on the show where
there's a wave of interest in them and a particular

(09:17):
window of time, and then they just sort of fade
back into the background again. Yeah, I think the thing
that I find myself most fascinated by in this is
just this sounds very broad and weird, and like I

(09:40):
am very sleepier under the influence of something. I'm like
language man. But my thing is that the idea of
different languages and how people perceive non native speakers always
is really interesting to me, Like, h particularly because I mean,

(10:02):
I know a lot of English speakers who have made
presumptions about the intellect of someone else who does not
speak English as a first language because they speak in
a way that sounds odd to a native English speaker,
like they don't grasp the language, and it's like, no, No,
their syntax that they grew up with puts this all

(10:24):
in a different order. It's not that they are speaking
like a simpleton. This is the natural way for their
brain to order words. Yeah, And that's like, I feel
like that has so many times throughout history been this
weird barrier for people to recognize other people as intellectual equals.

(10:46):
And I'm like, how many languages do you speak? Right,
you would do the same thing in the opposite way
if you were trying to talk to them in their
native language. It's always a really interesting one to me.
And then when you later on the idea that her
syntax has also become outdated and antiquated compared to the

(11:08):
way speakers of her language would speak today, Like, there's
just a whole cool interesting ven diagram of examination to
be done on the evolution of language for any culture. Yeah. Yeah,
I think I said in the episode that some of
the papers that I read that quoted from her letters,

(11:29):
some of them it felt like they had edited the
letter into like standard English, and some of them had not.
And the ones that were not edited, you could really
see sort of patterns in the things that she seemed
to struggle with in English, which one hundred percent, like

(11:50):
you were saying, suggests that like this stems from how
she understood things in her native language trying to communicate
them in a completely different language, not even not. I
mean we a lot of times we'll talk about people
on the show that spoke multiple languages, but it's like
they spoke multiple romance languages, right, So multiple languages that

(12:13):
already have a lot in common, and like we're talking
like Salish languages have some really big differences from English.
One of the things that one of the papers that
was talking about sort of the development of these stories,
like figuring out how to record an indigenous oral tradition

(12:35):
story into like a print book, was talking about context
where the gender of the speaker meant they would use
different language because there was like different context there, and
like that's not that's not really something that we encounter
in English that way, Like the word for father is father.

(12:57):
This is I'm made up example that I make up
for illustration. Like the word for father is father in English.
There's not a different word based on that, like the
gender of the person who's speaking the word father. Again,
that is an example that I'm sort of paraphrasing based
on my memory of a paper that I read, not

(13:17):
necessarily when it's like strictly accurate to the language. So yeah,
there are a lot of efforts, like really concerted, concrete
efforts to teach people a number of different Salish languages
because like as we said at the beginning, like there

(13:38):
are still people that speak these languages. There are still
elders who are fluent in these languages and may have
even grown up speaking them as their first language. They
are critically endangered languages though, and so like there are
a number of organizations and people putting like really strong
effort into trying to pursue these languages and get more

(14:00):
people fluent in them. So yeah, yeah, I think that's
what I have to say about this week's episodes. That
I apologize if anyone got to the end of part
one not realizing it was a two parter because I
forgot to say that. The good news is it will

(14:21):
say part one. It will your app when you open
it to listen. I'm not going to name any names,
but there is a podcast that I listened to that
drops surprise two parters and it doesn't say in the
title of the episode, and so I will be like,
really into what's happening, and then it's like next time,

(14:42):
and I'm like, I would have I would have waited
until both of them were available to listen to them both.
So yes, it will very clearly say part one in
part two in the title of the episode. Now, when
I build this show page, I'm not going to include
it just to be a jerk. Oh no, I'd be Friday.
Whatever is happening on your weekend? You know. I hope

(15:02):
it's really good and we will be back with a
Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have brand new episodes on Monday.
Hope things are going well for everybody. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

(15:26):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,