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The Columbia History of the American NovelHe did not succeed, perhaps because of World War I; and -280- then after the war he continued to make changes in the manuscript — but this time without telling Hum-ishu-ma. The book, as Alanna Kathleen Brown explains, now became the work of two people with two separate objectives. When the novel finally came out in 1927 McWhorter had so altered it that Hum-ishu-ma wrote to him: "I feel like it was someone elses book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it." Hum-ishu-ma wrote Cogewea at night after exhausting labor all day as a migrant farmworker; she trusted McWhorter with her manuscript; and her reward was a book she could barely recognize as her own. As Dexter Fisher points out, McWhorter no doubt meant well. He wanted to revise Cogewea to make it more timely, impressive, and therefore marketable. Nevertheless what he did was to appropriate and rewrite Hum-ishu-ma — transform her work into his image of what it should be. He repeated on the personal level precisely the process of colonization and erasure that he claimed as an advocate of Native American issues to be fighting against in white culture ...» |
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