Collaboration and the Complex World of Literary Rights

Abstract

The area of literary rights is especially confusing for those who work with collaborative materials, particularly materials of earlier Native American writers. Multiple problems involving questions of authorship, the determination of heirs, conflicts over the possession of materials by family heirs and librarians, and ethical conflicts over the control of the scholarship itself must be confronted. Having dealt personally with all of these in the last few years, I share the issues hoping to begin a dialogue that will enable scholars to move forward in the profoundly important activity of bringing a true account of our multicultural literature into the American canon. The primary and most problematic issues for those working on Native texts - such as Mourning Dove's Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927), which was extensively edited and ultimately cowritten by L. V. McWhorter, or Mourning Dove's Coyote Stories (1933), which was modified by Dean Guie to meet the expectations for juvenile literature of the 1930s - is the scholarly problem of determining who wrote what and how the collaboration worked. Extant letters, the recollections of those who knew the collaborators, the writers' statements, the texts themselves, and comparisons to other accounts (if such are available) are critical to the process of fleshing out an understanding of an entire case. While literary heirs can inform this process, such scholarship is primarily a research endeavor and, ideally, should be resolved separately from literary heir issues.