Cultural Cartographies: The Logic of Domination and Native Cultural Survival

Abstract

D' Arcy McNickle's novel Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978) begins: The Indian named Bull and his grandson took a walk into the mountains to look at a dam built in a cleft of rock, and what began as a walk became a journey into the (1995, l).1 As with most journeys, and as dis tinct from wanderings and well-practiced travels to familiar places, the journey portrayed by McNickle depends upon of various kinds to chart and negotiate unknown territory. In the novel, McNickle describes maps of the mind that provide strategies for comprehending and nego tiating the world, often in vastly different ways. Specifically, in Wind, these are conceptual shaped by cultural histories and experiences, and they determine the dynamics of intercultural encounters, the focus of the story. We will argue that even as McNickle presents a chronicle of contact and communication between Native American and European American people, he offers a theoretical assessment of the different kinds of mapping used at these points of contact and their consequences. McNickle's narrative centers on the issues of colonialism, Native American identity, self-determination, and cultural survival. Alternative ways of mapping the world both create and provide resolutions to these problems. Historically, have been essential resources in the process of colonialism; knowing indigenous people meant mapping them in locations relative to the colonizers. With came the possi bility of exploitation, dispossession, and assimilation. McNickle's use of as metaphors evokes this violent history. But even as these con tending colonial lead to tragedy, the story dramatically proposes