Politics and Culture in the Fiction of D'Arcy McNickle

Abstract

Politics and Culture in the Fiction ofD'ArcyMcNickle James Ruppert University ofAlaska, Fairbanks A man of many talents, D'Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) is noted as a historian, civil servant, Native American rights advocate, and novelist. McNickle, a member of the Salish Tribe, published three novels, six ethnohistorical studies of White/Native American affairs, and a biography of Oliver LaFarge, most of these being written during his 16 years in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He is viewed today as the grandfather ofModern Native American Literature and his work is studied in many classes. Yet what is written about his fiction seems to reflect little of his ethnohistorical writings and his years of experience in the political arena. As Lawrence Towner suggests in an afterword to McNickle's novel, The Surrounded (1936), "everything he wrote was about the First Americans, their culture and their history" (304). It seems clear that in whatever he wrote, McNickle was revising and rewriting, developing and elaborating on the insights of all his previous work. In this light I would like to compare his final novel, Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978), to his earlier novels The Surrounded and Runner in the Sun ( 1954) and to illuminate his fiction through an understanding of his definition of culture as expressed in his ethnohistorical study They Came Here First (1949). Two significant processes that shaped the writing of Wind from an Enemy Sky affect our interpretations of this book and its vision of intratribal politics and White/Native American political relationships . First, in this novel, McNickle is, in a very real sense, rewriting The Surrounded, and to a minor extent Runner in the Sun, so as to incorporate the experience of over 40 years of White/Native American political maneuvering. Secondly, in this revision process, his conclusions about the cognitive maps of White and Native American societies, and more specifically his definition of culture as a process of necessary dynamic change, inform his fiction. While some critics see Wind from an Enemy Sky as a static statement of destroyed culture, to view the culture as process, as McNickle saw it, adds new dimensions to an appreciation ofhis novels. (See, for instance , Larson, Owens, and Wiget). In The Surrounded, the internal political structures of the tribe have been destroyed. What should be the orderly lines of communication and authority no longer exist. The tribe drifts in a state of confusion and despair. The social functions of the chiefs have been taken over by the government agent, who barely understands 185 186Rocky Mountain Review his role. Though he plays the role of a lawgiver, he is a lawgiver who does not understand the effects of his laws. The coherent functions of law enforcement, once a common tribal responsibility, have been taken over by the vindictive and hateful Sheriff Quigley. To mirror this breakdown of the internal political structures, McNickle presents a similar breakdown in internal religious structures . The religious structures which once lent organization to the tribe and the individual have been subsumed by the Catholic missionaries . The dances which engendered clan and generational solidarity and identity have been banned, and commonly understood notions of wrong doing and atonement have been replaced with alien concepts of sin and eternal damnation, creating only fear and confusion for the people. Modeste, the blind old chief and storyteller, is all that remains of the political and religious structure of the Salish tribe. The older people pay him little attention and the young people laugh at him. Father Grepilloux, the first missionary priest, had gained the respect of the Salish, even though he never really understood them, and they never really accepted his beliefs or way of life. In contrast, the new priests want only obedient charges. While the old missionaries of the mid-to-late nineteenth century did lead the White world to the Salish, McNickle seems to be saying that their paternalism was preferable to the institutionalized disregard and disrespect he saw at the time he was growing up on the reservation. In the development of these motifs, the protagonist's mother, Katherine, plays a major role. Katherine, the daughter of a chief, was the first Salish convert to the Christian...