The “Map of the Mind”: D’Arcy McNickle and the American Indian Novel

Abstract

L O U I S O W E N S University of New Mexico The “Mapof the Mind”:D’Arcy McNickle and the American Indian Novel In D’Arcy McNickle’s posthumously published novel, Wind From An Enemy Sky (1978),Toby Rafferty, the reform-minded agent to the Little Elk Indians, thinks, “The problem is communication. . . . The answer, obviously, is that we do not speak to each other — and language is only part of it. Perhaps it is intention, purpose, the map of the mind we follow.”1 In Wind From An Enemy Sky and The Surrounded (1936), novels pub­ lished more than four decades apart, McNickle has given us remarkable perspectives on two “maps of the mind” — Indian and white — and his conclusion in both novels is that the maps simply do not match: the com­ pass orientations are different, the landmarks point in different languages toward different destinies. Few writers have given us darker pictures of the relationship between Indian and white worlds than has McNickle. That this perspective is found in novels separated by nearly half a century, and that it comes from McNickle, university-educated, mixed-blood mem­ ber of both Creek and Flathead (Salish) tribes, darkens the picture fur­ ther, for surely McNickle stands as a luminous example of the ability of Indian and white to merge successfully, or at least communicate. At the beginning of The Surrounded, Archilde Leon, half-Salish and half-Spanish, has returned to his reservation home from a brief spell of wandering and fiddle-playing in Oregon. Archilde returns home an assimi­ lated, disoriented Indian, dressed in a blue suit, his shoes polished and his attitude toward his Indian past one of indifference bordering on embar­ rassment. “When you came home to your Indian mother,” McNickle writes, “you had to remember that it was a different world.”2 Of the feast his mother gives in his honor, Archilde thinks, “You gorged yourself on meat until you felt sick, and a lot of old people told tiresome stories” (p. 4). 276 Western American Literature At the feast, Archilde listens to and watches his mother and Modeste, an old, blind elder, and Archilde thinks: Actually, in the way he was learning the world, neither Modeste nor his mother was important. They were not real people. Buffaloes were not real to him either, yet he could go and look at buffaloes everyday if he wished, behind the wire enclosure of the Biological Survey reserve. . . . To him they were just fenced up animals that couldn’t be shot, though you could take photographs of them. (p. 62) Through the ambiguous pronoun, “they,” McNickle suggests strongly that Archilde is thinking as much about the entrapment of his people as about the buffaloes.3 In the course of the novel, beginning at the feast as he listens to the old Salish stories, Archilde moves toward a new understanding of the world of his mother and her people — the world that has nearly vanished from the valley. Though at first his Indian relatives — and by extension that side of himself — make Archilde sick, and though he at first insists that the old ways are “gone, dead” (p. 63), he soon comes to listen to the stories and to understand the lessons they teach. As Archilde hears Modeste tell of the old ways and the lost world of the people, McNickle writes: “A story like that, he realized, was full of meaning” (p. 69). While Archilde is beginning to comprehend what it means to be Indian, his Spanish father, Max Leon, lies in his big ranch house and listens to the sound of the Indian feasting, “swearing at the noise and wondering what it signified” (p. 60). The barrier which has developed between Archilde’s two worlds is suggested by the fact that while Max lives in the ranch house, Archilde’s Indian mother Catharine remains in a sod-roofed cabin set off from the big house. Husband and wife do not communicate. Listening to his wife’s people in the distance, Max thinks, “Why was it that after forty years he did not know these people and was not trusted by them? . . W hat were they saying...