The Protagonist as a Mixed-Blood in John Joseph Mathews' Novel: "Sundown"

Abstract

John Joseph Mathews' novel, Sundown, recreates as its setting Osage history from the period prior to the allotment of Osage Indian land in 1906 through the oil boom of the 1920s. It also traces the search for cultural identity of Challenge Windzer, a young mixed-blood from a wealthy Osage family. Sundown, initially published in 1934, is one of the earliest novels by an Indian author to present the theme of the assimilated or mixed-blood Indian as an alienated character.1