D'Arcy McNickle

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D'Arcy McNickle: The Indian War That Never Ends, or the Incredible Survival of Tribalism

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SOURCE: "D'Arcy McNickle: The Indian War That Never Ends, or the Incredible Survival of Tribalism," in Revue française d'études américaines, Vol. XIII, No. 38, November, 1988, pp. 363-65.

[In the following essay, Meli discusses the concept of tribalism in McNickle's works.]

As an administrator, historian, anthropologist or writer, d'Arcy McNickle's first concern was the issue of tribalism, that is the multiplicity of distinctive traditional cultures, which gives the lie to all stereotypes and resists the forces of assimilation. Contrary to the white man's early and contemporary expectations, the Indian tribes of North America have neither vanished nor completely assimilated.

McNickle summarizes Indian cultural traits over time: restrained, giving, individualist, stoic, courageous, awed of the world, presently oriented and spiritually minded. Such coordinates risk generalization, to be sure, but I think are still useful as basic introduction to Indian ways. The main features of tribalism are embodied in the vision quest. The quest is cyclic, requires solitude and so the visionary leaves the tribe periodically but only in order to return with powers to share, to be validated by the tribe, that is interpreted and applied in a social context. Native American cultures carry this old sense of interconnectedness, sacred among the people, down to the present time. Carrying back, going home again and rejoining the circle is the thorough bass note of the song that binds tribal America.

In the handling of plot and nature the works of McNickle (but we can surely mention also the most prestigious names in the field of contemporary Native American literature: Momaday, Silko and Welch) are drenched in a tribalism most whites neither understand nor expect in Indians who are University Professors. Incomprehension and surprise may be explained when we take into consideration the unquestionable fact that personal growth, in the American culture, is the story of a young man leaving home for better opportunities in a new and unknown land (let's mention just a few American classics: Moby Dick, Huck Finn, Portrait Of A Lady, The Great Gatsby, etc.). The American individual, frequently regardless of the price to be paid, has little or no regard for family, society, past, or place.

In marked contrast, in most Native American novels, the protagonist comes back home. He is not certain why he has returned home. All he knows is that the white world has not given him the solutions to his problems. McNickle's novels are about the reluctant return of the native. Although the white point of view would find in such a "coming back home" a failure, a personal disaster, McNickle applauds Archilde's return to Indian roots even if he doesn't obliterate the ambiguous and contradictory conflicts the protagonist has to face.

The ending sought by the protagonist is significantly related to tribal past and place: very frequently a personal bond is formed with a traditional tribal elder. Tribalism is respected and preserved, even though it is inseparable from a kind of failure. In any case, outside the Indian land, it should be underlined, there is more than failure: meaningless and unbearable violence and estrangement.

McNickle's novels depict a tribal rather than an individual definition of "being." The tribal "being" has three components: society, past and place. The "society" of the tribe is the law which binds people together into more than a population. The first assumption of tribalism is that the individual is completed only in relation to others and the group is organized in some meaningful way (customs and rituals, etc.). The second component of tribalism is its respect for the past. The tribe, which makes meaning possible, endures through time and appeals to the past for authority. Tribal reality is profoundly conservative. The source of respect for the past is respect for authority: parents, elders, customs and government. Severed from the past, the present is meaningless, outcast, homeless. The third component of tribalism is place. The protagonist in Native American literature ends exactly where he began. Place is not an aspect of d'Arcy McNickle works: place may have made them possible. A specific place is necessary to the protagonist's growth and pride. Conversely, white disregard and disrespect for place is crucial to Indian literature. Such aspirations toward tribal reintegration are not sentimental, romantic or unrealistic; the recoil from the white world in which the Indian finds no acceptable meaning, the "homing" cannot be judged by white standards of individuality: they must be read in the tribal context.

McNickle, in his works, identified the concept of individual transferable title to the land as the "prime source of misunderstanding" between whites and Indians. McNickle thought that Indians understood land payment as a gift and perhaps as a rental fee for land use, but that probably even late in the 19th century, Indians could not conceive of private land ownership. [In Indians & Other Americans] McNickle eloquently states the difference between the white transmutation of land to money and the Native American view: "One cannot grow a tree on a pile of money, or cause water to gush from it; one can only spend it and then one is homeless."

Many Native American tribes are still today a people unwilling to buy wholesale the white ways or to abandon their own. As [Vine Deloria points out in We Talk, You Listen]: "In many areas whites are regarded as temporary aspect of tribal life and there is unshakable belief that the tribe will survive the domination of the white man and once again rule the continent." McNickle made a clear and firm recognition of the function of "ethnic boundaries" long before the concept entered the various disciplines of western thought: it was a plea to the lawmakers and intellectuals of the day to accept ethnic and cultural diversity as a notable and precious element of American society and culture. The plea, of course, came prematurely and we realize what a loss to mankind would be the obliteration of Indian contribution to the history and culture of "Turtle Island," call the process the way you please: assimilation, acculturation, termination, etc.

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