The 'Map of the Mind': D'Arcy McNickle and the American Indian Novel
[Owens is an American educator and critic of mixed Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish descent. In the excerpt that follows, he examines the theme of misunderstanding between whites and Native Americans in Wind from an Enemy Sky.]
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." In Wind From An Enemy Sky and The Surrounded (1936), novels published 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 compass 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 member of both Creek and Flathead (Salish) tribes, darkens the picture further, for surely McNickle stands as a luminous example of the ability of Indian and white to merge successfully, or at least communicate….
In the opening pages of [Wind From an Enemy Sky], the schism between Indian and white worlds is emphasized as Bull, Chief of the Little Elk people, looks down from his mountain retreat to "the open valley far below, a white man's world. A world he sometimes passed through but never visited." Bull, a man "who 'lives inside,'" has kept his people apart from the whites, isolated in the mountain camp, while his older brother, Henry Jim, has chosen the white man's way and a farm in the valley. The brothers and the Little Elk people have been split for thirty years, neither communicating nor understanding one another.
McNickle develops the theme of misunderstanding in Wind From An Enemy Sky in the barrier of silence between Indian brothers, in the miscommunication between Indian and white, and in the seeming impossibility of dialogue between all men.
Early in this novel, we learn that Antoine, Bull's young grandson, has, much as had Archilde in The Surrounded, recently returned home from Oregon where he has attended the government school. Soon after the novel begins, Bull takes Antoine to see a dam the government has constructed in a meadow sacred to the Little Elk Indians, a "place of power." When Bull realizes that the whites have indeed "killed the water," he shoots at the dam: "He raised the gun waist-high and fired into the concrete dam. Once. Twice. Nothing moved…. Not even a flash of a splinter. If the lead-nose bullet smacked against the structure, no one heard it. The sound of whining machinery and the thunder of water even smothered the bark of the gun." In Bull's gesture, McNickle symbolizes the futility of Indian resistance to the white world of machinery and power, and foreshadows the novel's disastrous conclusion when Bull will once again fire into the impenetrable wall of white machinery. In the end, however, the machinery will be represented by two men, Adam Pell and Rafferty, the Indian agent.
McNickle's theme in this novel is precisely what it was in The Surrounded: the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of communication, and the tragic consequences this entails. And again, while communication is particularly difficult between worlds—Indian and white—it is a problem common to all characters. Not only do Bull and Henry Jim refuse to talk to one another for thirty years, even Featherboy, the incarnation of powerful Thunderbird, cannot talk to the Indian people he has come to help, because they fear him: "The only one he could talk to was his own mother, which wasn't the way Thunderbird planned it, and it almost spoiled everything." Bull admits early in the novel, "I never learned how to talk to the white man," a statement he will echo many times, later confessing, "I didn't know how a white man talked, because I never went to listen." When he is forced to talk to the agent, Rafferty, Bull says, "When I talk to a white man, what does it matter what I say?." Louis, Bull's brother, declares even more bitterly, "We learned a long time ago that when we talk to the strangers from across the mountains, we lose something…."
Henry Jim has alienated his people not only by turning onto the white man's path, but even more so by attempting to turn his people from the old ways by giving away Featherboy, the most powerful of the tribe's medicine bundles. The government has built a fine house and farm for Henry Jim but in the end Henry Jim rejects the white world whose "prize" Indian he has been. He moves out of his house into a tepee to die. Henry Jim's final rejection of the white world is indicated in the fact that before he dies he has forgotten the white language he lived his life within. In the beginning, Henry Jim had tried "to discover what the white men were saying, and what they meant beyond the words they used," and he remembers that "The words were a marvel of obscurity, but in the days of telling they seemed important." After a lifetime of lonely exile in a white world he can never fully understand, Henry Jim returns to his people.
"How to translate from one man's life to another's" writes McNickle, "—that is difficult. It is more difficult than translating a man's name into another man's language." In The Boy, the tribal policeman, McNickle illustrates the point he makes here. The Boy's Indian name is Son Child, but as he is translated from one world to another, this man of great tact, understanding, and courage is diminished, "loses something" as Louis would put it, and becomes The Boy, an implement manipulated by the machinery of the white government.
Language not only defies translation in this novel, it also defines character. Antoine, approaching the Indian agency with trepidation, thinks of the government people he has known: "They had loud voices," he remembers. The terrified Eskimo girl Antoine recalls at school became mute in the face of the white world: "Antoine never heard her speak a word." The Indians approve of Rafferty because he doesn't insist on "talking at once" when someone comes to see him, and The Boy praises Rafferty by saying, "I guess he's all right. He talks good." To talk good in this novel is to listen well and to understand. As Henry Jim prepares to tell Rafferty the history of the medicine bundle, Henry Jim thinks, "Today talks in yesterday's voice." He adds, "It was so important this time—so much depended on a good understanding." In drawing nearer to the Indians, Rafferty is learning to hear "yesterday's voice," admitting to himself, "Maybe I wasn't listening before." Later, as he is gaining the confidence of the Little Elk people, Rafferty thinks nonetheless that "there seemed to be still a larger aspect, and this he did not yet understand. It had to do with their way of talking."
Adam Pell, the man who has designed the dam, is also the director of the Americana Institute to which Featherboy was given. And in Adam, McNickle presents his most stark example of the consequences of misunderstanding. Adam has "made a hobby of Indians," and has even gone to Peru to help descendants of the Incas build their own hydroelectric plant. Although Adam's sister says, "He may even be planning to talk to those Indians—he's always talking to Indians," it is apparent that while Adam may talk to Indians he has never learned to listen to them. Adam makes the fatal mistake of generalizing about Indians, judging the Little Elk people by his experience with the Indians of Peru.
Bull's nephew, Pock Face, shoots Adam Pell's nephew who happens to be working on the dam. A young, angry Indian, Pock Face is caught between two worlds. He wears cowboy boots and can "talk about horses like a white man." He listens to what the old men of the tribe say, but he fails to understand the voice of the past, as is evident when he tells his side-kick, Theobold, that he has been to the dam before but that he hadn't understood the significance of the place: "Somebody said the old timers used to go there all the time. But I didn't know why that was." Adam's nephew dies because of a lack of understanding on both Indian and white sides, and when Adam learns why his nephew has been shot, he recognizes his own culpability: "The enormity of the misapprehension swept over his mind and silenced him." The shock awakens Adam to a new understanding of the Indians. He realizes that "They worked with different data and a different order of reality," and he thinks that if only he could have returned the destroyed Featherboy bundle, "we could have worked together. They shot that young man, my nephew, because nobody tried to talk to them, not in their terms." But Adam's understanding is short-lived, and Adam, good man that he is, brings about the final tragedy through the enormity of his misapprehension of the Indian world. Earlier, Bull had prophesied Adam's role: "Maybe he is a good man … and yet he will destroy us."
When the Little Elk Indians, led by Bull, come to the agency expecting the return of the medicine bundle from Adam's museum, Adam tells them that Featherboy, valueless in the white world, has been destroyed by mice in the museum's basement. Earlier, he had told Rafferty, "There is nothing left to restore," and now he attempts to replace the lost medicine bundle with a gold fertility figure from the Inca world, attempting, as Rafferty says, to "restore a lost world by a simple substitution of symbols." When the Indians realize that Featherboy is lost forever, Bull seizes a rifle and shoots both Adam and Rafferty, shooting into the machinery of the white world he doesn't understand just as he earlier shot into the heart of the concrete dam. Bull, in turn, is killed by The Boy, who shouts, "Brother! I have to do this!"
Again, just as in The Surrounded, McNickle has given us a tantalizing glimpse of the possibility of a merger of white and Indian worlds. As Rafferty and Bull draw closer toward one another, as the white world seems to be moving for the first time to meet the Indian world halfway, McNickle suggests a possibility for a mutual understanding and respect. And just as in The Surrounded, McNickle pulls the rug out from under his characters, suggesting that the schism between worlds is simply too enormous. The "dog-faced man," the minister who has taken the medicine bundle and given it to the museum, sums up the barrier between white and Indian when he tells Rafferty:
"The Indian people start from origins about which we speculate but know next to nothing. We do know they are a people who are unlike us—in attitude, in outlook, and in destination, unless we change that destination…. Regardless of what we white men have attempted, the Indian has always remained beyond our reach…. He's always slipping away into the distance."
The Surrounded and Wind From An Enemy Sky deserve more critical attention than they have yet received. For in these powerful works, McNickle has created one of the most penetrating and despairing pictures offered by any American Indian novelist, arguing in these novels that meaningful communication—the communication necessary to survival—is an impossibility between Indian and white worlds. Attempts at bridging the two worlds are doomed to end in "something" going wrong. For McNickle's displaced Indians understanding fails, speech breaks down, and the result is alienation and tragedy which the best of intentions—Indian or white—cannot forestall.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.