In Wind from an Enemy Sky, D’Arcy McNickle, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kutenai tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, born and educated in Montana, writes of the difficult period in American history during which the United States government attempted to subdue Native Americans peacefully. McNickle, a government employee for most of his life, presents a balanced view of what occurred during this period in one small Native American enclave in the Flathead Lake-St. Ignatius area of Montana.

On the surface, McNickle presents the story of a Native American extended family that includes Pock Face, who, carrying his grandfather’s rifle, steals furtively into a canyon where white developers have built a dam on tribal land. The Little Elk Indians equate the damming of their river with its murder. The dam has an immediate negative impact upon fishing and farming on their tribal lands.

As Pock Face and Theobald, his cousin, approach the dam, they spy a white man walking across its surface. Pock Face fires one shot. Jim Cooke, ironically on his last day of work before going east to marry, dies instantly.

The remainder of the story revolves around the government’s efforts to mete out justice to the murderer. This surface story, however, provides the justification for a compelling subtext that illustrates the difficulties involved when one well-established culture attempts to impose itself upon another. Wind from an Enemy Sky, maintaining throughout an objective view of two disparate cultures, proffers a poignant political and social statement about culture and values in multi-ethnic settings.

Readers will feel empathy for members of the two major societies depicted in the novel, even though these societies remain at loggerheads and are divided within themselves. Toby Rafferty, the government agent in charge of the Little Elk Reservation, and Doc Edwards, the agency physician, have compassion for the Native Americans with whom they work.

Rafferty, for example, demonstrates trust and sensitivity toward Bull and his followers, releasing them from custody on their own recognizance after the murder to attend the final hours of Henry Jim’s life. Doc Edwards, who treats Henry Jim as death nears, employs the tactics and technology of white medicine, yet he never loses sight of the faith and reliance that Henry Jim and his kinspeople repose in tribal ways of treating illness.

Despite this, the crucial and undeniable fact is that the whites who represent the dominant culture are unabashedly out to annihilate the Native American culture. The whites deal as kindly as they can with their Native American charges, but they shamelessly try to homogenize them into mainstream American life.

The whites’ most effective tactic is forcibly to wrest Native American children from their families, shipping them to government schools. There, officials take the children’s native clothes and burn them, then cut their hair and delouse them—all great affronts to Indian culture. The younger the children, the better their chance of acculturation.

Bull’s grandson is snatched from his family while Bull is hunting one day. The boy is sent to a government school in Oregon, some thousand miles from his home, there to be stripped of his identity. He is assigned the new name of Antoine Brown; he learns how to pray and eat and be civil. He is told to forget his home and his people. Meanwhile, his mother, Celeste, devastated at being robbed of her only child, becomes a raving lunatic and soon dies. Only then is the boy permitted to return to Montana and his family.

McNickle never suggests that whites are motivated by evil intentions, yet their intentions are so greatly in...