Wind from an Enemy Sky is concerned largely with the inability of the Native American and dominant societies in the United States to communicate productively with each other. As McNickle presents it, Native American society is deeply suspicious of the dominant society that has, through the years, oppressed it. Promises made have seldom been promises kept. The suspicions that keep Indians from interacting productively with government agencies are spawned not by paranoia but rather by extensive bitter experience.

The dam the government built has diverted a river on which the Indians depend. The waters that the dam captures will nourish the fields of white homesteaders, to whom the government has sold Indian lands at $1.25 an acre. The Native Americans look upon these land sales as forms of robbery. Added to this justifiable charge is the charge that white officials have kidnapped Indian children and sent them to distant government schools against their will.

Among the most pervasive and impressive symbols in this novel is that of the Feather Boy medicine bundle. This sacred artifact is taken by a reservation clergyman, Stephen Welles, and given to Adam Pell’s museum in exchange for a stipend the museum bestows upon Welles’s church. Welles mendaciously assures Pell that the medicine bundle was given to the museum with the full knowledge and consent of the tribe.

As Henry Jim lies dying, he calls for the return of the medicine bundle, which is thought to possess spiritual properties. Toby Rafferty writes to Adam Pell asking for its return and explaining its importance to the Little Elk. Pell and his staff search the museum’s storerooms for this contribution, carefully cataloged, then placed in long-term storage.

To Pell’s distress, the medicine bundle, when found, has irreparably deteriorated. Pell decides to visit the reservation and to make amends to the tribe by parting with a solid-gold Inca statue he had obtained with great difficulty and at considerable expense after years of searching. His motives are perfectly acceptable by the standards of his society, but his reparations are incredibly insulting to the Native Americans with whom he is trying to reach an accord. They view his demeanor and his proposal, quite correctly, as outrageously condescending.

To make matters worse, the Indians, ever modest, are to be given a statue of a nude figure. Pell’s gesture is insensitive in the extreme, but not intentionally so. Rafferty, better attuned to Native American sensitivities than Pell, attempts to dissuade him from telling the Indians that their sacred medicine bundle has been lost. Yet Pell, honest and forthright, tells the Indians of the loss and of the generous indemnity he proposes making to compensate them, simultaneously robbing them unwittingly of their hope and demeaning their heritage.

Pell’s disclosure leads an outraged Louis, in a tribal meeting with government officials, to grab Bull’s rifle. Bull leaps up, wrests the rifle from Louis, and shoots Pell dead. He then fires the rifle at Rafferty and kills him. At this point, The Boy, a Native American intermediary between his people and government officials, does what he has to do: He aims his pistol at Bull and shoots him dead.

Thematically, McNickle suggests by these acts the inevitability of tragedy in dealings between Native Americans and representatives of the dominant society. He also demonstrates how some Native Americans—Henry Jim and The Boy, for example—move into the white world or attempt to straddle the two worlds, placing them in impossible positions. For Henry Jim, it is impossible to shake the Native American heritage, which the dying man finally embraces again.