The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle

He knelt at his mother's head, thinking as he did so of the night in her tepee on Fourth of July night. The sparks flew up, expired, and he had wished that a person might find oblivion as easily. It was a different matter now. People grew into each other, became intertwined, and life was no mere matter of existence, no mere flash of time. It was time that made the difference. The time that was consumed in moving one's feet along the earth, in learning the smell of coming snow, in enduring hunger and fear and the loss of pride; all that made a difference. And a still greater difference was this entangling of lives. People grew together like creeping vines. The root of beginning was hard to find in the many that had come together and spread their foliage in one mass.

Archilde Leon is a "breed" in the classic archetype of Native fiction: half-Spanish, on the side of his ambitious but proud father, Max, and half-Flathead Salish on the side of his mother. He has been gone from the Flathead reservation in Montana a long time, playing his fiddle in Portland, and he expects his return will be a short one. The reservation he returns to is a tough place: his mother is no longer living in his father's house, his brother Louis wanted for horse thieving, his much-younger brothers Max and Narcisse are threatening to grow up the same way. The reservation has imposed idleness and dependence on the young men of the tribe, and bad behavior, it seems, follows. But Archilde is cautious and thoughtful; there is the hope, for a moment, that he might reconcile himself to his father and take over the extensive ranch. But such hopes are threatened when Louis is shot in the mountains by a game warden, and the game warden axed by their mother--a crime that will come back to haunt Archilde.

The Surrounded is a remarkably early book, by the standards of Native fiction in North America. Written in 1936 by D'Arcy McNickle, a Cree-Metis scholar who grew up among the Salish in Montana (there's an echo here of Momaday, who was Kiowa but wrote about the Pueblo communities where he grew up), The Surrounded captures a specific moment in the life of tribal relations in the U.S. The Indian wars are over, and the reservation era has been around for a generation or two. The marriage of Archilde's parents, it's intimated, has something to do with the Dawes Act that split communal land into allotments that could be sold--or stolen--that is, Max married Archilde's mother Catherine so that he might use her land. The arrangement, it seems, has gone sour: Catherine, a once devout Jesuit, has "gone back to the blanket" and returned to Salish customs and religion, for which she has been tossed out of the household.

The Surrounded depicts the Salish as having invited the arrival of the Jesuits in their country, foretold by visitors from the Iroquois to the east. The power of the Jesuits, totemized by the "two crossed sticks" of the cross, was seen by Catherine's generation as a force that might offer reprieve from the depredations of the U.S. Army and the violence, amplified by plentiful guns, of wars with the Blackfeet. When Catherine kills the game warden, Catholic confession fails to assuage her guilt; so instead she turns to the Salish chief and the ancient tradition of whipping. Catherine, in her disillusion and return to her traditions, is maybe the most interesting character in the novel, but I was also really taken by Archilde's father Max, whose practical attitude toward ranching and the land has curdled into a sour resentment not only of Catherine but all Indians, including his own children, who he regards as shiftless and untrustworthy.

There's an interesting element, too, in the story of Mike and Narcisse, who are sent on orders of the Indian Agent to the Residential School, where the unruly Mike becomes so terrified of the divine horrors threatened by the Jesuit instructors that he becomes traumatized and unable to ride a horse. It's a far cry, maybe, from the real horrors that we now know were perpetrated at residential schools, but the theme is clear: whatever the Salish hoped would happen when the Jesuits arrived has not come to pass, and things have gotten worse. Nevertheless, the novel takes many pains to show that some of the Jesuits are well-meaning and kind, like Father Grepilloux, Max's friend who promises to pull strings to offer Archilde training in the violin in Europe.

Archilde, the protagonist, is pulled in many directions: back to Portland, and a simple life of playing the fiddle and reading baseball scores, toward Europe and the violin, toward the land in front of him that his father, Max, wants him to cultivate. He is pulled, too, toward his mother, whom he feels like has never known or understood, and whose return to traditional ways kindles new possibilities in his mind. Archilde puts himself in danger to protect Catherine, but she is covered "by the whip" while he must still face the guilt of the warden's death and the threat of imprisonment long after Catherine dies. Like Tayo from Ceremony, like David from Night of the Living Rez, and countless other characters besides, Archilde's status as a "breed" epitomizes the feeling of being caught between worlds: white and Indian, Catholic and traditional, even, perhaps, past and future. His essential thoughtfulness separates him from his brother and the other idle young men of the reservation, but as McNickle shows, the weight of the contradictions threatens to destroy him anyway.

I liked The Surrounded; it has something of the style of McNickle's contemporary Willa Cather. There is a simplicity of language the is appropriate to the setting, and belies a depth of melancholy and despair. There's a sense of heavy-handedness to the plot--it seems more thematically necessary than organic that Archilde, on his brief stop at home, suffers the death of both of his parents--but perhaps it's true that Cather only conceals those things better. What the novel really does well is capture the sense of being surrounded--the crisis closing in, and avenues of hope closing. For Archilde, that feeling becomes, in the novel's final moments, sadly literal.