Wind from an Enemy Sky
D’Arcy McNickle, 1978 (‘78 is the year after he died; I’m not actually sure when he wrote the book)
It may take me a while to collect my thoughts on Wind From an Enemy Sky. It seems to me to be a more ambitious and complicated, more beautiful and more flawed than The Surrounded. My biggest disappointment is with Adam Pell and his sister Geneva Cooke. When we meet them, Cooke’s son has just been murdered, and these two characters simply don’t act like a bereaved family – any plot device might have gotten them in the room to talk about their holdover squabbles from childhood, etc (151).
McNickle’s own biography (what I know of it) plays interestingly into the places and events portrayed here. He is critical of the conversion of the reservations from commonly-held lands to parceled allotments, and the subsequent sale of many ‘spare’ allotments to white settlers. He himself sold his reservation allotment to finance an Oxford education. He is also offering a nuanced critique of the Indian bureau (which succeeds in distinguishing the institution from the people working for it, as represented by Rafferty, the agent, and The Boy, the tribal policeman), one that comes from experience – he worked for the bureau under John Collier, whose papers I combed through looking for the famous circulars prohibiting traditional dance, about which my dear M. Austin had so much to say. The dance controversy reared its head in The Surrounded, and again here (4).
McNickle is also (like Zora Neale Hurston) an anthropologist. The book portrays Adam Pell, capitalist who collects and keeps a museum on the side (I’m reminded of the millionaire collector who showed up and made an ass of himself at Junior’s grandmother’s funeral in Absolutely True Diary)… he loves to say how much he respects the Native Americans, (as he imagines should be evident from how much he likes buying their art and artifacts and digging up their ancestors’ bones (149-50). Pell alternates between total ass and somewhat-anthropologically self-aware. He describes an Incan artifact as “ripped from its cultural context” but is dumb enough to think that the Indians of the (fictional) Northwestern tribe (“The Little Elk People”) might accept it in place of their destroyed medicine bundle.
We get various ways to understand that sacred object – as a physical thing (210), through its origin-story, never to be told to a white man but printed here nonetheless (207-8) and through the political and land-history of the region, which Pell thinks, rightly or wrongly, allows him to understand the sacred object (209). See also his collection of the pre-columbian cartwheel (142)! And the suggestion that ‘cultural respect’ can be just another system of control! (38)
McNickle has a reputation as one of the first ‘pan-indianists,’ but he’s clearly no fan of Pell’s practice of lumping South American civilizations with the Little Elk People. Pell’s attempt to substitute one sacred object for another turns out disastrously… but the day before that all occurs, Pell takes a drive around the reservation and sees the sub-divided lands, encroached on by outsiders… and with Pell’s enormous wealth, though McNickle never comes out and says it, he might have bought out those small landholders. This was the injustice begging to be righted, whereas the cultural disinheritance was a fate that never could be righted. Yet he never says it, just leaves that landscape-vision there, a way to derail the tragic train of events, trembling on the edge of obviousness.
Astonishingly, I’ve gotten this far without naming some of the complex and (in contrast to Pell), convincingly drawn characters, Bull, the aging chief, Two Sleeps, the outsider and seer (given McNickle’s obvious consciousness about cultural mixing, I found moments when Two Sleeps or Pell might have fit Christian martyr archetypes to be quite interesting, as well as moments of biblical language, ‘a cleft of the rock’ on p.1, etc.), Bull’s more assimilated brother Henry Jim, bitter Louis… and Bull’s grandson Antoine, who’s been (kidnapped) away at school.
Names are important throughout, often marking someone’s degree of assimilation, but there’s a meditation on the translation of them on 26.
“foolish Indian anger” - internalized stereotype? Borne up by the book? (24)
Great meditation on grid survey as a Great Plains necessity stupidly imposed on the northwestern terrain (191-2)
picture of paternalism (93)
A few scatters of gorgeous phrases:
wind from an enemy sky (197)
“the wind is pulling at my shadow” (19).
the ‘bleached bones’ of the ‘killed water’ (2-3)
Finally, both here and in The Surrounded, I appreciate how McNickle individuates horses. They’re more than just hooved set-pieces to him, whether it’s Henry Jim’s big bay, or Antoine’s little buckskin…
