MAPPING NATIVE AMERICAN MASCULINITY IN A POSTCOLONIAL SPACE:
MALE CHARACTERS AND CONSTRUCTS OF MASCULINITY IN D’ARCY
MCNICKLE’S THE SURROUNDED
By
Anthony Correale
A Project Presented to
The Faculty of Humboldt State University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts in English: Literature
Committee Membership
Dr. Michael Eldridge, Committee Chair
Dr. Christina Accomando, Committee Member
Dr. Nikola Hobbel, Graduate Coordinator
May 2013
ABSTRACT
MAPPING NATIVE AMERICAN MASCULINITY IN A POSTCOLONIAL SPACE:
MALE CHARACTERS AND CONSTRUCTS OF MASCULINITY IN D’ARCY
MCNICKLE’S THE SURROUNDED
Anthony Correale
D’Arcy McNickle’s 1936 novel The Surrounded is a seminal work of Native American
fiction. Combining the work of theorists in both masculine studies and postcolonial
studies, I analyze McNickle’s novel as an expression of Native American identity and
masculinity in response to pernicious stereotypes of Native masculinity and to
colonialism generally. My close reading identifies where these stereotypes exist in the
novel and how Native males combat or succumb to them. Ultimately, I show how
colonialism works as a gendered process, threatening Native manhood as well as the
Native community at large.
Keywords: Twentieth-Century Native American Fiction, D’Arcy McNickle, The
Surrounded, Masculine Studies, Postcolonial Studies
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................ ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... iii
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Theoretical Framework ....................................................................................................... 5
A Hierarchy of Masculinities .......................................................................................... 5
Postcolonial Masculinities ............................................................................................ 11
Historical Context: the Reformation of National Masculine Identity in Late
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America ..................................................... 15
A Close Reading of The Surrounded ................................................................................ 19
Max and Father Grepilloux ........................................................................................... 21
Modeste, Louis and Catharine ...................................................................................... 34
The Death of One Generation, the Birth of Another: Mike and Narcisse .................... 42
Surrounded .................................................................................................................... 56
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 62
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1
INTRODUCTION
Nationhood, as Joane Nagel argues, is an expression of masculinity. “Men
organize, run, and ‘man’ the machinery of government,” Nagel points out; “they set
policy, and they make war; men occupy the vast majority of positions of power and
influence in nations in the global system” (“Nation” 397). Thus the Imperial project, the
conflict between European nations and the numerous indigenous peoples they sought to
colonize, might be characterized as the expansion and colonization of specific types of
European or American masculinity necessarily in opposition to the masculinities of those
they colonized. Indeed, as sociologist R.W. Connell notes, “the imperial social order
created a scale of masculinities as it created a scale of communities and races,” while the
imposed gender ideologies “tended to fuse with racism” (“Globalization” 75).
Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where an expanding
westward frontier served as the laboratory for the twin formation of a national and
masculine identity that was defined against the Native peoples it sought to extirpate, all
while selectively reappropriating and grafting aspects of their identities onto itself.
Integral to this process was the imposition of gender identities onto Native American
groups to legitimate the newly fashioned identity of the fledgling nation.
And yet, as Tim Edwards asserts in his book Cultural Masculinities, the
intersection of masculinity and race has received little critical attention, what criticism
exists remains largely a matter of white masculinities versus black masculinities.
Indigenous masculinities, in particular, Deena Rhyms’ has recently observed, are under-
2
theorized, even though “a number of Indigenous writers acknowledge how
decolonization is linked to re-evaluating gender relations in their communities” (1).
One such indigenous writer is D’Arcy McNickle, whose 1936 realist novel The
Surrounded depicts the complex cultural and political forces at work on a Salish
reservation. I argue that McNickle’s novel portrays an indigenous masculinity in conflict
with a hegemonic white masculinity which has been formulated at its expense and that it
is possible, in detailing this conflict, to understand how colonialism negatively affected
indigenous masculinity and consequently the indigenous community at large.
As a seminal work of Native American fiction, The Surrounded presented a
crucial expression of self-defined Native masculinity at a time when Native masculinity
was aggressively caricatured from without—from the romanticized Indians depicted by
James Fenimore Cooper to the political rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt who branded
Indians brutal uncivilized savages. McNickle positioned his protagonist in opposition to
these archetypes of Native manhood, and presented the struggle for a cultural identity as
bound up with the struggle for masculine identity.
In their special issue of Jouvert dedicated to Postcolonial Masculinities,
Lahoucine Ouzgane and Daniel Coleman characterize their task as “motivated by the
hope that criticism works: that, by calling attention to a diverse range of masculine
practices and by analyzing the structural and social contradictions as well as the
innovative possibilities among these practices, criticism can contribute to the propagation
of new, non-toxic masculinities” (6). The aims of this thesis are similar. I study
McNickle’s portrayal of a Native American masculinity constrained by early 20th century
3
notions of manhood with the hope that my analysis might be applied to other works of
contemporary Native American literature and ultimately shed light on the present state of
Native American masculinity. In order to do this, I will analyze how the novel’s male
characters, Salish, white and mixed, mediate their position relative to one another, to the
patriarchal and imperialist institutions present in the novel, and to female characters.
Before beginning my close reading of The Surrounded, I wish to construct a
critical framework that borrows from the field of masculine studies and several sources
that seek to combine that still-emergent field with postcolonial studies. I will engage
primarily with the sociologist R. W. Connell’s theories of masculinities, applying her
schema for understanding the stratification of patriarchal power and the way in which
that power is granted or denied to males of certain groups; James Messerschmidt,
William DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz’s writing on masculinity, aggression and
crime; and Joane Nagel’s work on the relationship between national identity and
masculine identity. In addition, I'll build on the work of theorists like Lahoucine Ouzgane
and Daniel Coleman, who have repurposed the work of Connell for use with
Postcolonialist theory, in their case drawing largely from the work of Homi Bhabha.
First, however, I will provide historical context for the novel, detailing the
formulation of a new national American masculinity during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth-centuries and examining how it affected Native peoples. This masculine
identity informed the federal government’s stance toward Native peoples as well as the
policy and rhetoric of figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who is remarkable as an example
of both national and masculine identity. In addition, it appears articulated in numerous
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national men’s organizations that nominally modeled themselves after, and yet excluded,
Native Americans, organizations that are symptomatic of a larger trend toward the
simultaneous fetishization and marginalization of Native American masculinities.
McNickle’s novel is both shaped by and articulated in opposition to these imposed
constructions of Native masculinity and understanding that cultural context is key to
understanding the conversation into which his novel enters.
My close reading of The Surrounded will focus primarily on the novel’s
protagonist, Archilde, and how he negotiates the conflicting and largely gendered
expectations of his community, especially those represented by his white father and
Salish mother. A significant aspect of Archilde’s character, I’ll argue, is that he’s actually
transiting the levels of a patriarchal hierarchy throughout the novel as he struggles with
his place relative to the Native Salish and white communities. One important facet of
how Archilde and other male characters, white and Salish, negotiate these conflicting
expectations is aggression, both its role as a resource in power struggles between male
characters and the degree to which it is either permitted or policed by the larger
community. Also of import is the role of the Catholic church as an implement of imperial
and patriarchal power, especially through its boarding schools, and the role it plays in
constructing Native masculinity.
5
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A Hierarchy of Masculinities
In their introduction to Postcolonial Masculinities, Ouzgane and Coleman argue
that one of the most valuable tools that can be taken from masculinity studies and applied
to postcolonial studies is the hierarchy of masculinities developed by R. W. Connell. This
hierarchy is predicated on the idea of masculinities plural and part of its usefulness,
Ouzgane and Coleman insist, is that it maintains “the power differentials the term
[masculinities] was first meant to signal… not only between men and women, but also
between men and men” (14). They then proceed to provide a summary of the theory,
somewhat repurposed for use within a postcolonial framework.
Connell’s hierarchy, as understood by Ouzgane and Coleman, provides a schema
with which to understand the stratification of male power within the patriarchal
hierarchy, delineating four levels of masculine privilege: hegemonic, complicitous,
marginalized and subordinated. Ouzgane and Coleman describe these four levels as
denoting “the various abilities to cash in on what [Connell] calls the ‘patriarchal
dividend’ or ‘the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of
women.’” Here, hegemonic males represent an idealized form of masculinity that is held
by the dominant group, chiefly white heteronormative males. Complicitous males are
those who do not meet some of the criteria for hegemonic masculinity, but still partake in
and uphold the patriarchal structure in such a way that it confers upon them benefits and
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privileges similar to those enjoyed by hegemonic males. To help understand the position
of the marginalized male, Ouzgane and Coleman point to black male athletes who “can
be used as exemplars or supports of masculine authorization” because they “exemplify
masculine potency” and yet “remain excluded from hegemonic privilege.” Subordinate
males, meanwhile, are “repositories of what is most virulently expelled from hegemonic
masculinities,” (6) a category which includes, most notably, homosexuals.
The subordinated category also contains all that is perceived as feminine, and
consequently those males who occupy this category are themselves conflated with
femininity. Thus, when we talk about a system for the division of patriarchal dividends
accrued at the expense of women, we are also talking about them being accrued at the
expense of subordinated, and consequently feminized, males. And since Native males, at
least in the context I’ll be discussing them here, fall into the subordinated category, we
are speaking directly of a hegemonic masculinity founded on their subordination and
exploitation.
Connell’s hierarchy has been borrowed and retooled for a wide range of research,
and one of the more intriguing aspects of the schema, and one that is of particular interest
for my discussion of The Surrounded, is how it accounts for violence. In her original
discussion of the schema, Connell highlighted the role of violence in preserving the
masculine hierarchy. Hegemonic males, and the institutions which can serve as
instruments of their power, often employ violence against males in the marginalized and
subordinated categories as a means of oppression. Marginalized and subordinated males,
meanwhile, might also employ violence as a last resort against hegemony, or against one
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another (Edwards 58-61). Tellingly, Connell understands acts of violence as “transactions
among men,” (Masculinities 83) with the dominant group employing it to draw clear
boundary lines between themselves and groups or activities that they seek to expel, for
example. Connell also explains how violence can be symptomatic of the hierarchy’s
precariousness, an indicator of what she calls “crisis tendencies” in the gender order or
what might be otherwise called unsustainable inequities (Masculinities 84).
The role violence plays in Connell’s schema has been further developed by other
theorists, among them James Messerschmidt, who is primarily concerned with the
relationship between masculinity and crime, and whose essay “Men, Masculinities and
Crime” neatly summarizes his nearly two decades of thinking on the topic.
Messerschmidt points out how criminology, motivated by crime statistics in which
minority males are vastly overrepresented, has long been interested in the intersection of
gender, race and class. Messerschmidt’s contribution was to apply Connell’s hierarchy to
criminology’s understanding of the motives behind violent crime, locating a male within
a specific set power relations in order to shed light on their motives, what he calls
“structured action theory.” Much of his work has involved the painstaking construction of
what he calls “life-history studies” for each individual male, mapping the structures of
masculinity within which they exist and then locating them within those structures.
Needless to say, Messerschmidt stresses the need to understand these structures on a
microsocial level and is thus reticent to generalize his findings. However, there are
several points I’d like to take from his methodology and several trends he identifies that I
think will become relevant in my discussion of The Surrounded.
8
One of the ways in which Messerschmidt seeks to understand the lives of these
men is to identify in their lives “moments of engagement.” The term is Connell’s, and
refers to “the moment in which a boy takes up the project of hegemonic masculinity as
his own,” (Masculinities 122) though Connell later stipulates that these moments can
occur throughout a man’s life, making “boy” a little misleading in the above quote. Since
Messerschmidt is concerned with crime, the examples of “moments of engagement” he
presents are most often occasions for violence; however this need not be the case, and I’d
like to return to the idea of the “moment of engagement” at a later time independent of
any linkage to violence. What is important here, however, are the myriad of factors that
govern how these moments manifest. Modeling is obviously an important factor, with
boys imitating, for example, the “use of physical violence [as] an appropriate means to
solve interpersonal problems” (204) when such a practice has been modeled as
appropriate. But the location of an individual within his particular system is also of great
importance to how these moments manifest. Messerschmidt looks at two boys with
similar family backgrounds (in which violence was modeled by the hegemonic males in
their families) who attend the same school. The greatest difference between the boys is
their size: one is much larger than average and the other is much smaller. Size, in this
instance, is roughly equivalent to power for obvious reasons, but it is possible to
substitute size for another factor such as race. Race may not be linked with power in as
straightforward a manner as physical size, but they are both resources from which to
derive power.
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Regardless, Messerschmidt’s study concluded that size played an important role
in how each boy’s “moment of engagement” manifested. The larger boy was actively and
publicly confrontational, physically menacing other boys and even throwing desks at
teachers. “[H]is body facilitated masculine social action—it was a successful masculine
resource—by creating boundaries” between himself and his victims, thus demarcating the
lines between his hegemonic masculinity and that which he was subordinating. Within
this specific setting (the high school), the larger boy “embodied practices representative
of hegemonic or exemplary masculinities” (206).
On the other hand, the smaller boy has no such resource and is unable to embody
this hegemonic masculinity within the same sphere, and, consequently, the boy
“inhabited the most subordinate position in the masculine power structure of the school”
(207). The result was that this second boy’s violent “moment of engagement” occurred in
the relative isolation of the home against a smaller cousin.
For the purposes of this paper, the primary resource of hegemonic power I’ll be
treating is race and the power hierarchy I’ll be examining is that which exists on the
Salish reservation, where being white is a resource even greater than superior size. In
addition, the kinds of violence that Messerschmidt is concerned with occur rarely in the
novel, so I’ll instead be examining acts of aggression more generally, including verbal
abuse and the threat of violence. But the trend holds: those with power resources are free
to express aggression in a public way; indeed they are sometimes encouraged to do so,
thus effectively establishing the boundaries between hegemonic masculinity and the
subordinated, while those without these resources exercise their power in private,
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subversive ways. Archilde’s brother Louis, for example, steals horses from the white
ranchers and is verbally belligerent with his Salish mother while their father, Max, is free
to threaten violence and men like Sheriff Dave Quigley are free to enact it.
Walter DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz also address the role of violence in their
essay “Masculinities and Interpersonal Violence,” including a discussion of how race and
class play a part and arguing that “the decision to be violent is affected by class and race
relations that structure the resources available to accomplish what men feel provides their
masculine identities” (356). They treat this intersection of violence, class and race
primarily in a discussion of youth gang violence: those at most risk of perpetrating such
violence, they conclude, are those males who have had their capacity to accomplish
masculinity foiled across several dimensions.
DeKeseredy and Schwartz are speaking about a specific subset of males, “innercity African American young men” who are “denied masculine status in three ways:
through the inability to succeed in school, a lack of meaningful jobs, and the racism and
stereotypes of their neighborhoods” (361) and are then more likely to attempt to
accomplish their masculinity through a range of violent, deviant behaviors. While I’ll
spend much more time unpacking more contextually specific ways in which racism and
stereotypes against Native Americans can preclude the possibility of accomplishing
masculinity, the trend DeKeseredy and Schwartz identify holds true in a general way for
the milieu of McNickle’s novel, where achievement of masculine status is denied across
numerous dimensions, thus leading to an upswing in/expectation of deviant behavior.
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All of the same factors are present, with the underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools
that obstruct the achievement of masculine accomplishment through scholastic means
having their analogue in the Catholic schools with their purported mission of replacing
the naïve prelapsarian paganism of the Salish people with an enlightened Christian
discourse replete with sin and a message of racial superiority. Economic depression is
present in both milieux as well, and abject poverty on the reservation is observed at
several points in the novel. And finally, of course, there are the racial discourses that run
through all of these, exacerbating the effects of the other factors.
Postcolonial Masculinities
Since Ouzgane and Coleman’s reformulation of Connell’s hierarchy for
application to postcolonial masculinities, several theorists have attempted to take the
approach they outline and examine specific groups in ways that combine the insights of
postcolonialism and masculine studies. Connell herself has revisited the issue, attempting
to identify and categorize a “global gender order” established as the result of
globalization and characterized by the actions of entities like “the international state”
(“Globalization” 72-73). She argues that while much of the research that might be termed
postcolonial masculinity has focused on local masculinities, the broader forces of
globalization—and the imperialism that preceded it—are integral to the understanding of
any local masculinity.
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Crucially, she views the formation of this global gender order as tied inextricably
with the processes of colonialism, highlighting where imperialism was an imposition of
hegemonic masculinity. Within colonies, “gender ideologies were linked with racial
hierarchies and the cultural defense of empire” (“Globalization” 73), drastically
reordering gender relations. This reordering also accompanied a certain pattern, often
occurring alongside “extensive sexual exploitation of indigenous women” or the
formation of various “frontier masculinities” with their own unique properties. The
capacity of imperialism to reorder the structures of indigenous societies also applied to
gender order, Connell argues, and the arbitrary impressions made on colonizers of a
group’s inherent strength or weakness quickly became a valuation in the masculine
hierarchy with certain groups disregarded as effeminate and others revered—and perhaps
feared—for some feature of masculine potency. As mentioned in my introduction, one of
the larger insights provided in Connell’s revisitation of the subject, and one which is of
special interest to my subject, is how often these valuations “tended to fuse with racism,”
thereby fusing the concerns of postcolonialism and masculine studies (“Globalization”
73-75).
To recall the hierarchy of masculinities: the forces of imperialism variously
marginalized or subordinated indigenous masculinities, allowing some to embody certain
aspects of masculinity without actually being allowed the privileges of hegemonic
masculinity, as with the black athlete, and others being denied male any male status. In
her discussion, Connell offers an anecdote demonstrating this phenomenon, telling how
the name of a Sydney suburb, Manly, came to be called such because, in the opinion of
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the first British governor of Australia, the aborigines who originally inhabited the area
were particularly manly relative to others. Similar judgments were made in the United
States concerning the relative manliness or unmanliness of different Native American
tribes, and the braiding of racial and gendered valuations played a large part in how those
tribes were perceived and treated.
Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart also combine postcolonialism and masculine
studies in their essay “Men in the Third World,” in which they “set out to see how…
global inequalities can be understood in gendered terms” (91). First, however, they draw
from more well-trod territory: black men in the United States and Europe. Black
masculinity is a logical starting point because there is more extant literature on the
subject than most other minority masculinities. Many theorists begin their discussions of
postcolonial masculinity with a brief synopsis of the most salient work on black
masculinity, including that of Tim Edwards and Ouzgane and Coleman.
Morrell and Stewart note how black men “develop subordinate masculinities that
reflect their exclusion from hegemonic male power” and that there is a “defensive aspect”
to these constructions, allowing them to create safe space that both “signals a defiance
and validates difference” (96). Their examples—the emphasis on physicality in rap and
with sports—are useful precisely because they are highly visible and easily recognized
and discussing how these masculinities interact with hegemonic masculinity and with one
another facilitates the understanding of similar strategies. As they state in their
conclusion, “the way in which black men are positioned has become central to the ways
in which we think about men in postcolonial contexts” (109). The issues with such
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strategies, too, are similar and Morrell and Stewart point out how gender inequities
within black communities are relevant to any discussion of subordinated masculinities.
Ouzgane and Coleman also notice this phenomenon when looking at the rhetoric
of Black writers like Frantz Fanon who conceptualized the civil rights movement as a
battle against white hegemony in which women were reduced to subalterns, “the sexual
battlefield over which the male warriors raged” (3). This problem crops up repeatedly in
the literature about civil rights, with bell hooks often quoted for her deconstructions of
black male sexism, and it also appears in other related instances that involve clashes
between hegemonic masculinity and subordinated masculinities, including within the
movements for Native American civil rights. While McNickle’s novel at least features
vibrant, strong female character, it is primarily concerned with Native American identity
as Native masculinity, and its female characters are often reduced to props in what seems
a larger struggle of masculinities.
There is, of course, some danger in the insistence that the local might be
understood through the global, and as far as concerns Native American cultures, this
danger might be best expressed in the disclaimer with which Brian Klopotek prefaces his
entire discussion of Native American masculinity in the context of cinema: “‘Native
American’ encompasses hundreds of different cultures with varying conceptions of
masculinity, and even within each tribal culture, different people will have different ideas
about the virtues, faults and responsibilities of manhood” (270). I will attempt to keep
this in mind as I examine how the larger patterns of globalization might apply to the local
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generally, and I will follow it with contexts that are increasingly closer to my ultimate
subject, the Salish reservation of D’Arcy McNickle’s 1930’s novel.
Historical Context: the Reformation of National Masculine Identity in Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century America
In her introduction to the essay collection Across the Great Divide, which
analyzes the role of the American west in the formulation of a new masculinity in the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Laura McCall discusses how the middle-class
men of that era sought to combat the perceived effeminizing effects of urban life through
“muscular Christianity, the strenuous life and pseudoscientific theories that stressed the
mental and physical superiority of white males” (5). McCall explains that this new,
rugged masculinity was a specifically white masculinity, formed in opposition to women
and to the masculinities of working class males and minority groups such as Mexicans,
Chinese and Native Americans. White male empowerment was achieved by emasculating
these groups of males, thus identifying them with all that the white male was not, while
simultaneously cultivating and appropriating mythical paragons of masculinity plucked
from these groups. The cowboy, the self-reliant pioneer man, and, most important for my
purposes, the Native American brave, all became fodder for the reinvention of the
hegemonic white male. Just as R.W. Connell cited the black male athlete as figure both
marginalized and revered as a paragon of masculine power, so too were these groups of
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males marginalized, mythologized and, to some degree or another, emulated by white
males.
David Anthony Tyeeme Clark and Joane Nagel, in their essay “White Men, Red
Masks: Appropriations of ‘Indian’ Manhood in Imagined Wests,” explore this process in
greater detail, examining the ways in which white males projected both their fantasies
and anxieties onto Native masculinity. The authors point to a renewed interest in Native
American culture during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries that “arose
partly from fears about a fragmenting hegemonic American manhood and desires to
reinvigorate and strengthen American manliness” (Clark and Nagel 113). Middle-class
white males thus “created their Indian, an imagined figure, to write themselves into
western stories and to re-create themselves as men who dominated other men and nature”
(114). This imagined Indian was constructed in a number of ways, including the popular
realist narratives of the day which purported to tell real accounts of white men’s sojourns
among Native Americans, and captivity narratives, which told of white women being
captured by Native tribes and subjected to unspeakable savageries. The first type of
narrative established the Native male as masculine paragon, strong, noble, master of his
environment, attuned to some deeply primitive masculine essence, while the second
played on white male anxieties and imbued Native men with such qualities as brutality,
cunning and sneakiness. Both types were, of course, largely fictive and reveal more about
the man telling the tale than anything historical, but what is important is how they worked
together to create two seemingly opposed archetypes of Native masculinity, one an
idealized depiction from which white males sought to empower their own masculinity via
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emulation, and the other a caricature emphasizing uncivilized, emasculate and threatening
aspects.
This time period also witnessed the formation of a number of fraternal
organizations supposedly modeled on Native American societies, “spaces where male
friendships were nurtured and where threats to white male hegemony could be analyzed
and expropriated, mimicked and caricatured” (Clark and Nagel 119). In these
organizations both of the above archetypes were in play: the Native male as masculine
paragon was being actively emulated, while the threats represented by the other archetype
could be neutralized. Gunther Peck looks more closely at one of these fraternal
organizations and observes that it “invoked an idealized past in which risk-taking and
masculine hierarchies were secure and unquestioned” while it “excluded Indians from
these rituals of manly and racial transformation” (Peck 81-83). Despite their proximity to
actual Native societies, these organizations were predicated on ideas that originated
entirely within white culture—springing from sources like the popular narratives—and
were consequently divorced from any actual Native community. This disconnect was so
serious that one of these fraternal organizations actually adopted the name of a recently
“removed” tribe of Paiute Indians, occupying their lodge and revering their recently
vanquished leader as a paragon of masculinity despite their organization’s entirely fictive
nature and its members’ active role in eradicating the tribe it was purportedly emulating.
Clearly, the function of such a group was the consolidation of white male power.
As Clark and Nagel note, this construction of an idealized Native masculinity,
often located somewhere in an unattainable past, created
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[a] contradictory situation in which some American reformers were busy
‘civilizing’ indigenous people in efforts to turn them into whites, while at
the same time other Americans concerned with manhood were busy
emulating, or more accurately, simulating Indian men in an effort to
revitalize Anglo masculinity. (116)
In the group Peck discusses, these processes are being enacted by the same people, a
cognitive dissonance that appears again and again in the actions of the dominant culture
relative to Native Americans.
As this new hegemonic masculinity, formed at the expense of groups like Native
Americans, ran parallel to the formation of a fierce United States nationalism, it was also
consonant with “other political ideologies of that time, in particular colonialism and
imperialism” (112). The nationalist and imperialist project, intent on eradicating the
threat posed by “the Indian problem,” as it was so often termed, draws from that second
archetype of Native American males, one which is, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt,
characterized by a “brutal unmanliness,” (quoted in Clark and Nagel 114). This is the
cunning Indian, noted for his treachery and the unrestrained savagery he exerts upon his
victim when no recourse is immediately apparent, at once emasculate and threatening. On
the other hand, the romantic Indian constructed by white males as a way to identify with
and claim some new masculine identity, is a model for masculinity, the hypermasculine
paragon of an exclusively male world. One of the many questions that D’Arcy McNickle
takes up in The Surrounded is where the lived experience of Native males fits between
these contradictory constructions of Native masculinity.
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A CLOSE READING OF THE SURROUNDED
In the novel’s protagonist, Archilde, McNickle has created the ideal vehicle for
the discussion of identity. Archilde occupies the juncture of multiple axes of race, culture
and masculinity and his efforts to negotiate and ultimately locate himself along these axes
constitute much of the novel’s plot. Archilde is the mixedblood, child of a SpanishAmerican father and a full-blood Salish mother. Of course, what exactly being
mixedblood entails is dependent upon where others choose to locate him and, to a lesser
extent, where he locates himself. Which gets at the heart of Archilde’s identity conflict: is
he white or Salish? American or Indian? Does he conform to a Salish model of
masculinity or an American one? Or is there some way to disrupt these binaries and move
beyond them? These are the questions that propel him through the novel.
The plot begins with Archilde’s return to his Native Salish reservation in Snielemen, Montana after a year’s absence. This absence has provided a break from his earlier
life, and McNickle handles the expository work of revisiting Archilde’s childhood as a
roll-call of the figures who shaped it, each perceived from a more mature vantage point.
It also provides the reader with an equally neat introduction of contemporary perspectives
regarding Native male identity.
I’ve already mentioned Archilde’s white father Max, through whom he is
connected to the dominant American perspective. As a powerful member of the
community, Max also represents hegemonic masculinity in the novel—in tandem with
another character with whom he is closely aligned: the Catholic priest Father Grepilloux.
20
Archilde’s education in the Catholic boarding school that Father Grepilloux runs has
imposed the dominant cultural perspective on him in a clear “colonizer-to-colonized”
context—that is to say, the Fathers’ express purpose in educating the young Native boys
is to redress the wrong-headedness of their Native naivety and is both corrective and
assimilative. Nowhere else in his life is Archilde so clearly and consistently identified
from outside as Native than in the closed system of the boarding school, and nowhere
else is the meaning of this identity in the colonizer’s eye so fixed or the antidote so
clearly articulated. Outside of this system, Archilde’s claims to whiteness through Max
actually allow for the possibility of assimilation in a way that would be impossible for his
full-blooded peers.
On the other hand, he is also anchored in the culture of his native community and
its traditions through his Salish mother and the influence of community elders like
Modeste. Needless to say, the Native identity they provide is very different from the
identity imposed on him by the Fathers. At the novel’s beginning, it is apparent that
whatever conception of his own Native identity Catharine and Modeste might provide has
been overridden by the sort imposed by the Fathers, and Archilde appears to be exploring
his roots in the community for the first time.
Each of these identifications—the white status conferred on Archilde as Max’s
child, Native identity as something in need of molding as the Fathers treat it, the Native
archetype of brutal unmanliness perceived by characters like Sheriff Dave Quigley, and
Native as the community defines itself as well as the innumerable possible shades of
Native and white that exist between these categorizations—corresponds to particular
21
models of masculinity. Consequently, each of the above mentioned figures also acts as an
arbiter of the masculine hierarchy, Archilde’s Salish mother Catharine included. Many of
the expectations that Father Grepilloux and Max place on Archilde are gendered—
including the expectation that Archilde act not only in accordance with the teachings of
the Church or the values of the larger white society, but also in accordance with the
strictures of hegemonic masculinity. Questions of racial and cultural identity, then, are
inextricably bound with his masculine identity and the position he occupies in Connell’s
hierarchy.
Archilde negotiates multiple positions on these axes throughout the novel, and
through a kind of triangulation, it is possible to map the axes of cultural, racial and
masculine identity and their interstices as his position changes and shifts the entire
system. For example, his position within the masculine hierarchy at any given moment is
dependent upon which cultural or racial group he is identified with, and how his behavior
either conforms to or resists the archetypes of that group. In order to elucidate the
complexities of these relationships, then, I’ll be examining several facets of Archilde’s
male-to-male interactions throughout the narrative.
Max and Father Grepilloux
Max and Father Grepilloux embody a patriarchal and imperialist attitude toward
the Salish community and toward Archilde. The role of the Catholic church is very much
a part of this attitude, and it is impossible to discuss imperialism in the novel without
22
examining the church’s presence and the effect of its boarding schools. The influence of
these two men is neither static nor monolithic, however, and it will be necessary to chart
some evolution in their thinking—particularly Max, as he begins to introduce ambiguities
into his opinion about the Salish and their essential qualities—and to address the highly
symbolic deaths of both men as the death of their perspectives’ primacy.
Max and Father Grepilloux are the novel’s most visible arbiters of hegemonic
patriarchal control, the acme of the novel’s masculine hierarchy. They are more fully
fleshed out than other enforcers of hegemonic power like Dave Quigley, and they
represent a broader pattern of contact between Euramericans and native communities,
equipped as they are with a philosophy and policy set for dealing with the Salish.
(Quigley, by contrast, is a more two-dimensional representation of simple antagonism
and disregard for Native Americans.)
The impact of these two men on Archilde is difficult to overestimate. At the
novel’s start, Father Grepilloux’s paternal attitude toward the Salish and his faith in the
inherent rightness of his project—namely the Catholic education and indoctrination of
several generations of young Salish, Archilde included—have been shaken. Discussing
the problem with Max, he muses:
Somehow or other the bad Indians that you were just speaking of have
come upon the scene. Who turned them loose, I don’t know. They spoiled
your boys for you. I’m afraid they have also taken many children from the
Church. (45)
23
Already we have what informs the way these men see the community, with innocent,
unspoiled Indians, whom they believe they and the church have an obligation to educate
and indoctrinate, on one side and the ambiguous bad Indian on the other. Evident, too, is
the Edenic/prelapsarian view that Father Grepilloux subscribes to, the belief that the
Salish, as he found them when he was a young missionary, were child-like and ignorant
and that his role was to educate them about sin. The bad Indian is a corrupting evil, and
Grepilloux’s inability to draw the connection between his own project and the unexpected
rise of the bad Indian is symptomatic of his view’s reductive simplification. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in the story of Big Paul.
In this anecdote, Grepilloux articulates the archetypes of Native maleness that
exist in the novel in a condensed form. The epic drama that Grepilloux makes of the
anecdote is a Jungian journey into the mind of the Catholic imperialist, populated by twodimensional heroes and villains that correspond to their own mythical archetypes and,
just like his description of the innocent Prelapsarian Salish peoples he encountered and
subsequently sought to civilize, dressed in the trappings of Christianity. Big Paul, in the
story, appears as a kind of failed Jesus.
More than that, it identifies the drama in which Grepilloux sees Archilde
participating, and articulates his unrealistic expectations for Archilde’s path forward, the
hope that he will succeed where Big Paul failed. Understanding the anecdote, then, is a
path toward understanding the pressures that both Max and Father Grepilloux impose on
Archilde: it is hegemonic masculinity’s prescription for the proper model of masculine
behavior.
24
Louis Owens notes that McNickle perceived the imposition of Euramerican
discourse on Native cultures to be pernicious specifically because it deprived those
communities of their own natural leaders, and that without those leaders, the culture
languished and its organization crumbled. In this context, what makes Archilde special is
“pride and spirit—these had marked him for a special existence… but something had
gone wrong…the end had come almost before a beginning had been made” (McNickle
150). Archilde’s uniqueness as expressed here has less to do with his vantage point and
more to do with his status as a potential leader, and McNickle is showing, through
Archilde, exactly how those leaders whose absence he decries are being destroyed by the
forces of hegemonic masculinity.
The story of Big Paul is told by Father Grepilloux in a moment of self-reflection,
as a lament for what almost was. His audience is Max, who has come complaining to
Grepilloux about his sons, whom he considers lost. Archilde, he tells Grepilloux, is the
only son whom he has yet to disown, but his hopes for him are diminishing. Grepilloux
agrees that “a change has come over these children” and points to the sudden appearance
of that nebulous, pernicious group: the bad Indians (45). His subsequent recollections of
an earlier time, including the story of Big Paul, are a desire to show Max what those
“children,” the Salish before their abrupt and inexplicable corruption at the hands of the
bad Indians, were once like.
When, in the story, Big Paul’s father is killed by a white man as revenge for a
murder he did not commit, he is caught between the demands of “primitive law,” as
Grepilloux terms it, which dictates that he and his family take vengeance in turn, and a
25
course of action more in line with the code of laws held by the white community. Big
Paul refuses to take part in the vengeance raid, saying only that he will help capture the
men who murdered his father so that they might be brought to the Indian agent, but
refusing to go further. In the feud that results, the brothers exact their revenge while Big
Paul abstains, continuing to advocate the intervention of law.
Inevitably, Big Paul is drawn in anyway, condemned as a coward by his own
people for refusing to avenge the murder of his brothers and mistrusted by the white men,
whose justice he intends to submit to as a means of ending the matter peaceably. When
the white men turn on him without the trial he expected, he kills them and escapes their
camp, only to be intercepted by a band of Salish, led by his only remaining brother, who
murder him as a traitor to their people.
Father Grepilloux offers this analysis in summation:
“You have least to complain of. You lose your sons, but these people have
lost a way of life, and with it their pride, their dignity, their strength. Men
like Jeff Irving have murdered their fathers and their sons with impunity.
Gross-natured officials have despoiled them, they are insulted when they
present grievances. Of course”—since Grepilloux was a priest, and a
faithful one, he added what in his heart seemed to balance all that he had
set against it—“they have God.” (59)
The idea that the imposition of Catholicism might be related to this despoiling never
occurs to Grepilloux, and on this point the narrative voice is sympathetic—if ironically
so—acknowledging that within Grepilloux’s basic schema, he appears to believe that his
26
proselytizing offers an outweighing salvation. Or, at the very least, is attempting to
convince himself that this is the case.
Max, hearing Grepilloux’s story, seems impressed by its compassion, but is still
caught wondering why it is that the Native Americans are unable to forge their own path
forward. In the following chapter, he reflects on Father Grepilloux’s story and thinks to
himself, “they had lost a way of life, as Father Grepilloux said, but—damn it! Why
couldn’t just one of his sons have the sense and the courage to make himself a new way
of life!” (75). This is the expectation in which Archilde is ensnared, that he should have
“sense” and “courage” enough to negotiate the conflicting expectations and create his
own place in the world. The imperative is being placed on Archilde specifically—who
Max considers his last uncorrupted son—to take his fate into his own hands and salvage
himself and his community. Presumably the failure to do so is to succumb to the baser
nature that Max so frequently ascribes to his sons.
When Father Grepilloux first sits down with Archilde, we are told that “in [his]
mind, the story of Archilde Leon was placing itself against the story of Big Paul… the
promise of victory after a long wait… this boy might be the promise of the new day”
(97). The connection between both men is made explicit here, as are several of the
expectation’s flaws—victory implying a more martial struggle against Salish culture than
Grepilloux has yet articulated for example, as well as reinforcing the Biblical overtones.
Clearly, then, the anecdote of Big Paul foreshadows that Archilde too will be a casualty
to this flawed view, another failed Jesus.
27
At crucial points in the novel, Archilde exhibits the paternalistic attitude
exemplified and championed by Father Grepilloux, notably in his encounters with his
young nephews, and in a number of other scenes whose shared theme is the question,
How does one help the Salish community? One of these pivotal scenes involves
Archilde’s attempts to save a starving mare, effectively running her down and separating
her from her foal in the process, and here and elsewhere the paternal attitude proves
either ineffective or disastrous, an emblem of the failure of Grepilloux’s larger project
and of Archilde’s own inevitable failure.
The other major facet of Father Grepilloux’s role in the novel involves the
Christian boarding schools that constitute a significant part of his civilizing project and
what relation they might have to the sudden appearance of the “bad Indian.” Andrea
Smith devotes a chapter in her book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian
Genocide to the pernicious influence of boarding schools on entire generations of Native
children, male and female, and the sorts of effects she diagrams are clearly present in The
Surrounded. Smith notes that “in the colonial imagination, Native bodies are also
immanently polluted with sexual sin” and “that Christian colonizers often linked Native
peoples to the Biblical Canaanites, both worthy of mass destruction” (10). No such
explicitly genocidal project appears in The Surrounded, but it is clear that the Catholic
missionaries in the novel believe that part of their project is to awaken the Salish to the
sin of their sexuality, and attempt to instill in them a sense of shame and guilt that they
believe lacking. Either way, the effect of all such projects of indoctrination, Smith
explains, is that “Native peoples internalize the genocidal project through self-
28
destruction,” (12) even going so far as to defend sexualized violence and brutal gender
inequities as “traditional” (12-14). Disturbingly, the evidence they mount in defense of
sexualized violence’s traditional roots often draws from Western discourses that
caricatured the Native American as savage and primitive before the civilizing effects of
Christianity, often actively contradicting actual traditions.
We’re given some indication of the psychological traumas that Archilde and his
brothers suffered as children, and while these are never detailed for us, they are clearly
linked with the boarding school and the imposition of Christian discourse in general. One
illuminating scene has Archilde walking into the community church for the first time
since his return to the community and feeling “quivers of fear” as he recalls a childhood
“lived in the perpetual tyranny of the life-everlasting,” a cheerless concept associated
with images of the damned falling into hell, and priests performing puppet shows in
which sinners, child-like and happily unaware of their sin, are dragged into hell by Satan
(100). His attempts to confront and dispel these fears as an adult are interrupted when a
bat flies down from the roof and brushes against his head, recalling all of the hellish
images from his childhood, and he runs from the church. Outside, Archilde marvels that
“it was inexplicable, but the dread which had been instilled into the mind of the child
never quite disappeared from the mind of the grown man” (106).
Archilde’s nephew Mike suffers a similar trauma, and this, in contrast, is
described for us. For an infraction as slight as chewing the host during communion, Mike
is placed in what is only described as “the solitary chamber” (190). We aren’t given any
details of the chamber’s contents, but its status among the boys as a place of supernatural,
29
Biblically inspired punishment is enough to ensure that the darkness and solitude are
themselves a harrowing experience. Mike is soon heard screaming from within the
chamber and he emerges from it changed: he is clearly afraid of the dark, disengaged
from his brother and the rest of his family, given to wetting the bed and to night terrors.
At school, the other boys come to believe that “the devil’s mark is on him,” (191)
effectively stigmatizing him and thereby “confirming” that he has somehow become
corrupted or touched by evil.
Smith’s primary concern, sexualized violence, is absent from the novel, but her
analysis still pinpoints the boarding school, and the concomitant Christian discourse, as a
source of numerous problems for McNickle’s Salish community. Even after Archilde
manages to distance himself from Christian discourse, the effects of his early schooling
remain, a fact further evidenced when, upon being awoken by Mike’s screaming in the
middle of the night, he finds himself “frightened and, to his amazement, crossing
himself” (186). We must also ask how much of Archilde’s older brother Louis’s criminal
behavior and his inability to communicate in a healthy way—resorting to aggression in
his interactions with Archilde and exhibiting belligerence toward his mother—are due to
similar traumas.
To his credit, even Max eventually acknowledges, if not the outright damage the
boarding schools have wrought, at least their ineffectiveness. After taking Mike and
Narcisse to the boarding school, Max thinks:
He could not explain it, but he had taken to wondering about his
grandsons. He felt that somewhere within their mysterious natures was an
30
inner core of responsiveness, and if possible it could be reached. Nothing
was accomplished with the whip, he had seen that; but friendliness, now,
seemed to work miracles. Too bad he had had to wait until he was an old
man to learn that. (112)
Too bad indeed, as by this point Grepilloux’s project and Max’s complicity in it have
gone on so long that a generational break is almost complete. Only the most ancient of
the elders remain aware of a time before all of their boys were given over to the boarding
school, leaving generations of traumatized and indoctrinated Salish.
One final aspect of Max’s character, determining how he interacts with and
influences Archilde, involves the expression of anger. Anger and hostility are important
factors for understanding how masculinity is expressed, precursors to the outright
aggression and interpersonal violence that play such large roles in the work of
Messerschmidt, DeKeseredy and Schwartz. Examining how Max and Archilde express
their anger and the reaction of the larger community to these expressions is crucial to
understanding the models for masculinity that they enact. How they express or suppress
it, how their aggression or lack thereof is perceived, and how aggression is in turn
expressed relative to Archilde are all useful indicators of their respective positions in the
masculine hierarchy. As Connell has noted, aggression is the currency of transactions
within the masculine hierarchy (Masculinities 83).
In addition, aggression is an important aspect of the two major archetypes of
Native masculine identity, and is thus subject to frequent policing by the dominant
culture. In the novel, for example, there is an implicit prohibition on Native males
31
concerning public expressions of anger, a constraint that the novel’s white males,
including Archilde’s father Max, do not suffer. This prohibition forces Native male anger
to manifest in private, subversive ways and has a direct effect on the ability of Native
males to relate to one another and to women, an effect visible in Archilde’s brother
Louis.
Of course, Max’s status as a hegemonic male is somewhat problematic given that
Max himself is arguably not safely within the category of “white.” He is a Spaniard, dark
enough that his olive skin tone is, as he thinks at one point, similar to that of some of the
Salish. For all intents and purposes, he enacts hegemonic white masculinity relative to
Archilde, but there is some question about his status relative to other white males. As I
examine his interactions with Mr. Moser in particular this is important to keep in mind,
especially since it signals a precariousness about Max’s position that might explain his
aggression as a form of overcompensation.
From the outset, Archilde’s relationship with Max exhibits the problematic
hallmarks of interaction between hegemonic masculinity and subordinated masculinity.
Specifically, we see Max employing anger against Archilde, and Archilde repressing his
own anger and retreating. This is in contrast to the way Archilde apparently perceives
himself relative, say, his brothers. Louis’s overt hostility does not prompt the same
behaviors in Archilde that Max’s does; indeed, Archilde seems to completely ignore
Louis’s aggression at one point in the novel, while assuming a position similar to Max’s
at another.
32
Upon arriving at the reservation after a period of time away, Archilde inquires
about his brothers and thinks: “already he was hearing the old stories—quarreling,
stealing, fighting. His brothers knew nothing else” (4). The commentary Archilde
provides here is two-fold: on the one hand he has identified the very problem of a
subordinated Native masculinity and the effect it has on the ability of males to interact
with one another, causing them to resort to aggression and hostility; on the other,
Archilde’s oversimplification of their deviancy is representative of that held by
hegemonic masculinity, reminiscent as it is of charges of ignorance and an incurably
savage nature.
We quickly see how precarious Archilde’s assumed position is, however, when he
visits with his father Max. Immediately, Max asserts his dominance by reminding
Archilde that he is an Indian and associating him with the concomitant negative
stereotypes. For example, Max expresses disbelief that Archilde has brought any money
back with him, insisting that Archilde must have gambled it away by now. When
Archilde responds that he does not gamble, Max replies, “what kind of Indian are you
then?” Archilde “trie[s] not to show his irritation” (6) but, despite his wish not to
capitulate to Max, Archilde eventually responds to his father’s continued goading by
showing him the money as proof. Max suggests that Archilde give him the money for
safe keeping, and when Archilde refuses his father says “So! You have learned nothing!
You will blow your money on a good time and then go on living off me” (7). Throughout
the exchange, Archilde has admonished himself to remain calm, but this comment
prompts him to “speak out in anger and so confess his helplessness” (7). Archilde
33
immediately regrets his outburst, characterizing it as “the answer of a child” (7) and is
ashamed at having been unable to hold his temper. However, Max, though he responds
with further insult, is apparently impressed with Archilde and the scene ends with Max
thinking “at least [Archilde] had not slunk away like a whipped dog” (7).
Archilde’s attempts to suppress his anger and the inevitable outburst that follows
is significant of a larger pattern in the novel. Max, enacting white hegemony, effectively
emasculates Archilde through his repeated bullying and insults—painting Archilde in
broad strokes reminiscent of the negative Native stereotypes discussed by Clark and
Nagel. Furthermore, he preemptively restricts Archilde from any valid means of
reacquiring that masculinity. Archilde’s strategy—to ignore or endure his father—is
unsuccessful, and despite knowing that a show of hostility will accomplish nothing,
Archilde inevitably explodes. It is a pattern similar to that discussed by DeKeseredy and
Schwartz, who argued that interpersonal violence was a means of accomplishing
masculinity when all other routes had been cut off. Here, aggression and hostility
expressed verbally stand in for actual violence, but the underlying logic holds.
Max’s interactions with other white males provide a contrast to his interactions
with Archilde. Elsewhere we see Max, an important and respected member of the
community, engaging other members of the community and utilizing anger as a valid
mode of communication—that is to say, his angry outbursts are not condemned in the
same manner that he condemned Archilde’s. In these instances his anger is either
tolerated as a valid mode of expression, or actively rewarded. Consider his interaction
with Mr. Moser, the shopkeeper for the small community. Their meeting is prefaced by
34
the narratorial observation that Max “was in a rage” and the exchange that follows has
Max yelling at Mr. Moser about “God damn farm machinery!” and how those who
manufacture the machinery, as well as those who repair it like Mr. Moser himself, are “a
bunch of robbers!” (79-80). Mr. Moser’s reactions throughout this exchange are
tempered, even conciliatory. He ignores Max’s oblique insults and instead tries to calm
and console him, inviting him into the back of the store for a drink.
There is no consequence for Max’s apparent expression of anger, although Mr.
Moser is a well-regarded and relatively powerful member of the community. In an earlier
encounter between the two men, in which Max also expresses his anger and suffers no
repercussion, a bystander actually observes “’Looks like he’s out to get somebody’s
hide’” to which the narrator observes, “There was an admiring tone in the voice” (28).
Here we see that Max’s conduct is actually cause for admiration, not admonition and that
his public expressions of anger are socially sanctioned. Archilde, on the other hand,
enjoys no such freedom of expression and, throughout the novel, displays a polite
passivity in the face of conflict—with the Indian Agent Mr. Parker and with Sheriff Dave
Quigley.
Modeste, Louis and Catharine
Modeste and Catharine act as counterpoints to the influence of figures like Father
Grepilloux. This is not to say, however, that these characters clearly represent the Native
half of a simple binary. Indeed, their opinions and the influence they have on Archilde
35
change considerably throughout the novel. Catharine, for example, begins as a devout
Catholic who attempts to synthesize aspects of traditional Salish life with the teachings of
Christianity but ultimately renounces her faith. And the antidote to assimilation is
realized not through Modeste or Catharine, but through Archilde’s young nephews Mike
and Narcisse. Instead, the perspective that Modeste and Catharine represent is important,
initially, simply as a contrast to the epic struggle for the Native soul that Grepilloux
believes himself to be engaged in.
Archilde’s conscious reactions to the aims of the Fathers and Max are largely
dismissive, anticipating his rejection of Catholicism is visceral and total. Yet, at first, he
is also utterly scornful of the viewpoint offered him by Modeste and Catharine. At a
gathering of the Salish to celebrate his homecoming, Archilde exhibits the detachment of
an anthropologist, sure that what’s being displayed has little real bearing on him. He
thinks:
In the way he was learning the world, neither Modeste nor his mother
were important. They were not real people. Buffaloes were not real to him
either, yet he could go and look at buffaloes every day if he wished,
behind the wire enclosure of the Biological Survey reserve… to him they
were just fenced up animals that couldn’t be shot, though you could take
photographs of them. (62)
This detachment, and the frenetic boil of emotion that follows (ranging from amusement
to vague disgust), attest to the effectiveness of the Fathers’ project. Archilde’s connection
to Salish culture has been effectively severed by his long stint in the Catholic boarding
36
school and then later at the Oregon boarding school, as well as by Fathers’ prohibitions
on certain Salish traditional practices. Furthermore, his equation of elders and buffalo is
characteristic of the larger American perception that Native culture is a curious and
obsolete relic, no longer a significant part of the world and soon to be extinct. Despite his
rejection of the letter of the Fathers’ teaching, he has apparently absorbed its spirit, and
his position relative to the Salish community of which he is part is identical to that of the
dominant culture.
Indeed, not only is he passively perceiving his tribe from the dominant culture’s
position, he is disseminating its viewpoint. When an older aunt invokes cultural tradition
to imply that Archilde should be ashamed for not being able to eat more—an interesting
expectation of masculine behavior itself—Archilde responds angrily that “you people talk
about the old days as if they were here. But they’re gone, dead. So don’t tell me what I
ought to do to be like that” (63). He rejects their cultural expectations on the grounds that
they are anachronistic and irrelevant in the modern world.
This, then, is the jaded and unwilling stance he occupies at the start of the
festivities. This scene immediately follows the anecdote of Big Paul, and while Archilde
was obviously not privy to the conversation between Father Grepilloux and Max, the
proximity of the two scenes allows us to see how closely aligned Archilde is with their
assimilative aims. The stage is set, then, for a rebuttal, and that is indeed what we get
from Modeste, who offers a retelling of the Fathers’ arrival from the Salish point of view.
37
As Modeste tells Archilde, the Salish sought guns. Where Grepilloux interprets
the Salish’s receptiveness to white men as a desire for Catholicism, Modeste sums it up
as a necessary step toward acquiring guns:
Today we can say that we never had the blood of any white man on our
hands. It was not that we feared them, but we had to have their guns. And
we could not stop being friendly once we had got some guns… because
we had to have more guns. (71)
Yet, where the acquisition of flint and iron are regarded positively, Modeste insists that
the quest for guns was a mistake—once the neighboring tribes had also acquired them,
that is—that left the people impoverished and miserable. From this beleaguered place,
then, came the desire for Catholicism—as a potential source of power to counteract the
devastating effect that guns had had on the Salish way of life. As Modeste summarizes:
This new kind of fighting just meant that more men were killed. It was
bitter fighting. And we gained nothing… A man feared to go hunting
alone or in a small company… We dared not leave our villages
unprotected for our enemies would shoot our women and children and
carry everything off. (73)
Neither the seasonal hunting nor the once low-stakes intertribal warfare is the same after
guns, and as a result the Salish are in greater danger of starvation or extermination than
ever before.
Crucially, however, the quest for Catholicism ended the same way that the quest
for guns had, with the people diminished and broken. Modeste sums up his story
38
abruptly, saying of the Fathers that “we thought they would bring back the power we had
lost—but today we have less” (74). Archilde’s reaction is immediate and powerful; he
“felt something die within him. Some stiffness, some pride, went weak before the old
man’s bitter simple words,” and for the first time the story strikes him as real (74).
Certainly, Modeste’s tale is not couched as the sort of mytho-poetic struggle that
Grepilloux’s was, and yet the story is expressly directed at Archilde, so that he may “see
better just what it was like back in those times,” a rebuke to Archilde’s earlier dismissive
outburst (70). Moreover, Modeste succeeds in shifting Archilde’s perspective, allowing
him to commiserate with the Salish in their present state and awaking in him a concern
for their future. Later, reflecting upon Modeste’s story, Archilde “found himself thinking
about them rather often, he kept wondering about their lives” (113).
Archilde also admits that following this gathering in his honor, he feels closer to
his mother. Archilde’s mother Catharine is a singular character in the novel: the daughter
of a Salish chief who, despite being known for her devotion to Catholicism and called
“Faithful Catharine,” maintains a relatively traditional life in all other ways. That is, she
has embraced Catholicism without any concomitant assimilation; the domestic schooling
that accompanied her religious education is entirely missing from the traditional Salish
home she keeps.
Catharine’s influence on Archilde is best captured in an incident that occurs
when, accompanied by Archilde’s older brother Louis, they ride into the mountains on a
hunting trip. Before analyzing the scene in the mountains, however, I’ll provide some
analysis of Louis’s role in the novel. Louis most closely adheres to the archetype
39
epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt’s emasculating description of Native males,
summarized by Clark and Nagel as “brutal and lazy, incapable of self-motivated
productive labor, but dangerous to men and cruel to women and children” (114).
Tellingly, Louis is meant to be representative, standing in for all of Archilde’s other
brothers, in whose footsteps Louis is following, and epitomizing bad Indians generally.
Max, in whose mouth an approximation of Clark and Nagel’s description appears,
also accuses Archilde of these qualities, but Archilde self-consciously breaks this
imposed construct, impressing Max in the process. By contrast, Louis responds by
articulating his own subversive brand of masculinity. Here, Messerschmidt’s discussion
of masculinity and crime becomes useful, offering us a way of understanding the
motivations for Louis’s behavior and explaining their link to his masculine status.
In the case study that served as a representative of Messerschmidt’s larger
findings about masculinity and crime, the criminal acts of two boys were analyzed in
terms of one factor: physical prowess. The larger boy used his physical power as a
resource for the accomplishment of masculinity, committing aggressive acts in public
displays of power while the smaller boy committed a private act of aggression,
accomplishing his masculinity all the same. In the case of Louis, physical prowess is not
relevant: instead the determining factor is the power conferred or denied by racial status.
If we compare Max with Louis, we see a binary similar to Messerschmidt’s, the
salient difference being that Max is identified as white and thus hegemonic, while Louis
is identified as Native and subordinate. Thus Max’s aggression is accepted and even
encouraged by the community, a valid avenue for the accomplishment of masculinity.
40
Louis, on the other hand, cannot express his aggression publicly. Consequently, he resorts
to horse-stealing, a subversive act committed against the white ranchers, as a way of
accomplishing masculinity. In addition, he is particularly belligerent toward his mother
and Archilde, in a manner reminiscent of the interpersonal violence that DeKeseredy and
Schwartz identify as a means of accomplishing masculinity in their study of inner-city
black youths. Louis, like those youths, has been denied conventional avenues for the
accomplishment of masculinity: school has become a source of trauma, farm work is
rendered equally unsatisfactory by his father’s presence and likely concomitant verbal
abuse, and any of the traditionally Salish routes have been foreclosed on by the
withdrawal of elders like Modeste in favor of the Fathers’ teachings. Similar to the
youths in Dekeseredy and Schwartz’s study, then, Louis settles on violence and
aggression as the only valid means of accomplishing masculinity.
Every scene with Louis is characterized by aggression of some form or other, and
Archilde says of him that he “had a slow mind and the only way he could hold his own
was by growling,” implying that animalistic aggression is Louis’s one reliable resource
(17). In his first appearance, Archilde’s observation is borne out, as Louis responds often
with threats of violence: when Archilde warns him that Sheriff Quigley is after him,
Louis replies “if he wants me I’ll be waiting with my gun!” and, when the two begin to
verbally abuse one another, it is Louis who “holds his hands up in a position to fight”
(18-19). In the scene that follows, Louis is equally threatening towards his mother
Catharine.
41
The fraught dynamic between the brothers and their mother culminates with the
hunting trip, an experience that pits the two men against each other in a sort of masculine
competition with their mother as judge and moderator. Archilde’s opinion of Louis is
exceptionally low; indeed it is disturbingly consonant with Max’s own view of Louis and
with the view of hegemonic masculinity generally, focusing on Louis’s laziness, stupidity
and childishness. “He was a child talking,” Archilde observes at one point during the hunt
(119). And Archilde insists on antagonizing his brother frequently, apparently intent on
emasculating Louis and proving himself the better hunter. Archilde appears to be
subordinating his brother across as many dimensions as possible, from a place of
hegemonic white masculinity and a place of Salish hegemonic masculinity.
Eventually, the brothers stake out their own positions and lay in wait for the deer.
Throughout this wait, Archilde begins to reconceptualize the meaning of the hunt,
downplaying the significance of hunting prowess. Thus, when the moment comes and a
deer appears, Archilde decides to intentionally miss his target, apparently convinced that
lying in wait for a deer is so detached from the thrill and expertise of a real hunt that such
a kill would be empty. And yet, despite insisting that “his mind was at rest about the fact
of his failure as a hunter,” Archilde immediately feels foolish when he appears emptyhanded to his expectant mother, who is ready for his kill with skinning knife in hand. In
addition, he immediately continues to disparage Louis. “I guess Louis’s is shooting
squirrels” he says dismissively (to which his mother responds that he will, at least, not
miss his shot as Archilde did), and upon seeing his brother’s deer, a yearling, he asks
mockingly, “couldn’t you find a smaller one?” (123).
42
Throughout this entire trip, Archilde appears simultaneously concerned with
exhibiting prowess as a hunter—or, if not exhibiting prowess himself, at least ensuring
that his brother does not—and asserting superiority over Louis as a civilized, mature and
intelligent man. That is to say, Archilde is almost wholly occupied with exemplifying his
hegemonic male status relative Louis as both a Salish man and a white man, conforming
both to his mother’s expectations of masculinity, which focus on hunting prowess, and to
Max’s, which aren’t defined by any particular set of qualities but which are achieved at
Louis’s expense by voicing many of the same deprecations of Louis’s character that Max
himself does.
Ultimately, Louis is shot in the back of the head by a game warden made nervous
by what he perceives as Louis’s aggression, but which is in fact Louis’s panic. Catharine
responds by striking the warden in the head with her hatchet. Later, as they ride away
dragging Louis’s body, she reflects that when Louis was a child, she had
[Known] his eyes. Then he went to school to the Fathers, and there was a
change. She could not understand why it was… She never saw his eyes
again… He drew a knife on a man, ripped him open, and for that he was
almost sent to prison. Then he stole horses. Now he was dead. (131)
Catharine has located the source of the Native community’s problem as Father Grepilloux
could not. Thus begins the doubt that will eventually lead to Catharine’s renunciation of
Catholicism and her reinvigoration of long-prohibited Salish custom.
The Death of One Generation, the Birth of Another: Mike and Narcisse
43
Louis’s abrupt death marks the beginning of a trend, and by the time the novel is
two-thirds finished, most of the major influences upon Archilde have died. Father
Grepilloux dies first, followed by Max (who dies, ironically, of pneumonia contracted
while attending Grepilloux’s funeral hatless) and finally Catharine. None of them,
however, manages to die without first making some last dramatic statement that further
complicates Archilde’s ongoing crisis of identity.
On his deathbed, Max symbolically reconciles with his wife, apparently
abandoning his cynical stance toward the Salish community. This is in addition to his
change of heart regarding the Fathers’ project, and his feeling that his nephews can
perhaps be reached through a different approach: “nothing was accomplished with the
whip, he had seen that; friendliness, now, seemed to work miracles” (112). His offer of
forgiveness to Catharine and his change of heart regarding the role of the boarding
schools in his nephew’s lives stands in for Max’s admission of the failure of the
assimilative project that has preoccupied the community for the last several decades.
Catharine, meanwhile, undergoes a dramatic renunciation of Catholicism,
deciding that the atonement it offers is inferior to that of the old Salish practice of
whipping. Catharine requests, in front of the other elders, that Modeste whip her,
breaking an explicit injunction by the Fathers against the practice. When Modeste and the
elders agree, they are breaking with policy set down many years earlier at the time that
the boarding schools began. Her renunciation is also enormously symbolic, and the Salish
elders appear to be ending their tacit approval of the Fathers’ policies and of assimilation.
44
Their revival of the practice of whipping is an important rebuttal, a reclamation of the
traditions whose passing they so often lament.
The deaths of Father Grepilloux, Max and Catharine represent a dramatic
generational shift: no longer are the assimilative policies of the Fathers unquestioned and
unchallenged. The very architects of the policy have died doubting their project, and the
ideal convert and adherent, “Faithful Catharine,” has died renouncing her Catholic faith
in favor of Salish tradition. In order to better understand the full implications of this shift,
however, it is necessary to consider the novel’s only young characters: Archilde’s young
nephews Mike and Narcisse whose trajectory becomes an increasingly important concern
as the older generation die off.
Beyond their importance as case-studies in a nascent generation of Native males,
Mike and Narcisse have two other interesting functions in the novel, at times acting as a
kind of bellwether, displaying changes in thinking about masculinity and their place in
the community that parallel Archilde’s own evolution, and at other times acting as
Archilde’s foil. Their evolution is crucial to the novel, and those scenes in which they
appear are invariably important points in the larger discussion about Native masculinity
in which the novel engages.
Mike and Narcisse first appear early in the novel when Archilde notices them
tailing him as he walks along the creek, “too bashful to come out in the open” (12). When
he catches them, their first impulse is to run away. This sets the tone for their initial
relationship with Archilde, where for all intents and purposes, he represents both
hegemonic masculinity and “white” authority. When, for example, Narcisse reveals that
45
the younger boy, Mike, is called Little Lord Jesus in the Catholic boarding school
because “he won’t cut his hair. He thinks he’ll be a chief if he don’t cut it off,” Archilde’s
solution is to tell Mike that he’ll take him to a barber (14). Clearly, Mike’s act of
resistance against the imposed Catholic discourse is motivated by a desire to adhere to a
model of masculinity unique to his own community, but Archilde’s response is
essentially to advocate for assimilation.
Given Archilde’s largely cynical and dismissive stance concerning Salish culture
at the novel’s beginning, this is unsurprising. The advice Archilde gives is also in line
with his own behavior, as he is apparently eager to leave the reservation once more and
rejoin the outside world. At several points in the first chapter, Archilde thinks of his trip
home as something temporary, his family something to be endured while he
commemorates the place of his childhood for one last time before departing for good. In
this sense, he appears in the boys’ lives as an extension of Max or Father Grepilloux.
And if Archilde is here exhibiting his most two-dimensional, assimilated self, the
boys themselves seem to conform to their own two-dimensional models: bad Indians in
training. Indeed, Mike and Narcisse display several negative aspects of the Native
archetypes discussed by Clarke and Nagel. First, they are seen sneaking up on Archilde,
unwilling to confront him head-on. Once he has engaged them, their first interaction is to
demand that he show them the money he’s brought back with him. When he shows them
the money, the younger boy Mike immediately asks “where you steal that?” (12). When
Archilde demands to know how Mike knows about stealing, we are told that “such a
question pained Mike. He did not have to be told such things” (12-13).
46
This exchange raises several questions about Mike and Narcisse and about their
role in the novel. It is not difficult to see why they might assume Archilde has stolen the
money: Louis appears to be their primary model for Native masculinity. When Archilde
asks them about Louis, who, his mother has just told him, is wanted for horse-stealing
and is hiding in the woods, Mike, the same boy who refuses to cut his hair because he
wants to become a chief, proudly exaggerates the number of horses Louis has stolen
(fifty). Clearly, there is prestige in this activity and Louis is an exemplar of that prestige
for the boys. They begin the novel, then, clearly aligned with one very stereotypical
model for Native masculinity, one characterized by subversive resistance to powers
hegemonic and imperialist. There is a link between Mike’s small act of resistance in the
context of the Catholic school and his reverence for Louis. In addition, they assume that
Archilde too conforms to the model of Native masculinity presented by Louis since they
expect his money to be ill-gotten. This assumption implies that they hold a racialized
model for masculinity, and that Archilde’s Native identity is enough to categorize him
alongside Louis—the same sort of racialized thinking, ironically, that Max demonstrates.
Since we are given little background on the boys, it is impossible to conjecture
exactly how they arrived at this model of masculinity. Indeed, we might see their position
as a result of Max’s racialized expectations (in the next scene he openly doubts that
Archilde has managed to acquire money at all, ill-gotten or otherwise), or of the
expectations of the Fathers who run the Catholic boarding school—both reasonable
assumptions given how these forces act on the boys throughout the rest of the novel—but
for now, their position is largely important as a starting point for their development. More
47
important will be how they evolve beyond this position and what models for Native
masculinity they will forge for themselves.
As I’ve discussed, the role of the Catholic boarding school in the development of
the novel’s Native characters, especially the males, cannot be overstated. A significant
part of Archilde’s homecoming is his confrontation with the scars left by the Christian
Biblical stories that the Fathers had told him in church and school, stories that clearly
traumatized him. At one point or another, we see each of the novel’s major role models—
Max, Father Grepilloux and Catharine—implicating the boarding school system as a
source of discord in the Native youth. Father Grepilloux identifies the large-scale
generational trauma when he states that “a change has come over these children…
somehow or other the bad Indians… have come upon the scene,” though he never makes
the causal connection explicit (45). Catharine’s thoughts turn to the boarding school
when she reflects on Louis’s life and laments that, upon returning from the school, he
was lost to her. Max, too, comes to view the practice of packing his sons off to the
boarding school warily, suspicious that this is the wrong approach.
Yet, as the adults around them struggle with the damage the boarding schools
have wrought, the boys actively live it and provide a kind of real-time test case for
surviving its aftermath. We are led to believe that Archilde only managed to survive
relatively intact because his desire to study and practice the violin, and the crucial,
positive attention it yielded from the teachers at his Oregon boarding school, sustained
and sheltered him from the school’s abuses, but this is never developed or expanded
upon. Yet, the how of Archilde’s emergence from the boarding school as a functional
48
adult is one of the novel’s most important quandaries: if the boarding schools have
caused a cycle of trauma and dysfunction, how is it possible to break that cycle? Mike
and Narcisse are an attempt to speak to that question, if not answer it.
From the first, the school is an imposition on the boys. Max can only return them
to it by sleight of hand. Indeed, he refers to it as “capturing” them, and he is careful not to
give any indication that they are to return to the school soon lest they “disappear like
scared rabbits” (110). Once they are trapped in the school’s courtyard, Max observes that
they “were like animals brought to the zoo” (111). Mike’s reaction to this betrayal is
telling. After calling Max a liar, he looks as though he’s about to cry but “just when it
looked as if he would, he turned upon Narcisse, who was bigger by a head, and began to
fight him” (111). In this moment of utter powerlessness, Mike sublimates his apparent
shock at Max’s betrayal and transmutes it into an act of aggression reminiscent of those
discussed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz, who see interpersonal violence within urban
African-American communities as a way of “accomplishing masculinity” when most
other avenues have been denied. In this moment, Mike averts a show of weakness by
accomplishing his masculinity against the only available person, his older brother, who
must stand in for the untouchable Max. And this is not a singular example of this
behavior, but is, in fact, representative of a pattern of behavior between the boys, who are
seen fighting with one another frequently throughout the novel, both before and after this
moment.
Mike and Narcisse are not seen again until they are released from the Mission for
spring break, when their transformation is abruptly apparent and heartbreaking.
49
Immediately we are told that “something was wrong” with Mike (186). His time at the
school has clearly traumatized him; he has returned quiet and fearful, afraid of the dark
and given to wetting the bed. Archilde, awoken in the middle of the night by his
nephew’s screaming, is so affected that his own experience in the Mission school
resurfaces and he immediately crosses himself without quite realizing what he’s done.
Archilde begins to worry about his nephews, trying to conceive of ways to help them
overcome the apparent trauma they’ve endured. The answer, however, comes not from
Archilde, but from the community of Native elders, Modeste in particular.
Modeste’s solution is to offer Mike a privileged position by his side during the
community’s Fourth of July ceremony. Archilde appreciates the importance of this offer
explaining that:
Modeste occupied the situation of honor at all tribal gatherings, and this
distinction was heightened by the unique place he occupied in the minds
of all men, Indian and white, for his own character. Mike would be stirred
by this, his pride would be awakened—if it were still alive. (199)
The issue at hand is one of psychological trauma, and yet the solution Modeste presents,
and the terms in which Archilde understands it, is tied up with both masculine and
community status. Modeste proposes to facilitate Mike in the accomplishment of his
masculinity, affirming him as a Salish man.
When we see the ceremony, however, it is through Archilde’s jaded eyes.
Initially, Archilde observes that
50
there was nothing real in the scene he came upon. The rows of carriages
and wagons were bad enough, but that wasn’t the worst. The idea was of a
spectacle, a kind of low-class circus where people came to buy peanuts
and look at freaks… It was a sad spectacle to watch. It was like looking on
while crude jokes were played on an old grandmother, who was too blind
to see that the chair had been pulled away just before she went to sit down.
He felt the hurt which the old men suffered unknowingly. (McNickle 216217)
Archilde’s eyes are drawn to the male dancers, and yet his description tellingly evokes an
old grandmother. He sees a scene entirely devoid of masculine power, going so far as to
feminize it. The spectacle, taking place as it is on the Fourth of July rather than at the
traditional point in midsummer, is clearly being displayed for the white onlookers.
Consequently, the entire scene is haunted by the archetype of native male power, the
Native male body as a paragon of masculine power to be coveted and emulated. Archilde
assumes the vantage point of the white onlookers by perceiving the dance as a spectacle
and mimics the attitude that he held at the beginning of the novel when he described the
Salish and their customs as anachronistic and likened them to an exhibit. Furthermore, his
position at the edge of the dance with the white onlookers in a perimeter, is fraught with
symbolism. Together, they are surrounding the dance, and their perception of what
occurs—a spectacle or an exhibit of something curious and antiquated, like the buffalo
Archilde mentions—plays a significant role in stripping the ceremony of its meaning and
power both as a cultural practice and as an expression of masculinity.
51
Archilde’s perspective is disrupted, however, when he sees Mike preparing to
take part in the ceremony. From Mike’s perspective, Archilde is offered a radically
different view of events. From this sympathetic standpoint the dance becomes “graceful,”
with the dancers “moving unhindered through space.” Archilde admires “the majesty of
the dancers,” feeling that “it really seemed, for a moment, as if they were unconquerable
and as if they might move the world were they to set their strength to it. They made one
think of a wild stallion running free—no one could approach him, no one would ever
break his spirit” (218). This is as close to identifying with the Salish as Archilde ever
comes, and it is also one of the more hopeful scenes in the novel. That Mike could
experience his culture anew and emulate the masculine model it provides even with the
mocking spectators hemming him in, and that Archilde could vicariously experience it,
offers some hope for the Salish community’s ability to recover itself in the face of the
devastating forces that are actively robbing it of its power. The moment is short-lived,
however, and ultimately Archilde’s perspective flips back. By the end, he is painfully
aware of the humiliating aspects of the ceremony and he is ultimately unable to see it as
an affirmation of masculine identity.
Despite the moment of empathy, Archilde’s inability to see the dance as Mike
does represents a significant difference between himself and his nephews, and it sets him
up in opposition to them by novel’s end. They are capable of exploring a route towards
masculinity that Archilde apparently was not and it is important to analyze how far the
boys pursue it and whether or not the novel posits it as a valid route.
52
Earlier I mentioned “moments of engagement,” a concept of R.W. Connell’s that
was important to Messerschmidt’s discussion of masculinity and crime, constituting “the
moment in which a boy takes up the project of hegemonic masculinity as his own”
(Masculinities 122). Mike and Narcisse enact this moment most clearly when Archilde
encounters the two of them hiding in the woods—after they have fled from the
government agent assigned to forcibly return them to the Catholic boarding school—
enacting their own version of the Fourth of July dance: “The boys had peeled a young fir
tree at the center of a small clearing, and around it they were dancing. The peeled tree
was striped with red paint, giving it some special meaning. One boy danced while the
other beat the drum” (245). Archilde wonders, “was it a game of which they would soon
tire? Or was it a way of life which the Fourth of July dance had taught them? Their faces
revealed nothing” (245). Their ceremony is significant because it has been divorced of all
of the performative aspects that seem to have so perverted the spectacle that Archilde
observed earlier. Without the pageantry of the Fourth of July festivities and, more
importantly, without the perimeter of mocking white onlookers, it retains the power that
the boys have invested in it. And that power is real: the boys soon inform Archilde that
Mike is no longer afraid of the dark, implying that the ceremony has undone the
psychological traumas Mike suffered at the boarding school. It fulfills a spiritual need,
sustaining, healing and aiding the boys in their resistance to the damaging aspects of the
imposed Christian discourse.
Perhaps more significantly, the private ceremony has replaced the constant
fighting Archilde has witnessed between them and other boys, suggesting that the dance
53
is a form of constructive masculine expression capable of replacing the displays of
aggression which had previously mediated their position in the masculine hierarchy. The
pattern of interpersonal violence initiated when Mike, on the verge of tears, turned and hit
his brother, has been altered, the energy redirected into an affirmation of cultural and
masculine identity.
However, for all its hopefulness, McNicke seems to suggest that such a resolution
is not sustainable: their solution is contingent upon the boys having removed themselves
entirely from the community at large—from the perimeter of white onlookers that
jeopardized the Fourth of July dance, for example—creating a self-contained campsite,
and thus establishing independence from the forces of hegemonic masculinity and
cultural imperialism. Archilde himself alludes to this, pointing out that the boys will
eventually have to stop dancing and emerge from the woods when the season has turned
and there is no longer any game available. Critic Louis Owens reads this comment as an
assertion that “inevitably, McNickle acknowledges, the Indians will have to engage in
dialogue with their conquerors; however, the dialogic deck is stacked infinitely in favor
of the dominant culture” (66). Soon, that is, there will no longer be a space in which to
carve out this independence—the forces that constrict the Salish community are closing
in, the mocking white onlookers are inching closer.
This is one of those instances in which the boys act as Archilde’s foil, however, as
the moment becomes an occasion for him to reflect on the widening gulf between himself
and his own people, locating the boys’ act as an expression of Native identity and
54
masculinity that is alien to him. And with this realization, Archilde recalls his experience
with the mare, one of the novel’s most pivotal and symbolically fraught scenes.
The scene follows the Fourth of July dance: Archilde encounters a starving mare
searching for food with its foal and attempts to help the mare—or more accurately, tries
to force it to accept his help. Archilde’s comparison between the Salish dancers at the
Fourth of July ceremony and the “wild stallion running free” primes us for the allegory
which this subplot is clearly meant to posit. Here, the skeletal mare might be read as a
symbol for the Salish culture’s current state: where the mare is emaciated and worn
down, the Salish people suffer from the oppressions of colonialism, including the
corrosive effect that Christian boarding schools have had on their culture.
The mare, scared of Archilde, attempts to flee. Several dimensions of this allegory
are of interest, not least the fact that the horse, though female, responds to Archilde in the
same way that the Native male characters respond to civilizing attempts of white
hegemony. Some critics, January Lim among them, have posited that the mare stands in
for Archilde’s mother, Catharine, and that the mare’s resistance symbolizes that of the
novel’s female characters. This reading is in line with Lim’s larger project, which is to
rectify what she sees as a critical gap by rereading agency into the novel’s female
characters. As such, I would dismiss it for the same reason I dismiss much of her thesis—
for the simple reason that I find McNickle’s depiction of female characters to be
consistently problematic. That is, McNickle’s females are often passive, stock characters
in whom I think it would be a mistake to read the lives of real Native women. While
Catharine does constitute some exception to this rule—her renunciation of Christianity
55
late in the novel being a significant act of resistance worthy of analysis—generally her
behavior, like that of other female characters, is disturbingly, problematically passive.
Instead, I think, the mare’s flight might be more accurately identified with
characters like Archilde’s brother Louis, who escapes into the wild to avoid persecution
for horse stealing, or with Mike and Narcisse. In this context, the fact of the horse’s
gender becomes interesting for another reason, as it mirrors the emasculation of these
male characters. Louis, for example, is often described in a fashion similar to Theodore
Roosevelt’s description of Native males, summarized by Clark and Nagel as “brutal and
lazy, incapable of self-motivated productive labor, but dangerous to men and cruel to
women and children” (114). The mare’s gender, then, could be read as the symbolic
conflation of its behavior with that of a feminized, subordinated male like Louis.
Archilde is both frustrated by the mare’s resistance to his help and amazed by its
tenacity, observing in it the same spirit he ascribed to the dancers. Ultimately, however,
the mare’s flight proves self-destructive—the mare goes lame—and Archilde is forced to
kill it. This encounter symbolically takes the clash of cultures and masculinities to its
logical extreme with Archilde enacting the role of white culture and hegemonic
masculinity and the mare enacting that of the Salish culture and the subordinated Native
male. His motivations and frustrations echo those of Father Grepilloux and the project of
the Catholic boarding schools—determined to impose their assistance and ultimately
confused and angered by the recalcitrance of their subjects.
That Archilde should recall this encounter when confronted by Mike and Narcisse
in their makeshift camp further strengthens the connection between Archilde’s intentions
56
with the mare and Grepilloux’s with the boarding schools. More interesting, however, is
how Archilde apparently forgets the foal in his desperate attempt to save the mare.
Beyond the first image of it grazing alongside its mother, the foal is not mentioned again
and it is presumably left behind when Archilde gives chase. Mike and Narcisse, like the
foal, are casualties of the ideological clash, members of a lost generation largely left to
fend for themselves.
Ostensibly, Archilde recalls his encounter with the mare as a reminder not to
impose his will upon Mike and Narcisse. And indeed, Archilde assures them that he has
no intention of dragging them back to the Mission school. Yet his acknowledgement that
their position is an untenable one means that the boys will, at some point, be dragged
back into the fold, even if Archilde isn’t holding the reins. The boys have established a
viable route toward accomplishing their masculinity, but it is not a permanent solution.
The forces of hegemonic masculinity remain, and they will soon impose themselves on
the boys, closing off this particular route.
Surrounded
An anonymous quote in the novel’s frontispiece offers a translation of the
setting’s Salish name: “They called that place Sniél-emen (mountains of the surrounded)
because there they had been set upon and destroyed.” In this sense, the title of the novel
refers literally to the mountains that encircle the place and to the symbolic meaning it
holds for the Salish people. Yet the idea that the Salish are “surrounded” also constitutes
57
the novel’s most persistent and multilayered motif, important to numerous of its scenes
and also for the novel’s larger, general questions about the future of the Salish people.
At the Fourth of July dance, the Native dancers are surrounded by white
onlookers and, as I’ve argued, that “surrounding” plays a crucial role in depriving the
dance of its meaning and reducing it to a spectacle. Archilde forms part of that periphery,
and in this role he assumes the derisive perspective of the dominant culture. But another
dance scene directly follows, one in which Archilde and Elise—a Salish woman—join a
largely white group in a dancehall. Here, Archilde and Elise dance surrounded by white
onlookers who, upon observing that the two are drunk, begin to place bets on how long it
will take Archilde to blow through Max’s money. Though oblivious in the moment that
he has become the spectacle, the event establishes a reputation for Archilde. and at a later
point he reflects on it, providing an observation that forms the crux of my analysis:
It angered him to be watched and to have bets laid on him. It was the very
thing that could have made him become reckless and do the sort of hellraising they were predicting of him… But he wasn’t inclined to hellraising. That was what angered him. These people knew nothing about
him. (McNickle 251)
Archilde’s thoughts epitomize the issue faced by Native males, capturing the complex
reciprocity between the strict and constant community policing of his behavior and the
anger that is a toxic, inexpressible byproduct of that policing. This is our insight into
characters like his brother Louis who react to this pressure by committing subversive acts
of the very kind the community suspects.
58
The novel’s underlying geospatial metaphor is useful here as it also applies to
masculine expression, where the conventional cultural avenues towards “accomplishing
masculinity” have been blocked. The white onlookers constitute this barrier in the dance
scenes, but there is one character in particular who embodies it above all: Sheriff Dave
Quigley. Indeed, the scene in which Archilde reflects on the effect of having “bets laid on
him” is bracketed by him thinking anxiously about the prospect of encountering Quigley.
After the disastrous hunting trip into the mountains that results in the death of
both Louis and a game warden, Quigley becomes an increasingly menacing presence in
the novel and a growing source of anxiety for Archilde, who is worried that Quigley will
discover the body of the game warden and implicate Archilde and Catharine in the
killing. Quigley is, as Archilde describes him,
a name that could frighten most Indians, for the Sheriff had a reputation. It
seemed that every time an Indian left the reservation he almost certainly
ran into the Sheriff and had to give account of himself. Usually, if he saw
the Sheriff first, he didn’t stop for an explanation but simply whirled about
and left a trail of dust behind… He was a Sheriff out of the old West. He
knew the type—he had read of those hard-riding, quick-shooting
dispensers of peace, he had heard stories about them—and he was intent
on being all of them in himself. (117)
There are several important points to parse out of this description. Foremost is the role
that Quigley plays relative to the novel’s title, The Surrounded. As Archilde notes,
Quigley himself is part of that barrier that has encircled the Salish people, an omnipresent
59
force hemming the Salish in and preventing egress physically but also symbolically.
When Archilde attends the homecoming celebration that his mother has arranged for him,
he is reminded of buffalo exhibited in an enclosure. The exhibition causes a disconnect
between Archilde and the buffalo, rendering them unreal. Quigley is that enclosure for
the Salish community, and it is his presence that similarly entraps them and renders them
unreal—a curiosity, a relic, amusing but soon to be extinct (62).
In addition, Quigley is an intentional caricature, an embodiment of the imagined
symbol of the West, a cowboy. It is Quigley who stands opposite the boldly drawn Indian
archetypes discussed by Clarke and Nagel, the natural enemy of the Indian in the popular
imagination. In the same way, he also represents a caricature of a particular brand of
rough masculinity, described as an implacable, dead-faced figure. Perhaps the best
evidence for the power of his model of masculinity, however, is the impact it has on
Native men: Archilde mentions that most simply flee rather than face him, for example.
Archilde himself, running into Quigley upon his release from a holding cell (he was
detained as a precaution after returning from the mountains with Louis’s body), “felt
himself turn pale and cold, felt his heart die” (154).
Not surprisingly, Quigley perceives in all of the Native men he meets the negative
stereotypes associated with them. Grepilloux’s condescension was tinged with
compassion and Max’s anger and distrust eventually soften, but Quigley appears at all
times to assume the worst in Indians. In this way, his expectation becomes a selffulfilling prophecy of sorts, epitomized by Archilde’s thoughts about the bets wagered
against him, and emblematic of the larger culture’s attitudes toward Native Americans.
60
From the incident in the mountains until the novel’s end, there is a sense that
Quigley is closing in, encircling Archilde and cutting off all of the paths that once seemed
open to him. As the major characters die, these paths seem to vanish one by one, leaving
Archilde, at novel’s end, in the mountains with his nephews and Elise.
After the events of the novel’s dénouement, McNickle places Archilde in a
convenient stupor, unaware of his surroundings and vulnerable to Elise’s suggestion that
they escape into the mountains. As elsewhere in the novel, Archilde’s apparent
cognizance of a particular course of action’s hopelessness—here the futility of escape,
elsewhere the attempts to revive Salish custom, or Mike and Narcisse’s attempted escape
into the forest—is rendered irrelevant by his inevitable trajectory. Were it not for the
sudden, inexplicable deprivation of Archilde’s agency, he would have submitted himself
to justice, knowing that running was not an option. This is confirmed when he says to
Elise, upon awaking from his stupor, that “you can’t run away nowadays” (287), a
sentiment echoed a few pages later upon Archilde’s capture by the Indian agent, Parker:
“It’s too damn bad you people never learn that you can’t run away. It’s pathetic” (296297). The irony is that Archilde has spent the novel asserting exactly this in various
forms, even enacting it symbolically through his encounter with the mare.
The novel ends with Quigley dead at Elise’s hands, and Archilde “extend[ing] his
hands to shackled” (297) by the white man that has sprung up to take his place. Elise has
been caught as well, and though Mike and Narcisse have escaped for now, their capture is
most likely imminent—you can’t run away nowadays, after all. The reader is left to
wonder whether this ending was predestined, whether Archilde ever truly had alternative
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paths available to him. There is no clear answer, and perhaps McNickle, devoting his
entire life to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and attempting to mediate between his Native
community and the United States Government, could not conceive of one; after all, the
Native struggle for identity and sovereignty continued unresolved throughout his life and
beyond. More important than any overarching solution, however, is what insight
McNickle’s depiction offers into the plight of Native communities and into the way that
both cultural identity and masculine identity are repressed and warped by imperialism.
62
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