Wind From An Enemy Sky by D’Arcy McNickle (review)

Reviews 87 details. At any rate, as one author assumes, “the gossip is every bit as interesting as the truth.” In this particular book, then, it doesn’t seem important to worry about separating the shadow from the substance. Nor does it seem necessary to castigate the Western Writers of America for blurring the two. Designed to entertain, to enliven as much as to enlighten, The Women Who Made The West never was intended for scholarly fare. Instead, it offers a lively crosssection of female folklore and real-life feminism, coloring for us a brighter spectrum of “good ol’ gals,” our little-known foremothers who helped to shape the West. ANN RONALD, University of Nevada/Reno Wind From An Enemy Sky. By D’Arcy McNickle. (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 1978. 256 pages, $8.95.) D’Arcy McNickle’s final novel (Mr. McNickle died shortly after com­ pleting the work) provides a fresh perspective of the theme of the subjuga­ tion of the Native peoples by the white man. Wind From An Enemy Sky lacks the astringency — but none of the force of tragedy — characteristic of other modern treatments of the relations between the two races. What is presented here is a story of hope, blighted by misunderstanding and circum­ stance, transformed into tragedy. The novel is set somewhere in the mountains of the West during the first half of this century. A dam has been built in the sacred valley of the Little Elk Indians. As we see in the premonitory note of the novel’s first sentence, the tragedy that is to come is as fixed in certainty as are the concrete and steel in the monolithic dam: “The Indian named Bull and his grandson took a walk into the mountains to look at a dam built in a cleft of rock, and what began as a walk became a journey into the world.” The opposing forces, embodied in the Indian, Bull, and the white dam-builder, Adam Pell, are joined when Bull’s nephew appears at the dam and shoots the first person he sees; the first person he sees happens to be Adam Pell’s nephew. When Pell arrives at the Little Elk Agency to investigate his nephew’s murder, however, we are presented not with someone consumed with vengeance but rather with a man predisposed to deal fairly with the Indians. The murder serves to bring the central characters together, but the instrument of fate takes the form of the Little Elk Indians’ tribal totem, the Feather Boy Bundle. Years before, the whites had managed to drive a wedge into the solidarity of the tribe, thus causing the tribe to split into two factions: the one following Bull into the mountains in an effort to preserve the old ways; the other remaining among the whites in the fertile valley and following Bull’s brother, Henry Jim. At the time of the schism, Henry Jim, in a gesture intended to consecrate his decision to follow the new 88 Western American Literature way of the whites, turned the medicine bundle over to the local missionary, who in turn sent it to a museum whose director was Adam Pell. As the novel opens, a dying Henry Jim has come to Bull’s camp in a final desperate attempt to reunite the tribe by restoring the Feather Boy. The Little Elk Indians draw together in their shared hope that their sacred bundle will be returned. But the Feather Boy, the victim of years of neglect in a storeroom of Pell’s museum, no longer exists. The final tragedy is precipitated when Pell wires the Little Elk Agency that he is bringing the Indians a present; hoping to make amends for the destruction of the Feather Boy, Pell has decided to present the Little Elk Indians with a valuable piece of Peruvian Indian statuary. The Indians, of course, assume that he is bringing the medicine bundle and are euphoric. When the searing truth of the Feather Boy’s fate is revealed to the anxious Indians, Bull’s despair is beyond the assuagement of reason. The novel’s merits are numerous. There is the finely etched character of the...