The Secret of the Twig: Salish Adaptation, Jesuit Inculturation, and Spirit-Matter Relation in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded

Early in The Surrounded (1936), the character of Faithful Catharine—an old Salish woman who was converted by Jesuits in her childhood—raises a question that haunts the rest of the narrative: “What had come about since that day of the planting of the cross? How was it that when one day was like another there should be, at the end of many days, a world of confusion and dread and emptiness?” (22). Life on Montana’s Flathead reservation has become a “chaotic world” full of disrespect, “distrust” and “warfare” (22, 11), blighted with poverty, hunger, “misery and hopelessness” (232). While Catharine declares that “the Fathers had not done it” (131), critics have disagreed; many read the novel as an unequivocal indictment of Christianity, its spiritual and cultural assumptions depicted as fundamentally opposed to—and ignorant of—a Salish worldview and lifeway. According to these scholars, this “anti-Catholic novel” (R. D. Parker 64) portrays Christianity as a “radically alien cosmology” that “forces the Salish out of traditional patterns of relating to family, society,” nature, and the supernatural (Christensen 2–3); the Jesuit priests “doom the people [they hope] to save” (Purdy 47) as they “eradicate the Indian reality and replace it with a completely foreign conception of the world” (Owens 67). For several critics, the novel’s moral is that “Indian people know what is best for themselves and should be left alone to determine their own fates” (Lima 292). The eventual reversion of some Salish characters to paganism is read as a reassertion of lost autonomy and a resurrection of precolonial Salish identity (Purdy 77; Lima 298; Prampolini 75).

The condemnation of the Jesuits echoes a general tendency in Native American literature and scholarship to figure Christianity as an “unbidden and oblivious” vehicle of white oppression (Hoefel 52). Its missionaries and rituals are portrayed as agents of a “theological imperialism” that, confident in its own superiority, aggressively colonizes Indian identities, cultures, and ecology (Christensen). Christian and Native religions are typified as “mutually exclusive” (Deloria 237), and some hold Christian missionaries complicit—however unwittingly or unintentionally—in the genocide of Native peoples (Tinker 4).

Plenty of historical evidence justifies such accusations against Christian evangelists, including many Jesuit missionaries. Yet McNickle’s novel and the history of Salish-Jesuit relations strangely resist the invader/invaded dichotomy that structures so much scholarship. By acknowledging the Salish initiative in summoning priests for themselves and by portraying in Father Grepilloux the Jesuit principle of inculturation (adapting to Indigenous culture), The Surrounded suggests that the Jesuit worldview was not in fact “radically alien” or “completely foreign” to the Salish, nor did it, as some claim, “impose” itself “with no consideration” for the Salish view (Prampolini 74). The novel’s ambivalent narrative mode makes its assessment of the priests—and of the Salish’s self-determinative agency—significantly more complex than critics have allowed. Indeed, the novel incessantly struggles to define the protean relation between cultural adaptation and cultural persistence, between one’s spiritual identity and its material incarnations. While The Surrounded exposes the inability of Jesuit inculturation to guarantee Salish material prosperity and cultural endurance, the novel also suggests that cultural isolationism and a reversion to precontact Salish attitudes and lifeways (were this even possible) cannot adequately ensure Salish persistence postcontact. Like McNickle’s early theories of cultural adaptation, the novel obliquely suggests by its end that the Salish identity of the future need not (and perhaps cannot) be exclusively “tribal,” that it must be open to some kind of adaptation that eschews dichotomous identity categories and cultural divisions. The novel does not yet imagine for us what that might look like, but it does not appear to consider such an adaptation incompatible with authentic and persistent Salish identity.

“how it was i cannot say”: narrative ambivalence in the surrounded

The Surrounded’s irresolution about how to define the relation between Salish identity and cultural change is embodied in its young “mixed-blood” protagonist, Archilde. Having spent a year playing fiddle in Portland, Archilde returns...