In The Surrounded, Archilde, a young man of dual cultural identity—Salish/Spanish—returns to the Flathead Reservation to say his last good bye after attending an Indian boarding school and working in Portland. There he finds himself caught in conflicts between family members, the church, the law, and other non-Indian outsiders, as well as his own conflicts with his past and present experience. By the novel’s end, Archilde has redefined his identity. After reading this novel, an eleventh-grade student wrote: "I believe the closeness Archilde feels toward his fellow people is something that he could not experience in the white world. Despite the internal closeness to his people, Archilde is disrespectful of many views and actions. He wants the best of both worlds...and is hopelessly caught...At the end, these conflicts remain unresolved" [excerpted from Susag, Dorothea M. Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literature Themes, Lessons, and Bibliographies. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998. (169-170)].
According to Dr. Jim Rains essay “'He Never Wanted to Forget It': Contesting the Idea of History in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded," “It is a Native-authored text that attempts to address what the author perceives to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Native American people. It is a book about history: how Native American cultures have been constrained and limited by conventional histories and how they as distinct cultures perceive and practice history differently from Euro-Americans.” (143)
Rains also suggests that the audience for The Surrounded was non-Indians, the people McNickle intended to reach with the truths, as he knew them, of the Indian culture and experience in 20th Century America. According to Rains, several themes appear in The Surrounded. Each and al will serve as sources for discussion and further investigation: assimilation, culture, history, religion, language, genre (Western), place (West), Identity, cosmology, community, destiny, tragedy, American Indian Experience, American novel. With issues of bicultural Americans, the novel demonstrates the profound difficulty in living with forced assimilation, and McNickle’s work must be contextualized within the genre of the American novel. McNickle was a man of his time. “The tragic end is inevitable because the genre demands it.” (From a lecture at the Helena Book Fest, September 24, 2009)
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In October 2005, Dave Walter wrote the following letter to Kirby Lambert at the Montana Historical Society in Helena.
"I would like to nominate D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) for inclusion in the Montana Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in the Capitol.
“...D’Arcy was born and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. From the beginning, he faced the dichotomy of living in two different cultural worlds. That background infused his life, his career, and his writing. McNickle left the reservation to attend the University of Montana in Missoula (1921, sold his allotment and withdrew permanently in 1925 to attend Oxford University.
“McNickle proved a man of many talents: public official; historian; Indian Rights advocate; novelist. Through his writing and years of tireless public and personal service, he influenced the history of white/Indian interaction—an interaction that was the focus of his energies and intellect. Today many scholars consider him the grandfather of modern native American literature and modern Native American ethnohistory.
“Best known for his autobiographical novel The Surrounded (1936), McNickle authored a number of pieces of fiction and nonfiction that delineate the cultural problems faced by Indians in modern America. His reputation has only grown since his death in 1977.
“D’Arcy McNickle is a native who richly deserves inclusion in the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans.”
(This letter is in the vertical file at the Montana Historical Society library)
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