If Cher's nineteen seventies hit "Half Breed" were a novel, this would be it; like the song, it tells the story of a protagonist on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with never quite fitting in with either their Native American or their white families, and ultimately being rejected by both.
This is also a subject that the author, D'Arcy McNickle, knows from first hand experience; born of Irish and Native American parent, his father, William McNickle, and his mother, a full Cree Metis Indian, Philomene Parenteau, escaped the Cree revolution by fleeing to Montana and eventually settling on the Flathead Reservation, where D'Arcy grew up. Like his book's young hero, he attended schools away from the Reservation, and discovered a passion for words, semantics and education.
This is where the similarities between D'Arcy, and his young protagonist, Archilde Leon, end. Archilde and his parents become somewhat estranged when they become concerned that he has developed "city ways" during his time away at school, and shun him when he returns to the reservation. He develops a feeling for his Native American ancestry when he is befriended by one of the tribal elders, who is patient with him and tells Archilde stories that really seem to resonate with him. However, he still feels like a square peg in a round hole around his own family and his old friends who are all getting into criminal activity. Gradually becoming more comfortable on the reservation, he decides to stay and give life there a try, but he is framed for two murders that he didn't commit. One of these murders is committed by his own mother. The authorities come for him, and in a final scene of the novel that gives the book its title, he is surrounded.
Thankfully, McNickle suffered no such indignities, and despite an education gained largely away from the Montana reservation, his relationship with both his family, and his ancestry, remained strong and positive. He connected particularly to his Native American heritage, his first paid job being with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in New York City, where he settled after school. His rise within the Bureau was swift and within fifteen years he was chief of the tribal relations office. An avid anthropologist, he went on to create the Center for the History of the American Indian in the Newberry Library in Chicago.
McNickle also helped to write the Declaration of Indian Purpose that was the fundamental reading at the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference.
The Surrounded is McNickle's best known, and most widely-praised, novel. He is also renowned for his collection of short stories entitled The Hawk Is Hungry, all of which are based on old traditional tales and verbal histories passed down through generations of the Salish people.
