Making It New: 1900–1945 473(1936) by D’Arcy McNickle, being shackled and taken away by white law officers
concludes the novel with an image of resistance and criminalization that is repeated
in other works of Native American fiction of the time. It is only rarely that the
leading characters in these stories find a way home.
In “Blue Winds Dancing” the hero does so, however. “Blue Winds Dancing” is the
only significant published work of a man, himself of mixed ancestry, who found
success in a number of different fields. Thomas St. Germain Whitecloud was born to
a white mother and a Chippewa father in New York City. When his parents divorced,
Whitecloud stayed with his mother, but his childhood was spent on the reservation
as well as in white society. And, although he encountered difficult times while
growing up, he managed to fulfill his ambition of training to become a doctor. His
medical duties were then to take up a significant part of his time, but he engaged in
various civic activities, as a county coroner and a deputy sheriff; he traveled
extensively in the United States and served as a battalion surgeon in Europe during
World War II; and he wrote and lectured extensively. As a student, Whitecloud had
contemplated a writing career for a while. Some of the essays and tales he completed
he sent, while he was still young, to Hamlin Garland, for criticism and encouragement.
And, while he never realized his aim of becoming a full-time writer, his story “Blue
Winds Dancing” remains a powerful and clearly semi-autobiographical account of
a man caught between a conflict of cultures. The narrative is simple. A man of Indian
origin dreams of home. “I am weary of trying to keep up this bluff of being civilized,”
he says. He sees the geese going southward. “They were going home,” he observes.
“Now I try to study, but against the pages I see them again, driving southward. Going
home.” “I hear again the ring of axes in deep woods, the crunch of snow beneath my
feet,” he adds. “I feel again the smooth velvet of ghost-birch bark. I hear the rhythm
of the drums.” So he leaves his white school, to return to his people, who, he reflects,
“have many things that civilization has taken from the whites.” On the road, he
meets many “outcasts” from white society, both like and unlike himself, people living
on “the relief and the WPA.” And he is fearful that, once returned to the reservation,
he will not fit in. “Am I Indian, or am I white?” he asks himself. His question is
answered for him when, finally, he is back on the land of his people, where he sees
the blue winds dancing and hears the drums beat. “It is like the pulse beat of the
world,” the reader is told. He is back where he belongs. “I am one with my people and
we are all a part of something universal,” he declares triumphantly. And the last three
words of the story seal the triumph: “I am home.”
The fiction of D’Arcy McNickle is similarly autobiographical in origin and, in
being concerned with reaffirming traditional, indigenous values, equally at odds
with the popular contemporary belief that Indians should be assimilated into the
dominant Anglo-American culture. McNickle also strove in this fiction with even
more perseverance than Whitecloud to resist the conventions of the Western
narrative, popular images of Native American life, and what he called “the sentimental
and inept efforts that have been made on behalf of the Indian in the past.” The
precise racial origins of McNickle are a matter of debate. There is no doubt, however,
that he identified as a Native American, and that his family history was inextricablyGGray_c04.indd 473ray_c 04 .indd 473 8 8/1/2011 7:54:02 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 02 AM