The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

was sold him by a local cleric. The bundle is the ritual heart of
the people, and their loss of it affects them deeply. They hope
throughout the book that the bundle will be returned, but they
discover, at the white man’s admission, that he has somehow
lost it. Thus with the death of the water comes the tribe’s
knowledge of the death of its ritual center.
The foregrounding of ritual in Wind from an Enemy Sky
reflects changes in Native American self-images in the years
between 1936, when The Surrounded was written, and 1976,
when Wind from an Enemy Sky was written. But the late book
does not depart significantly from the earlier work in the way it
uses ritual structures. As a result it presents an even more
anguished view of the ultimate fate of traditional Indians. In both
novels the primary conflict is between Indian and white, and
both are mainly concerned with cultural extinction as the
inexorable fate of the Indians, whether they are half-breed or
full-blood, traditional or assimilated.
McNickle’s novels effectively demonstrate an interesting
feature of novels about Indians written out of a western literary
tradition: conflict-based plots require a tragic outcome if the
relationships between Indian and white are represented with
historical accuracy. When Indian is pitted against white, ritual
against technology, and spirit-based value systems against
materialistic philosophies, there can be no resolution other than
the destruction of the tribal, that is, the ritual life of the
colonized. In The Surrounded McNickle succinctly sums up the
terms of the conflict in the words of the Indian agent who stalks
the Indians: “It’s too damn bad you people never learn that you
can’t run away. It’s pathetic” (pp. 296–297).
Whereas The Surrounded is brutally fatalistic, Wind from an
Enemy Sky is profoundly tragic, concerned as it is with deicide.
It is about the conflict between traditionals and whites and
between traditional Indians and those Indians who “came in,”