The Whole in Small Compass: D'Arcy McNickle's Social Vision in The Surrounded

Abstract

This essay aims to renew interest in D'Arcy McNickle's allotment-era novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation, The Surrounded (1936), by drawing attention to how McNickle's social vision theorizes culture, history, and race in ways that align with recent critical calls in the Native American humanities and the new indigenous transnationalisms for more socially inflected approaches to theory and method. This essay draws on tribal history sources to illustrate McNickle's contributions to the development of a contemporary Native American social theory.