Wind from an Enemy Sky

Wind from an Enemy Sky is a work of historical fiction by American Indian author D’Arcy McNickle. McNickle writes from his life in the Flathead Indian Reservation as a member of the Confederated Kutenai and Salish tribes, as the U.S. government tried to strip away what few autonomies they still possessed. McNickle writes with particular insight into the motivations of the government, having worked for a government agency for much of his career. The novel received positive criticism for its balanced reading of the historical friction between Native American sovereignties and the United States’ hegemonic powers.

The novel focuses on a small community of Native Americans located in the Flathead Lake-St. Ignatius region of Montana. McNickle was born and raised there, and many of his characters are loosely based on figures from his childhood. The story follows a large Native American family, beginning when one of its younger members, Pock Face takes his grandfather’s gun into a canyon where white developers have intruded on tribal land and built a large dam. The Little Elk Indians, who consider important natural bodies to be not only alive, but also sentient, equate the white men’s action to murder.

Pock Face and his cousin Theobald see a white man walking on the dam. Pock Face fires at the man, Jim Cooke, killing him instantly. They later learn that it was his last day on the job before leaving the state to marry. This violent event compels the government to begin a self-interested initiative to restore “justice” to affairs in the region. However, Toby Rafferty, the government official entrusted with relations with the Little Elk Reservation, sympathizes with the tribe. His sentiment is shared by Doc Edwards, a government doctor.



Rafferty lets Bull and his friends go from jail to say farewell to a dying tribe member, Henry Jim. Edwards gives him medical care during his final hours, employing a mixture of Western modern medicine and Native American tradition. Unfortunately, Rafferty and Edwards are virtually alone in their compassion for the tribe. McNickle paints a subtle picture of white society’s attempt to assimilate the tribe. Its primary method of doing so is to take Native American kids from their reservations and place them in schools run by the government. Once institutionalized, their traditional clothes are destroyed and virtually every other aspect of their life is regulated.

One of the children taken from the Little Elk tribe is Bull’s grandson. He is placed in an Oregon school and renamed Antoine Brown. His mother, distraught from the abduction, spirals into insanity and eventually dies. The event of her tragic death is, ironically, what seals the grandson’s authorization to return home to Montana. Meanwhile, Rafferty tries to advocate for Native Americans but merely succeeds in reasserting white power over the local tribe. McNickle attributes this paradox to the cultural and social impasse between the two cultures. For example, whites grow extremely impatient and intolerant when Native Americans answer questions with allegorical stories. Moreover, whites are always aware that they hold an immense power advantage over Native Americans, engendering a toxic savior complex.

McNickle’s novel presents Native American culture as entirely valid, even where it is at odds with white norms and values. However, the novel denounces the use of white power structures to impinge on the rights and sovereignty of Native peoples and lands, symbolized most elegantly in the construction of the dam. Wind from an Enemy Sky suggests that assimilation is not the answer to conflicts of culture, arguing rather for compassion, fair political representation, and an attempt to restore dignity to the land’s disenfranchised natives.