The Hawk Is Hungry and Other Stories (Volume 22)

by D'Arcy McNickle, Birgit Hans (Editor)

These sixteen stories —ten of which have not been previously published—represent the work of one of the most influential Native American writers of the twentieth century—held by many to be the most important Native Americans to write fiction before N. Scott Momaday. Birgit Hans's introductory essay provides a brief biography of McNickle, sets the stories in the context of his better known work, and provides insights into their literary significance. Together, they constitute a collection essential to an adequate understanding of McNickle and of the development of Native American fiction.

CONTENTS

The Reservation
Hard Riding
En roulant ma boule, roulant...
Meat for God
Snowfall
Train Time
Montana
The Hawk Is Hungry
Debt of Gratitude
Newcomers
Man's Work
Going to School
The City
Manhattan Wedlock
Let the War Be Fought
In the Alien Corn
Six Beautiful in Paris
The Silver Locket

Genres: Indigenous, Short Stories

200 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1992

About the author

1904-1977

Reviews

[Marisa Duarte · Rating 4 out of 5]

D'Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) (Irish, Cree-Métis) is recognized as a political leader and major intellectual figure in American Indian history during the Progressive era. His mother's family had become involved with Louis Riel and the Métis uprisings in Canadian territory, which prompted the family's flight to Montana, where his father encouraged enrollment in the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. Growing up there, McNickle experienced reservation life as an Indian and also the foreign behaviors of white settlers homesteading, farming, ranching and establishing new norms on the land. As a young man, McNickle resides in cities and experiences new forms of whiteness and Settler mentalities, which he characterizes through his short fiction. Topics of love, marriage, performance of gender, city vs country, racial discrimination, the arbitrary rules of territorial governments, and relationships with landscapes are all set in this collection, and interpreted against McNickle's own politics of advocacy for tribes and American Indians, in particular for those who carry with them the knowledge of Settler injustice as they sustain their ancestral ways of life. Several of the stories are quite humorous. Hard Riding has reservation elders laughing at the folly of their Indian agent. Manhattan Wedlock is a comedy of errors that depends on the outrageous demands of a high-strung white woman accustomed to getting her way through cuteness and seduction. The Wedding Night sets the gender norms of educated city folk against the domestic rule of country matriarchs in the West. McNickle uses humor to demonstrate the absurdity of modern constructs of gender, class, and reservation. Other stories are heartbreaking, and a hard reminder of how some acts are beyond redemption. In Train Time, the reader stands at the station with Indian children waiting to be taken to boarding schools. In En Roulant Ma Boule, Roulant, an old man whose family is hungry hunts for a deer, wondering if the hunt is still in him. McNickle's landscapes are of their own accord, peopled by figures with unmet desires and trapped by the evil ignorance of the customs of their times.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted short stories and fragments that are deeply insightful explorations of human character, mostly set in the Depression-era West. Another serendipitous find while browsing among tumbling piles at my local used bookstore's ongoing clearance sale.