In 1936 D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded joined two other novels by Native Americans that dealt with contemporary Native American life: Mourning Dove's Cogewea (1927) and John Joseph Mathews's Sundown (1934). McNickle's work was the last such novel to be published until N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) was added to the short list, which grew rapidly thereafter. McNickle's novel is unusual in that it rejects assimilation of Native peoples into mainstream Euro-American culture; neither Cogewea nor Sundown go beyond questioning the exploitative actions of the federal government. The disappearance of Native cultures is lamented, but the underlying philosophical tenets of westward expansion are never really questioned by Mourning Dove or Mathews. In an earlier manuscript version of The Surrounded, however, McNickle expresses the same convictions as Mourning Dove and Mathews: Native cultures, locked in their primitive though picturesque state, must disappear in the interest of progress. This version is a...