In the novel “The Surrounded” by D’Arcy McNickle the author depicts the conflicts that many Native Americans went through when they were sent into the “white man’s world”. Native Americans were forced to attend boarding schools and taught to be “civilized” causing many to become alienated with their culture. McNickle shows the disconnection that Native Americans went through and felt between both worlds. They no longer fit in the Native American world and would never fit in with the rest of the world. While Europeans often times thought that they were saving Native Americans and teaching them the right ways to live reality was that assimilation and forced ideals led to the destruction of individuals. As the novel begins the protagonist Archilde …show more content…
They were running free all summer long and the time for them to attend boarding school had come closer. Archilde’s father tricked them into going to school otherwise they wouldn’t have gone. When the boys realized Max had stopped at the mission “they didn’t wait to open the car door but scrambled over the side and dashed about looking for the gate, but it had been closed behind them. They were like animals brought to the zoo” (111). They were dragged into a world they didn’t want to be part of forced to stay in a place where their ways were seen as demonic and evil. At the beginning they resist the change yet it is only a matter of time before they are broken and tamed. McNickle depicts how Native Americans were not being saved but destroyed by the process of assimilation. As missionaries inflict their beliefs upon them and force them to be “civilized” they end up harming the little boys and Native Americans in general. “When Mike and Narcisse returned from the mission school something was different” the boys were terrified of life they were afraid of the darkness and longer had that joyful spirit they once had (186). They stayed home all the time a reflection of how the change they went through detached them from what they used to love to do. This scene emphasizes how part of their identity