ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how settler-colonial discourses of modernity and modernization shape the characterization of Indigenous figures in novels by Indigenous writers and non-Indigenous writers of color of the modernist era. The politics of characterization determines which figures can become central protagonists and which occupy the marginalized position of the minor character who might facilitate or impede the protagonist’s journey through the text. Using concepts and methods drawn both from D’Arcy McNickle’s unpublished diaries and from recent work in Native Studies, the chapter illustrates the challenges facing Indigenous creators who seek to use the modern novel to represent Indigenous political and temporal sovereignty. After theorizing modernity as a characterological concern, the chapter contextualizes Mathews’s, McNickle’s, and Oskison’s novels alongside works by non-Native writers of color that employ minor Indigenous characters to gesture toward possibilities that the novel form cannot fully explore. The chapter culminates in readings of Oskison’s Black Jack Davy (1926), McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936), and Mathews’s Sundown (1934) that demonstrate how their Indigenous minor characters model approaches to sovereignty that open up possibilities that remain unresolved or unattainable for the protagonists and the primary plots of the novels.
