POSTPONED “Nodding Acquaintances”: D’Arcy McNickle and Transnational Indigenous Networks within Academia’s Colonial System

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

This event has been postponed.

SPEAKER: Dane Allard, University of British Columbia

When the American historian Dorothy Parker wrote her biography of the American born, Indigenous scholar, bureaucrat, novelist, and used-car salesman, D’Arcy McNickle, she canvassed McNickle’s contemporaries from the nascent field of Native Studies. Vine Deloria Jr. replied that “we had no special relationship and were probably just nodding acquaintances.” The anthropologist Murray Wax misplaced McNickle in history, recounting that “I do recall being told that D’Arcy’s earliest memories were of rifleshots in an attack by White Canadian forces.” Both responses reflect an unaddressed question in the history of Indigenous Studies: what do we with D’Arcy McNickle? While McNickle is best known for his literary work and his organizing in the United States, he appears in unexpected places across disparate archives. That McNickle fits uneasily in either the national histories of Canada and the United States, nor in the colonial narrative of Métis history reflects the challenges that Métis identity poses for settler colonial logic. I reconsider McNickle from a Métis perspective that emphasizes his role as a transnational intellectual whose biography and historical scholarship challenged the historical narratives that undergirded settler colonial borders and ontologies. In doing so, I consider McNickle’s use of the university as a site within networks of transnational Indigenous intellectualisms. McNickle used academia to support the Indigenous political projects of the mid-Twentieth Century, a practice more visible when his time in Canada is reconnected to his broader memorialization. I consider how McNickle engaged in academic conversations that both drew from and contoured discourses that sustained Indigenous self-determinations. 

About the Speaker

Dane Allard comes from Red River Métis and Settler families from Manitoba, with direct connection to the historic communities of St. François-Xavier, Baie-St. Paul, and St. Laurent. He is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at the University of British Columbia located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people, and a 2025-2026 Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, located on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Wampanoag and Nipmuc. If you enjoy Bannock, you can find his hot take on the popular Métis food in Native American and Indigenous Studies.