William D‘Arcy McNickle was born to an American Indian (Metis) mother, Philomene, and a Euro- American father on the Flathead Reservation in northern Montana, in 1904, just eight years after F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. Although his maternal ancestry extends generations in this country, McNickle, unlike Fitzgerald who was born a US citizen, was not legally made a US citizen until June 2, 1924 when the US Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all American Indians born in the United States. Although the US government through its various repressive local and federal apparatuses had been trying since the 1790s to physically kill off/ eliminate the American Indian, it was only after the Settlers Wars in the 1890s that the US government through the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 moved to assimilate the American Indian into Euro- American culture and society, to make him a part of the Western enlightenment narrative. The US government outlawed the practice of traditional Native religious ceremonies and established government- run, military- styled boarding and day schools, which American Indian children were required by law to attend. In these schools, the children were forced to speak only English, study standard American subjects/ curricula, attend Christian church, and abandon traditional customs, dress, languages, and religions. The objective was an all- out attempt to get rid of Indians, to make them “civilized” Americans, and/ or “to keep them from being acculturated as members of a Salish community.” “The Indian must conform to the white man's ways,” says Thomas J. Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1889. About three generations of American Indian children attended Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools, almost completely destroying the “social and cultural fabric” of their respective Indian nations. The assimilation era officially ended with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

D'Arcy McNickle belongs to the first generation of American Indians to attend one of these government- run boarding schools, enrolling at Chemawa (Oregon) for three years. He, then, attended public schools in Montana and Washington. Later, as a diasporic Indian from the Salish nation, he attended college at the University of Montana, Oxford University in England, the University of Grenoble, Columbia University, and the New School in New York City, where he lived from 1926 to 1934.