Sundown

by John Joseph Mathews

Book Overview

Challenge Windzer, the mixed-blood protagonist of this compelling autobiographical novel, was born at the beginning of the twentieth century "when the god of the great Osages was still dominate over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills" of northeast Oklahoma Territory. Named by his father to be "a challenge to the disinheritors of his people," Windzer finds it hard to fulfill his destiny, despite oil money, a university education, and the opportunities...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806121602
• ISBN13: 9780806121604
• Release Date: September 1988
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A mixed-blood Osage Indian trying to grow up in both worlds.

In this book, the fictional protagonist essentially describes the authors life, according to his daughter who wrote the introduction. Struggling to be successful in the white man's world, a mixed-blood Osage Indian is really only comfortable back home on the reservation. Never feeling at home in either, he often feels isolated in both. The book follows him from boyhood on the reservation to college and military life beyond, but always returning home.This book is an absorbing read, and is notable for being one of the first books to examine this topic intelligently. It is devoid of romanticism or New Age allusions (illusions?), but is not the inevitable sinking despair of a James Welch read. I strongly recommend it for anyone with an interest in mixed-culture and heritage topics.John Joseph Mathew was probably the most influential Osage Indian writer yet born. A World War I Army Air Corps pilot, he was Oxford educated as a geologist, travelled the world, especially Africa, yet came back to the Osage hills in Oklahoma to be "home". He was not a "full-blood" Osage, but was a "mixed-blood" of Osage and Caucasian heritage. In his era, it was this mixed heritage that probably allowed him to be as educated as he was. This was invaluable in his later writing career, because his books are both poetic in style and writing, capturing much of the feel of our Osage oral history and home, yet scholarly in their documentation. He wrote the first best-seller by a Native American author (Wah-Kon-Tah: the Osage and the White-Man's Road)published in 1932. Following this, he wrote a history of our tribe, (The Osages, Children of the Middle Waters) which while controversial in some aspects, is the most complete written history we have yet. He also wrote on topics of naturalism and his personal views on many topics, and a biography of an oilman, both of more or less relation to the tribe. But in none of these books to we get a real flavor of how he *felt* about things, and the experiences that molded him. In this book, Sundown, we see an intimate personal, often painful look at a younger Mathews. This, along with Mathews' prose syle is why I recommend the book.