In 1936 Dodd Mead published D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded. Set on the Flathead reservation in northwestern Montana, the novel entered the field of literary culture as a doubly regional work. Firstly, for American publishers Montana was part of a marginal region associated with popular genre fiction. Secondly, the Flathead reservation was not widely known outside of Montana because it had not attracted popular curiosity like the reservations of the southwestern U.S. Although the novel is firmly rooted on the reservation where McNickle was born and raised, he had been away for over a decade at the time it was published. He left in 1925 after selling his allotment and spent the intervening years in Oxford, Paris, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington D.C. Despite this cosmopolitan itinerary, McNickle represented himself as a regional writer when he wrote to John Collier at the newly reorganized Office of Indian Affairs in 1934 to inquire about prospective employment. In this application McNickle offers the following characterization of his artistic aims: “I am writing of the West, not of Indians primarily, and certainly not of the romantic West which best-selling authors have exploited to the detriment of a rational understanding of the meaning of the West, the Frontier, in American life. The tension between McNickle’s self-presentation as a regional writer and his cosmopolitan experience is crucial to understanding his authorial project, especially in The Surrounded, which I approach as a variation of regional modernism in which the aesthetics of regionalism and cosmopolitanism conflict. Regionalism and cosmopolitanism may seem unlikely terms for this analysis given that Native American literary criticism in the last twenty years has been focused on the struggle between tribalism and assimilation. As Robert Allen Warrior has pointed out, however, employing this analytic framework to discuss The Surrounded can be deceptive because the novel “is best understood in the context of [McNickle’s] New York period, when his major concern was for his own writing career rather than Indian communities (or identity).” Although I agree with Warrior that the McNickle who wrote The Surrounded has different commitments than the later McNickle, who became an activist and scholar of Native American history, I maintain that The Surrounded has much to offer on the topics of community and cultural survival. To demonstrate this I propose cosmopolitanism and regionalism as complementary terms that will enhance our understanding of the struggle that McNickle faced as a writer without models for tribalist modes of literary expression. McNickle struggles to adapt regionalist and cosmopolitan styles in his attempt to represent the Flathead reservation as a dynamic modern space and his struggles are mirrored in the protagonist’s fraught subject formation. Instead of a purely despairing account of the reservation as an underdeveloped region or an account of an exceptional cosmopolitan individual, The Surrounded dramatizes the tension between these two possibilities, representing the suffocating forces that constrain the mobility and agency of the Salish characters but also calling attention tribalist challenges to these constraints.