McNickle's novel for young people, Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (1954, 1987), is rich in information about native peoples at a remote point in their histories; he derived much of this information from his extensive research into the work of ethnographers such as Elsie Clews Parsons and Adolf Bandelier. The young hero, Salt, goes on a long journey, learning about different peoples and their cultures, encountering challenges that test and train him so that he can return with new varieties of corn seed and a bride from one of the distant cultures. McNickle celebrates here the important contributions of Native Americans to the agriculture and prosperity of post-contact world cultures while lamenting the wanton destructiveness of the European invaders whose sole focus was the destructive exploitation of what they found.

The world might have been, he argues, even richer from the contact than it...