Despite its sparse prose and simple structure, “Indian Camp” is a complex story that explores themes around Performing Masculinity, The Inevitability of Death, and Indigenous Resistance to Euro-American Colonization. By using short, declarative sentences and realistic dialogue, Hemingway leaves many of the story’s major tensions below the surface, trusting the reader to interpret how colonization has affected this tribe and the gendered and racialized expectations that mold a young man’s reluctant passage into manhood.

Hemingway builds his story through short, descriptive sentences as well as gaps in the narrative. This less-is-more approach is enhanced by the third-person limited point of view, in which the narrator shares some of Nick’s thoughts but none of the other characters. For example, the opening scene opens in media res, with Nick and Dr. Adams boarding a boat. The reader does not know where they are going, but neither does Nick; the boy only finds out they’re on the way to the “Indian camp” when they’re on the water. This gap in Nick’s knowledge, bridged by his fathers’ belated explanation, establishes the father-son dynamic long before the reader hears the doctor scold Nick for thinking he knows something.