"[1] Challenge grows up close to nature, often imagining himself as various animals, but also envisions himself as a soldier of the American Revolution from the history books his father reads.
[2] Chal later begins attending the local school and spends his summers with his friends Running Eagle and Sun-on-His-Wings riding horses.
Oil derricks and railroads begin to cross the reservation as Chal describes how he conceptualizes civilization as "the most delicate white woman he could imagine" and contrasts this with the Blackjacks which remind him of "the fullbloods" as "they stood proudly in their gorgeous red, yellow and orange in the brilliant sun of autumn.
Chal attends the University of Oklahoma initially alongside Running Elk and Sun-on-His-Wings, but they both drop out after refusing to be paddled to join a fraternity despite being talented members of the football team.
Despite feeling alienated, Chal frequently attends social events and dances while going on dates with the popular Blo Daubeney.
When Chal returns home for the summer he finds Running Elk is now a drunk and Sun-on-His-Wings has converted to the Native American Church and only participates in their dances and peyote ceremonies.
Chal is curtly informed of Metz death by his replacement, a lieutenant, and quickly moves on to the solo flying school.
[8] Challenge, the protagonist of Sundown, inherits large amounts of wealth when his father is murdered during a time period commonly known as the Osage Reign of Terror.
[12] Sundown is a semi-autobiographical novel where the main character, Challenge Windzer, closely mirrors the author, John Joseph Mathews.
Christopher Schedler describes it as a mix of “high” and “border” modernist aesthetics to create Native American modernism.
[15] Carol Hunter makes the claim that John Joseph Mathews is one of the first authors to portray an assimilated mixed-blood Osage protagonist as an outcast.
[17] Michael Snyder claims that Mathews’ use of the word “queer” and Chal’s feelings of peculiarity and alienation in the novel implies that the protagonist has same-sex desires.
[18] Alexander Steele describes the differences between colonial and Indigenous perceptions of time and how Challenge Windzer interacts with his sacred spaces.
[19] The way both groups view time is dependent on their “statuses of land” and interaction with the ecospaces, which have sustained Indigenous tribes for generations.
[19] The cultural significance of space and time in Sundown is shown in Chal’s disorientation when he returns from university and sees how much the landscape has changed since the oil frenzy.
[20] To Anson, both texts "regard the Osage Reign of Terror as a gruesome example in a long history of structural violence linking the settler state to land theft and resource extraction.”[20] However, Sundown offers readers a different story "beyond the tragic history of Grann’s vital study to articulate –quietly profoundly –with Indigenous resistance today.
"[20] The novel's ability to draw from resistance attitudes for environmental protection in the name of "Indigenous sovereignty and survivance" proves the text to be timeless.