An Educated View:
Acts of Violence
And The Violence of Memory:
The Writings of Sherman Alexie
By Martin Kich
Producing notable work in three genres–the novel, the short story, and poetry–in a career not much more than a decade and a half long, Alexie has already established himself not only as an important Native American writer, but also, more broadly, as a significant American writer. Indeed, he has more recently demonstrated an even greater versatility, earning good notices for his work as a screenwriter and as a columnist commenting on a broad range of social and political issues.
In 1966, Alexie was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where he has lived most of his life. He attended high school off the reservation, went on to Gonzaga University, and eventually earned a baccalaureate degree at Washington State. In college, he experienced his own problems with alcohol, but he did not sink into the alcoholism that has afflicted his largely absent father and has ruined the lives of many other Natives Americans both on and off the reservation.
Six of Alexie’s first seven books were collections of poetry: The Business of Fancydancing (Hanging Loose, 1992), I Would Steal Horses (Slipstream, 1992), First Indian on the Moon (hanging Loose, 1993), Old Shirts & New Skins (UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1993), Water Flowing Home (Limberlost, 1994), and Seven Mourning Songs For The Cedar Flute I Have Yet To Learn (Whitman College Press, 1994).
Subsequent collections have included The Man Who Loves Salmon (Limberlost, 1998) and One Stick Song (Hanging Loose, 2000). Critics have praised Alexie’s poetry for its sensitive depiction of Native American culture and for its documentary treatment of the debilitating material impoverishment and the spiritual violation that have too much characterized reservation life. In addition, critics have been impressed by Alexie’s straightforward, colloquial style, which nonetheless exhibits an awareness of poetic traditions and forms, by his deft suggestion of the metaphoric possibilities in commonplace objects and the transformative potential of ordinary circumstances, and by his imaginative, dramatic, and ironic interjection of historical figures and events into contemporary political and cultural contexts.
Sherman Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1994), remains his most well known and his most highly acclaimed work. It received the American Book Award in 1996, and it has become a fixture on the reading lists for a variety of university courses in contemporary literature. Working from the premise that blues legend Robert Johnson gives his totemic guitar to a young Native American musician, the novel follows the consequences of this musician’s sudden conviction that he and several acquaintances can transform themselves into the core of an innovative rock band for whom fame and wealth will be just a few simple chords away. In the process of trying to realize this ambition, the band members confront issues related to their Native American identity and culture. The novel has a number of mystical elements, including a brief visit to the reservation by the legendary—and long deceased—bluesman.
In his second novel, Indian Killer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), Alexie exploits elements of the mystery genre to show how easily the frontier stereotypes of the Native American as a savage, as a ruthless killer, can be resurrected from their supposed resting places in the museum vaults of the national memory. Playing off the 19th-century conception of the frontier hero as an Indian killer, the title refers to a serial killer who terrorizes Seattle by scalping his victims and thereby threatens to undermine the civil order of the city. Critics have observed that in this novel Alexie seems not only to be searching out a middle ground between serious and popular fiction, but also to be consciously trying to appeal to both Anglo-American and Native American readers. On both levels, this split in intention may have somewhat compromised the novel’s effect as much as enriched it.
Alexie’s first short-story collection is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). The twenty-two stories in the collection are set on the reservation. Because almost every aspect of the characters’ lives comes under the purview of one government agency or another, the characters are fundamentally disconnected from the rhythms of their own daily experience. Just as there has always been a thin line between bureaucratic paternalism and exploitation, there are, in practice, fine but nonetheless profound distinctions between trying to sustain or even to resurrect some of the old cultural and spiritual traditions and deluding oneself that a belief in the old ways can restore what history has taken.
These stories feature a number of recurring narrators and characters, in particular two characters named Victor and Junior who are portrayed from boyhood through young adulthood. In the title story, Junior’s relationship with a white woman becomes, through his dreams and his reading, the conduit through which both the meaning of mundane activities, such as work and sex and basketball, and the effect of broader cultural truths, such as the historical and contemporary atrocities committed against indigenous peoples, are filtered into his emerging consciousness of his own identity.
In his second collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), Alexie presents two more stories about reservation life, “A Good Man” and “Saint Junior.” In six of the other seven stories, Alexie shifts his focus from the reservation to Native Americans living in urban settings. Most of these urban Native Americans are relatively successful and lead materially comfortable lives–especially in comparison to their memories of hardship and impoverishment on the reservation. Taken together, the stories in this collection offer a less polemical but no less meaningful perspective on many of the themes treated in the novel Reservation Blues. Moreover, in their structures, these stories are, on the whole, more conventional than those in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, even if, consistent with the earlier work, they remain very stylized. For this collection, Alexie won the Malamud Short Story Prize.
His third and most recent collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians (Grove, 2003), presents nine stories, all character studies of mostly upwardly mobile Native Americans in urban settings, engaged in a representative range of occupations and professions. Each story centers on an event that has a profound impact on the central character’s life–but not entirely in the expected ways. In essence, the characters are trying to come to terms with the stereotypes that have become a factor in every Native American’s self-perception, even as Alexie gives those same stereotypes one ironic turn after another–suggesting, perhaps, that while irony may offer some necessary distance from the dilemma of identity, it is not ultimately an avenue to any sort of satisfying resolution to that dilemma. Two of the best stories in the collection are “The Search Engine,” in which a college student persists in tracking down a Native American poet who has not published anything in years and discovers how the literary life may actually compound a Native American’s sense of marginalization, and “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?,” in which a former basketball star rediscovers in middle-age how the game can be a source of meaning in his life and other lives.
Although Alexie’s work has been much praised, it has also generated its share of controversy. Some have wondered if writing about the victimization of Native Americans is not in itself a form of exploitation. Others have questioned whether the flamboyantly and darkly comic elements in Alexie’s stories are entirely appropriate to his themes. Still others have suggested that Alexie’s anger over the treatment of Native Americans may be too close to the surface of his work and rob it of some of the subtlety and complexity that it might have. Lastly, the unevenness that has marred some of Alexie’s work has been attributed by some critics to his restless energy and active interest in the world, the very things that have fueled his prodigious and wide-ranging productivity.
*Martin Kich is a Professor of English at Wright State University–Lake Campus, where he has taught since 1990. In 2000, he was named the 17th recipient of the university’s Trustees’ Award, recognizing sustained excellence in teaching, service, and scholarship. The author of one book on western American novelists, he has contributed to almost forty other books, as well as to several dozen professional journals and periodicals. He has also published several hundred poems in literary magazines. Contact: martin.kich@wright.edu
