Slow Dancing with Skeletons: Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Abstract

The Spokane Indian characters in Sherman Alexie's short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven wage daily battle against small humiliations and perennial hurts. Situated on a reservation where the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) houses, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) trucks, and commodity foods continually mirror paternalism and dependency, and where “tribal ties” and a cohesive “sense of community” (74) have waned, Alexie's characters confront the dilemma of how to be “real Indians,” of how to find “their true names, their adult names” (20), of how to find a warrior dignity and courage when it is “too late to be warriors in the old way” (63), of how to ameliorate what Adrian C. Louis has termed “the ghost-pain of history” (35)—that haunting sense of personal and cultural loss that generates a paralyzing sense of ineffectuality. They struggle to cope with passivity, cynicism, and despair to find healing for the pain that turns into self-pity and the anger that turns into self-loathing.