Sherman Alexie Research Articles

Facing the Fire: American Indian Literature and the Pedagogy of Anger

January 2001 Class ends; I talk with a small group of students. In this one seminar, the group after class consists mainly of Navajo students. I return to my office, close the door; I'm done for the day. Knock, knock. It is one of the seminar's white students, looking a little pained: "I'm always worried I'm going to say the wrong thing. She's so angry and I know she judges me, us. What am I supposed to do? I'm just trying to learn, but I don't want to be attacked, it makes me feel uncomfortable." February 2001 "Most people think that Truck Schultz is racist, but I agree with many of his ideas." This comment on a listserv discussion prompts a furious reply from a Native student, a rhetorically sophisticated reply, that alludes to the rage that perhaps gives rise to the "Indian Killer" in Sherman Alexie's novel of the same name. The student implies that the author of the posting better watch out, since he would show her and anyone else just how "savage" he could be. Some students try to mediate the dispute, others stop participating, others notify me; one notifies the campus police. March 2001 "This is the kind of racist crap from my classmates and most of my teachers that I'm no longer going to put up with! You all (pointing at a row of non-Native students) don't know what it's like to go to school here. I [End Page 80] took last semester off and could barely function: it was all I could do to take care of my kids; I didn't want to leave the house. I'm in this class because I know this professor isn't going to put me in jeopardy." April 2001 "Esther Belin's 'Ruby's Answer' [1999] is so angry. It made me feel bad when she read it at the reading last night." June 2001 Comment made during the first hour of the first day of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for High School Teachers on the teaching of American Indian Literature. I am the lead faculty member and the high school teachers, from all over the nation, selected this five-week institute because of their personal interest. A middle-aged white woman: "Why are these Native American writers so angry? I find them so disturbing. How do they expect to build bridges with this sort of attitude?" June 2001 Second hour of the first day of the NEH Summer Institute. An American Indian woman, after scanning the packet of secondary articles, all authored by Native scholars and public intellectuals: "None of these writers seem Indian to me. Look how they write. This is not how Indian people talk." July 2001 Three weeks into the NEH Summer Institute: "There's not room in my high school's curriculum for Native American history and literature." —a white male political science teacher "What do you mean, there's not room? Listen to yourself! I'm sick of this attitude!" —a history teacher who is American Indian [End Page 81] July 2001 Three weeks and two more days into the NEH Summer Institute. After a heated discussion, primarily among the seminar participants of color, about refusing to romanticize the past, a white seminar participant says, "Why can't we all just try to get along today? We have more in common with each other than we have differences." Silence. An African American woman responds, finally, "You just don't get it." She slams her folder on her desk to emphasize her point and rushes out of the seminar. Awkward silence. September 2001 Introductory College Honors course—beginning a unit on Native writers. Of the 39 students, 32 of whom are white, only 3 have read anything (even a poem) by a writer of Native descent. I'...

Red matters: Native American studies

Preface 1. Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Critical Perspectives on Native American Literatures 2. On the Translation of Native American Song and Story: A Theorized History 3. America's Histories 4. From Half-Blood to Mixedblood Cogewea and the Discourse of Indian Blood 5. The Rage Stage: Contextualizing Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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

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.

Sherman Alexie's Indigenous Blues

The blues speak histories that, from the conventional perspective, originate in the experiences of Africans in America. But invariably the blues exceed distinct, rigid cultural boundaries. Ralph Ellison's famous definition of the blues suggests an expansive vista, one limited only by the speaker's capacity to lyrically express his or her autobiographical chronicle of (78). As an idiom, the blues record histories, yet Ellison's definition privileges the personal and leaves uncertain the place of our national histories, the stories that speak our collective experiences. Locating the collective histories in the personal--and vice versa--has proven a pivotal problem in literary inscriptions of the blues from Ellison's own fiction to works by Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones. (1) However, in Sherman Alexie's 1995 novel, Reservation Blues, the issues become more problematic. Here, the blues speak not just an African American history and identity, but instead seem to generate from a Native American point of reference. More than simply transcribing a blues idiom to fit the experiences of his Spokane characters, Alexie looks deeper, teasing out traces of an indigenous American culture in an expressive medium generally thought to begin with the Atlantic slave trade. Aboriginality consequently becomes an ever-changing state for Alexie since contact with cultures of other continents constantly transforms one's means of representing that aboriginality. Nobody remains untransformed by this contact, not displaced Native Americans, not enslaved Africans, and not even the apparent conquerors, the European colonists. In Alexie's novel, the blues constitute more than an expression of catastrophe rooted in African American experience; they also act as a trope for an entire process in which rhetorical forms shape and inform one another. The appearance of Robert Johnson, the near-mythical Mississippi-Delta blues singer, on the Spokane Indian Reservation helps clarify this process. He bridges two different American experiences, African and Indian, and, in so doing, also helps bridge discourses. Alexie underscores the slavery metaphors in the bluesman's story, depicting how Johnson trades his freedom to a white stranger at the crossroads in exchange for his unearthly musical ability (264). (2) A prominent blues image, the crossroads maintains a constant presence in Alexie's novel, providing a distinct bluestone, but also serving to facilitate the cultural intersection for which the blues serve as trope. The novel ultimately presents a series of crossroads, signifying a constant process of miscegenation and cultural intersection. This kind of intersection first occurs when Robert Johnson passes on his guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire, enabling the formation of the Spokane Indian blues band, Coyote Springs. In the process, Alexie sensitizes us to expressive possibilities that developed when Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans began sharing, if not peacefully, the same continent. In its very form, Alexie's novel inscribes a crossroads similar to those in the blues, a juncture where we can see an indigenous Native American oral tradition still at work, but now in a hybrid form, informed by the other discursive forms that have crossed its path. He does so with Spokane Indian characters whose histories still offer the catastrophes that Ellison finds in traditional blues material. Chess and Checkers must live with the memory of their younger brother's death, a needless occurrence owing to the inadequate medical care often found on Indian reservations. Chess describes the kind of destitution that led to this tragedy: there no white doctors around. There weren't no Indian doctors at all yet. The traditional medicine women all died years before. Dad just walked into the storm like he was praying or something (64). …

Word as Weapon: Visual Culture and Contemporary American Indian Poetry

Poetry is revolutionary. It must be to survive. --Lance Henson (Cheyenne) In Sherman Alexie's novel Indian Killer, Marie Polotkin, a Spokane college student, explains to her Wannabe-Indian professor, for whom the Ghost Dance stands as a beautiful, and ultimately desperate act, that Wovoka's vision was more than mere symbolism and metaphorical beauty: Don't you see? If the Ghost Dance had worked, you wouldn't be here. You'd be dust (313). Indeed, though the Ghost Dance was not created as an act of violence, it was clear to its followers that this combination dance, chant, and religion would likely result in people and their culture be[ing] destroyed by a natural cataclysm (Mooney viii). From the Ghost Dance to the Mayan power song They Came from the East to the Iroquois's anti-Anglo spell Magic Formula to the Yana's Curse on People that Wish One Ill, Native communities have invested in language the ability to control identity and destiny. As scholar and linguist John Bierhorst argues, the belief that words in themselves have the power to things happen ... is one of the distinguishing features of native American thought (3). When Wovoka and his followers performed the Ghost Dance, they trusted that their singing would make things happen. If words, performative language, could reach their full potential, then, like a great spell, the unified chores of Indians would be able to act as an inverted Yahweh: they would speak all white people out of being. The ghost dance is a provocative vision of resistance, and it stands as a complex example of how Native Americans see language as a viable weapon to protect cultural identity and sovereignty. When physical resistance is implausible, linguistic resistance becomes necessary; stories can be told about the white devil, power songs sung, spells invented, and myths constructed. Not surprisingly, Native American communities have emerged with a relationship to language most contemporary Anglos do not and cannot understand. That so many Chippewa, Choctaw, Laguna, Navajo, Cherokee, Modoc, Creek, and countless clans and communities produce important poets is not a fluke. It is life. To sustain the transformative power of charged oral expression, writers from these clans, communities, tribes, and nations have, in the latter part of this century, turned to the lyric poem as a mode of both connection and resistance. Like its oral ancestor, the lyric has always sought the dual catalyzation of author and reader but has not really cultivated a reputation as a welcome space for protest or resistance, especially in the United States. While lyric poetry in English has not been without its private contrivances or tropes of conquest, for the most part its ontology has been one of engagement. In its essence, the lyric project seeks relation and transformation, as Edward Hirsch rightly notes: [r]eading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship with each other (4). For Native writers, poetry not only functions as a relationship but also as something sacred and powerful that transforms reality for author, reader, and the communities of both. In fact, in her recent book on contemporary American Indian poetry, Robin Riley Fast echoes Hirsch, arguing that Native writers engage in a poetry that modifies the for both speaker and listener, writer and reader. According to Fast, this dialogic exchange enacts a concept integral to Native oral cultures--that of language's efficacy, its power to change the world (214). Through the unusual and provocative conflation of public and private significations, performative powers, and subtexts of relation and confrontation, the contemporary American Indian poem has become a truly unique and effective form of simultaneous engagement and resistance. In the following pages, I look at poems by three contemporary Native writers--Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), and Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwoc)--in an attempt to understand how recent American Indian writers use the lyric poem as a mode of resistance that also participates in the cultural history of Native oral discourse. …

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie's Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie's Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Western American Literary Scholarship 2001: The Year in Review

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a r y S c h o la r s h ip 2001: T h e Y e a r in R eview G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Since the founding of Western American Literature (WAL) some thirty-five years ago, western American literary scholarship has come of age. N o less than in the study of other regional and national literatures, scholars in our field now deploy a variety of critical tools in their work, from the New Critical to the New Historical, Marxist, feminist, post­ colonial, ecocritical, and biographical. In this essay I review a selection of such essay-length scholarship published during the last calendar year. (I omit all books commissioned for review in WAL.) Much of this scholarship— indeed, nearly half of it— focuses on Native American and Chicano/a literature, though Willa Cather remains the most stud­ ied individual western writer with Cormac McCarthy and Sherman Alexie a distant second and third. In addition to several monographs and collections of essays, three special issues of scholarly journals were devoted to western American lit-crit: one on Cather in American Literary Realism (ALR), another on “The Literature and Popular Culture of the U.S.- Mexican Border” in Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, a third on “Representations of American Indians in Contemporary Narrative Fiction Film” in Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL). In all, the scholarship on western American literature last year demonstrates yet again that “the West” has borders that are fluid in a literary no less than in a geographical sense. N i n e t e e n t h - a n d E a r l y T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u r y F i c t i o n All reports of James Fenimore Cooper’s demise seem to be prema­ ture. Diane Price Herndl in “Style and the Sentimental Gaze in The Last of the Mohicans” (Narrative 9:259-82) contrasts Cooper’s novel with Michael M ann’s 1992 movie “to think through some contradic­ tory positions on sentimentalism, the gaze, and the politics of race.” More to the point, Herndl suggests that Cooper uses sentimental tropes ironically to criticize sentimentality and that Mann grafts a sentimental style onto a historical narrative— all to conclude that there may be gazes that are not about desire or control (in the Lacanian or Foucauldian senses) but about “concern.” A very theoretical essay, though a useful corrective (I think) to standard interpretations of “the gaze.” Andrew G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Doolen’s ‘“ Snug Stored Below’: The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers” (Studies in American Fiction 29:131-58) claims, though not entirely persuasively, that the first novel in the Leatherstocking saga allegorizes the “underlying current of racial violence that unsettles the formation of an ideal republic.” In “Go East, Young Man: Class Conflict and Degenerate Manhood in Mark Twain’s Early Writings” (WAL 36:233-57) Joseph L. Coulombe examines the ways in which Twain massages his western nanatives, partic­ ularly Roughing It, much as he had done in The Innocents Abroad, to appeal to a genteel eastern readership— which may in turn account for the osten­ sible “inconsistencies” in the text. My own note “A Coda to the TwainHarte Feud” (WAL 36:81-87) documents Twain’s unwillingness to aid Harte’s destitute daughter Jessamy in 1907 and how news of her predica­ ment colored his memories of Harte in his autobiographical dictation. Sara E. Quay’s “American Imperialism and the Excess of Objects in McTeague” (ALR 33:209-34) notes how Frank Norris’s novel equates things with characters and relates the fetishizing of such objects as N oah’s ark figurines, gold coins, and clothing to late-nineteenth century dreams of empire and anxieties over ethnic difference. Despite its engaging title, Jane Kuenz’s “The Cowboy Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen Wister’s...

American Indian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism: the middle place

Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the pristine wilderness celebrated by mainstream writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as nature is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists. This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of and place. Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of and the environment. More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common ground a middle place where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.

Escape Stories: Narratives and Native Americans in Sherman Alexie's 'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven'

Abstract Through close study of Sherman Alexie's short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), this essay aims to explore the dialectics of Native American narrative now. First, the blockage or thwarting of narrative in Alexie is identified and interpreted as a crisis for Native American representation. However, a second section suggests that Alexie queries the centrality accorded narrative within his tradition. Yet the final section finds that the non-narrative or anti-narrative strategies thereby explored are also, in their turn, questioned by Alexie; in postmodern fashion, his work considers the possibilities for Native Americans of 'little narratives'. Writing in 1989, Gerald Vizenor had occasion to object to the paradigms that he felt dominated the study of Native American writing: 'Claude Levi-Strauss and Alan Dundes have been cited more than Mikhail Bakhtin or Jean-Francois Lyotard in critical studies of tribal literature in the past decade'.[1] In his own fiction, besides his editorial and critical work, Vizenor, more than any other single figure, has been responsible for the subsequent reorientation of understanding of Native American texts along the lines he tacitly proposes here. It has become almost a commonplace, for example, to read such texts, older as well as contemporary, under the sign of the postmodern. I will come back later to some advantages and disadvantages of interpreting Native American narrative through the insights of Lyotard. For the moment, however, I want to turn to Bakhtin, the other neglected figure whom, a decade ago, Vizenor offered as a resource for revitalizing 'studies of tribal literature'. Since Vizenor made his observation, Bakhtinian ideas of the dialogic have indeed exercised an influence upon criticism in this field. Narrative Chance, the collective volume in which the claims of Bakhtin were put forward, itself made an inaugural contribution by including Arnold Krupat's essay on 'The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller'. Krupat argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's text, published in 1981 and comprising fictions, poetry, autobiographical meditations, and photographs, strategically resists any sense of the writer herself as a centrally authoritative or uniquely personal presence; instead, the book demonstrates that Silko's own discourse, traversed by the stories and memories of the Laguna Pueblo community of New Mexico, is actually 'the product of many voices'.[2] Without denying that its weaving of different voices makes Silko's text itself already dialogical, I want here to try to extend and complicate somewhat the dialogue by putting Storyteller into relationship with more recent Native American writing. Specifically, I am interested in how assumptions Silko makes about the nature and power of narrative in Native America may be contested or modified by Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). To explore a dialogue or intertextual relationship of this kind is, of course, not simply to pursue a specialist literary interest. Rather, in the implicit struggle between these fictions by Silko and Alexie, there may be read not only different senses of the politics of narrative, but, ultimately, different programmes for Native American politics itself late in the twentieth century. Before considering the divergence of these two writers, it is important to register a sense of their shared experience within the contemporary United States. On the dedication page of The Lone Ranger, Silko figures among those 'Native writers whose words and music have made [Alexie's] possible'.[3] If verbal art, in Silko, is understood as fundamental to Native American survival within a polity genocidal in the past and indifferent or assimilationist in the present, then so, too, in Alexie's collection, there appears to be a relationship between aesthetics and endurance. The word 'survival', or its cognates, occurs at least seven times here. …

Sherman Alexie's Autoethnography

or Sherman Alexie, 1993 was a famous year. His work having first appeared in book form a year earlier, with a poetry chapbook, Would Steal Horses, and a fatter collection poetry and fiction, The Business Fancydancing, in 1993 he published three full-length works: a volume poems, Old Shirts and New Skins, a book short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and a further book mixing up both genres, First Indian on the Moon. From the same year, Arnold Krupat's paper subsequently published as Postcoloniality and Native American Literature highlights, indirectly but succinctly, the originality Alexie's work. I'm not aware, says Krupat, of any Native American writer working today who has not declared some kind indebtedness and / or allegiance to the narrative primacy the oral tradition (171). Sherman appears on cue, the exception which such a remark perhaps inevitably anticipates: People keep asking me how my work is influenced by the oral he observes in an interview with John and Carl Bellante. I always say, 'Well, my writing has nothing to do with the oral tradition, because typed it' (Sherman Alexie 14). But the timeliness his project goes deeper than this. It isn't just that he contravenes this seemingly plausible outline a dominant Native American mode, but also that his work disturbs just as explicitly a number the most fundamental assumptions that shape the broader context out which Krupat is speaking-namely those cluttered demarcation debates the late eighties and early nineties around the postmoder and the postcolonial.

Escape Stories: Narratives and Native Americans in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Escape Stories: Narratives and Native Americans in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

"Open Containers": Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of content: The American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001) 46-72 Ironic and satiric impulses consistently suffuse tone, structure, realization of characters, and vision of contemporary reservation reality in small press collections of poems and stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) through The Summer of Black Widows (1996), as well as his mainstream works of fiction, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) to The Toughest Indian in World (2000). Much of praise bestowed on Alexie's early efforts and The Lone Ranger and Tonto has focused on author's unflinchingly bold depiction of dysfunctional nature of contemporary reservation life and fragmented, often alienated bicultural lives of characters who daily confront white civilization that encaptives their world - physically, historically, spiritually, and psychically. Clearly, part of attractiveness of Alexie's early volumes of verse and works of prose, at least for many mainstream readers, can be attributed to author's conscious construction of a hyperrealistic hip persona, one that at times might be indistinguishable from his biography. Kenneth Lincoln's recent assessment of Alexie's poetry, for example, voices both puzzlement and concern over Alexie's authorial stance: With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out smokehole. . . . Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky. To Lincoln, Alexie is stand-up comedian, Indian improvisator [who himself] is performing text (267). While Lincoln acknowledges that some readers may find meaning in Alexie's performance-art poetry - His firecat imagination plays tricks on reader, for our supposed good, for its own native delight and survival (268) - he also questions Alexie's motives: His is more performance than poem, more attitude than art, more schtick than aesthetic. Definitely talented, deeply impassioned, hyphenated American-Indian, but to what end? Although Alexie's poetry shows an obvious delight in surfaces, Lincoln finds little more beyond facade: Indi'n vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on edge of despair. A late- twentieth-century, quasi-visionary clown tells truth that hurts and heals in one-liners cheesy as Marx Brothers, trenchant as Lenny Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hill's BIA Halloween 'Trick or Treaty'. (271) Following publication of The Lone Ranger and Tonto and Reservation Blues (1995), however, Alexie also came under fire from certain quarters for his purportedly negative use of irony and satire - namely, literary connections to (white) popular culture and representations of Indian stereotypes that some consider inappropriate and dangerously misleading for mainstream consumption. Despite his early praise of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, for example, Louis Owens finds that Alexie's fiction too often simply reinforces all of stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing; there is no family or community center toward which his characters . . . might turn for coherence; and in process of self-destruction Indians provide Euramerican readers with pleasurable moments of dark humor or titillation of bloodthirsty savagery. Above all, non-Indian reader of Alexie's work is allowed to come away with a sense . . . that no one is really to blame but Indians, no matter how loudly author shouts his anger. (79-80) In his chapter on American Indian fiction, Owens contends that the most popularly and commercially successful Native American works thus far are marked by a dominant shared characteristic: They are direct heirs of modernist tradition of naturalistic despair, of which Indian is quintessential illustration (81). For Owens, these new American Indian novels articulate in sometimes extraordinarily well-disguised form familiar stereotype...

Teaching Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues

Among the results of the recent (and ongoing) upsetting of the canonical applecart, perhaps the most worthwhile is the general sense of "permission," for lack of a better word, teachers at both the public school and college levels have acquired to offer contemporary texts to their students. Not only do we no longer feel compelled to wait until the author's corpse is cold; we no longer even feel obliged to wait until he or she has hauled in a major prize (a Pulitzer or a Nobel). This opening up of the canon, however, is accompanied with certain perils. After centuries of conceding that the primary test of any writing's supposed literary merit was that of time, we teachers, critics, and scholars now find ourselves thrown back on our own resources. Are we up to it? How confident do we feel when it comes to the prospect of jettisoning Matthew Arnold's "touchstones" ("The Study of Poetry," in Culler, 327), presumably because those touchstones are an assemblage from a canon that has been argued to be everything from patriarchal and ethnocentrist to out-and-out racist in nature? To be replaced with what? we might ask ourselves. With our own sense of literary value, presumably, but what exactly does that amount to? Are we up to the task? Are we now to trust publishers and book reviewers more than we once did? Are we to run to Amazon.com and trust to the tastes of anonymous readers from the public at large (five stars good, two stars bad)? How capable are they, or we, of adhering to Arnold's most challenging rule for the critical reading of any text: disinterestedness? By [End Page 139] which he meant keeping aloof from what is called "the practical view of things" and "steadily refusing" to yield to "any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas" we find in a literary work that we might find either very attractive or very repugnant ("The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Culler, 246, 257). How often do we hear our students complain that they "don't like stories about X" or "stories with Y kinds of endings"? (Over the years I've observed that all literary texts, from plays to novels, are transformed in my students' writing to "stories.") The values of X and Y in the equations above vary with the student and other factors: this is hard math; this is calculus. Maybe Arnold was wrong when he said that "for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics, even, goes a long way" ("Literature and Science," in Culler, 389).

Smoke or Signals? American Popular Culture and the Challenge to Hegemonic Images of American Indians in Native American Film

American popular culture has historically been an arena where hegemonic structures and ideas could be challenged and where the status quo could be questioned, often through humor and satire. Continuing this tradition in one of the most refreshing recent contributions to American popular culture, Smoke Signals, Sherman Alexie challenges hegemonic and stereotypical images of American Indians through portraying a complex, humanizing, and contemporary image of American Indians. In doing so, he addresses, in an interview with Cineaste, what he avows is the "greatest challenge" to contemporary American Indians--the issue of sovereignty (West and West 1998). Sovereignty generally refers to autonomy and control over one's destiny. As such, it involves representation and the power to create and determine how groups, and individuals within those groups, are represented. Since popular culture is, by definition, "popular" and widely consumed, it is a powerful agent in shaping these representative images. However, the power of any one image of popular culture is weakened in part because of the sheer magnitude of competing popular elements. Images are further diluted because they are often casually consumed as entertainment and because the contents of popular culture are so broad, varied, and transitional. This essay emanates from my genuine appreciation for the efforts of Alexie and my curiosity about the effects of popular culture and the potential [End Page 129] of Smoke Signals to counter hegemonic representations of Indians. To explore this potential, I asked a series of questions of my students in an introduction to sociology class and conducted an exploratory experiment with a colleague's children. In the following, I discuss both the power of popular culture to shape perceptions, through inciting novel ideas in a film like Smoke Signals, and the transient effects of any one film. As such, I point to the importance of this use and appropriation of popular culture and also to the limitations of popular culture that necessitate actions on the part of people who shape culture in general, directed toward elaborating and institutionalizing the projects initiated by artists acting within the medium of popular culture.

An Interview with Sherman Alexie

On a rare sunny Seattle day, Sherman Alexie's manager offered me my choice of soda or bottled water and gave me a tour of Alexie's three-room office, a good-looking rooftop space with a deck that overlooks the tony community of Bellevue. Some worlds may contrast more starkly with Alexie's boyhood home on the Coeur d'Ale?e Indian Reservation, but not many. Alexie arrived late, comfortable in cotton, hair pulled back in a loose pony tail. As we introduced ourselves his smile hid a sense of weary obligation? this poet, fiction writer and filmmaker has many projects to promote. Though he became quite friendly after a few questions, at first his manner seemed to suggest, Let's get to it.

Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (review)

Reviewed by: Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place Nancy J. Peterson Louis Owens. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. xvi + 252 pp. “I conceive of myself today not as an ‘Indian,’ but as a mixedblood, a person of complex roots and histories.” Louis Owens’s striking remark lies at the heart of Mixedblood Messages, a book that carefully explores “questions of mixed heritage.” This distinction has far-reaching implications for the study of Native American literature, as well as for multiculturalism more generally. For Owens, “Indian” is too often linked to clichéd and stereotypical ideas of native peoples and an insistence on authenticity that leads to fakery, whereas “mixedblood” recognizes that because most native peoples today have a number of inheritances to reckon with, issues of identity, history, and culture are incredibly complicated (Owens himself is of Choctaw, Cherokee, Cajun French, Irish, and “perhaps Welsh, too” ancestry). To say anything worthwhile, then, the study of mixedblood texts and native peoples must take such complexity [End Page 1052] into account, and one of Owens’s purposes in writing this book is to revise the typical ways scholars and students read and analyze Native American literature. Another purpose is to defend mixedblood peoples from misunderstandings and unwarranted criticism. Owens points out the many ways in which “[m]ixedbloods in America inhabit an often hostile and bitterly contested realm” uneasily suspended between “White America” and “Indian America.” He defends mixedblood writers from charges that what they create is not “real” Native American literature because it may employ an urban setting, or it may present a multicultural rather than a traditional tribal vision. Elsewhere, referring to his unsuccessful attempts to locate even one picture of, let alone a name for, his maternal great-grandmother, Owens also describes plaintively the terrible in-betweenness that may occur for mixedblood peoples: “For me, as for many of us, there are enormous gaps, voids that cannot be filled. These are the missing grandmothers, and grandfathers, too, and the results are mixed messages.” At the same time, Owens borrows a term from Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor, “survivance,” to call attention to the will to rise above circumstances, to love and create families, to laugh at life’s absurdities and obstacles Owens witnessed growing up among mixedbloods. Mixedblood Messages consists of sixteen essays, several of which have been published separately over the past few years but appear in revised form in the book. As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into four parts, focusing first on literature and then film, moving on to several autobiographical essays, and finally turning to activist essays on the environment. Owens describes his book in the preface as “eclectic.” True—and yet given Owens’s determination to illuminate what it means to be mixedblood personally, theoretically, and intellectually, it seems fitting that the book should be “mixed” too. The book follows through on Owens’s observation in one essay that “to get at the concept of mixedblood, if one is of mixed bloods, requires negotiating personal as well as critical terrain.” All of the essays are worthwhile, but for the purposes of this review, the chapters on literature and film are most relevant. The first section of the book, titled “Mixedbloods and Mixed Messages: Adventures in Native American Literature,” includes chapters exploring such issues as the value of literary theory when analyzing native texts, the [End Page 1053] offensive use of romanticized stereotypes of Indians to market literary texts to a mainstream audience, and the ways that inflexible assumptions about full-bloods and authentic Indianness continue to skew readings of Native American literature today. Owens is not afraid to leap with both feet into various controversies. He enthusiastically recommends Vizenor as the most important mixedblood author writing today and laments that he is not more widely read and written about. At the same time, Owens is wary of mixedblood writers like Sherman Alexie, Adrian Louis, Janet Campbell Hale, and Louise Erdrich, who, in Owens’s view, have enjoyed commercial success by giving white mainstream readers clichéd texts and images of Indians. Particularly troubled by the bleak portrayal of reservations, as well as the preponderance of dysfunctional...

Native American identities: from stereotype to archetype in art and literature

Issues of identity and authenticity present perennial challenges to both Native Americans and critics of their art. examines the long history of dehumanizing depictions of Native Americans while discussing such purveyors of stereotypes as the Puritans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Hollywood. These stereotypes abetted a national policy robbing Indians of their cultural identity. As a contrast to these, he examines the work of white authors and artists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Oliver La Farge, the Taos Society of Artists, and Frank Waters, who created more archetypal fictional Indian characters. In the second half of the book, explores the work of Indian artists and writers, such as Edgar Heap of Birds, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie who craft humanizing new images of authenticity and legitimacy, bridging the gap between stereotype and archetype. This is an essential book for all readers with an interest in the tragic history of Indian-white conflict. Vickers is one of the few to consider artists and writers in relation to each other. He offers a refreshingly commonsensical approach.-Herta Wong, University of California Berkley

Native-American writers

Native Americans have produced some of the most powerful and lyrical literature ever written in North America. This volume examines some of the finest Native American writers, including Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, Samsom Occom, Zitkala-Sa, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom introduces this new edition, which also features a bibliography, a chronology, and an index for easy reference. This title in the Bloom's Modern Critical Views series presents a well-rounded critical portrait of an influential group of writers by examining their body of work through eight to 12 full-length essays.

Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place by Louis Owens

324 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 readers to question the assumptions underlying their own work and perhaps to envision fresh interpretive approaches to the study of women’s narratives of the West. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. By Louis Owens. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 263 pages, $28.00. Reviewed by Margaret Dwyer University of Texas at Arlington Bookstores have had difficulties placing Louis Owens’s latest book in their literature sections, despite its name. Amazon.com put it in with “his­ tory.” This isn’t surprising, however. With Mixedblood Messages, Owens offers his readers a cornucopia of free-standing critical literary essays, film criticism, short stories, personal history, and environmental observations. And in taking a step past his highly regarded Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, Owens shifts his gaze, looking not only at texts this time but also at the reader. Are consumers of American Indian litera­ ture looking for a tour of the exotic; are they literary tourists out to take a spin around Indian territory? Owens contends that some American Indian writers are writing to meet the expectations of mainstream readers, present­ ing the ubiquitous stereotypical Indian protagonists, settings, behaviors and outcomes. Perhaps this is because they themselves have accepted the dom­ inant culture’s metanarrative on what an Indian is: a historic artifact, whether dysfunctional or noble. Owens cites Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich as examples. Despite their very well-received early works, Owens sees “literary tourism” affecting their later novels. Other writers, however, are appropriating the “enemy’s language” in order to present works that are fresh and disturbing, shaking up their readers and making them question the status quo. It will be no surprise that mixedblood writer Gerald Vizenor tops this list, which isn’t limited to only late-twentieth-century writers. In the chapter “Mapping the Mixedblood: Frontier and Territory in Native America,” Owens provides a fine close reading of C ogewea by Mourning Dove, representing her complex understanding of the frontier that mixedbloods inhabit. For scholars who have looked to Owens for a steady supply of thought­ ful criticism, this book is going to become the companion to Other Destinies. Some of these essays were first published in hard-to-find interdisciplinary journals. While he has reworked and updated most of these works, the crisp ideas and criticism are intact. He has installed a few hot buttons as well, particularly with his chapter “Blood Trails: Missing Grandmothers and Making Worlds,” which responds to a broadside against “urban mixedblood writers” delivered by Lakota critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in the American Book reviews 325 Indian Quarterly. This is not a sweeping condemnation of Cook-Lynn’s work, however; he agrees with some of her thoughts on the representation of reservations in “Through an Amber Glass: Chief Doom and the Native American Novel Today.” He does take issue with her inconsistent criticism of Vizenor, King, his own, and others’ “mixedblood messages” while she praises Momaday and Silko for their representations of reservation life, seemingly missing both of these superb authors’ “mixedblood messages.” Readers of Owens’s fiction will find some of the backgrounding to his novels in his “Autobiographical Reflections, Or Mixed Blood and Mixed Messages,” as well as through the interesting collection of family photos contained here, many newly discovered by his older sister only a few months prior to the writing of this book. The trunk containing these family trea­ sures had been stored since his mother’s death in 1991; Owens’s pleasure in discovering the faces that are linked to a lifetime of family stories is clear in these chapters. Owens’s concluding chapters raise issues of the Native American rela­ tionship to the environment. Knowingly contradicting himself, he notes, for example, that while he is opposed to the possibility of an open pit cop­ per mine in the middle of the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area of the North Cascades, as a Forest Service employee, he “had participated in the mining company’s ultimate goal: to exploit the wilderness” (210). Owens also chal­ lenges the idea of Indians as “genetically predetermined environmentalists” and suggests the Iron Eyes Cody anti-litter campaign helped set this iconographic hook. Yet...

An occasion for giving

I GREW UP AS ONE OF THE FEW WHITES IN A LARGELY CHICANO NEIGHBORhood where all of the children-myself included-called anyone who took back a gift an Indian giver. Not until much later did I become aware of the hypocritical inversions of the term, or of the ironies that attended our name-calling, given our respective histories. In Returning the Gift, Native writers make clear (for anyone who hasn't got it yet) exactly who took what from whom. As the speaker in Sherman Alexie's Red Blues asks, What treaties can I sign now? I'd hold you to all your promises if I could find just one I know you'd keep (3). At the same time as contributors point to the bad faith and false promises that accompanied the taking of Native lands and lives, they (re)claim the term Indian giver. Witness, example, these lines from Harold Littlebird's untitled poem about a family reunion: Oh Grandfather! / In Love, Giving / I give lovingly / For I am an Indian-Giver, returning. . (184). Returning the Gift is indeed for Giving; its writings are gifts that Native contributors give to non-Native readers as well to one another and to their respective and overlapping communities. The occasion the anthology was the July 1992 Returning the Gift Festival, a 4-day conference in Oklahoma which, as anthology editor and conference co-organizer Joseph Bruchac notes, brought more Native writers together in one place than at any other time in history (xix).