Alexie Response

Frank Ross asked Alexie about the political nature of his writing, quoting him as saying he does not like to beat readers over the head with it. Alexie replied: “I like to make them laugh first, then beat them over the head . . . when they are defenseless.” Describe some examples from the stories that demonstrate this tactic. Choose one example to focus on and explain how the humor and political point work together as in the above quote.

From a mother sharing secrets with her son about drunken nights in between the sheets with his father, to a smashed Indian placed on a roller coaster by his laughing friends, Alexie preludes deeper messages with his own element of humor.  Very notably, in “A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie offers the reader Victor’s firsthand comical, yet grave, experience tripping on psychedelic mushrooms.  As the drug is often rumored to induce spiritual effects, Victor incorporates his own Indian ethnicity when inviting peer Thomas Builds-the-fire to join: “It’ll be very fucking Indian.  Spiritual shit, you know?”(14)  Although Victor’s description of his trip humorously begins with a conversation he shares with a talking horse named Flight, he eventually encounters some painful thoughts in their concrete form: “They’re all gone, my tribe is gone.  Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us.  I’m the last, the very last, and I’m sick too.”(17)  He is convinced of his own infection of smallpox until he conducts a Ghost Dance to bring back the deceased members of his tribe; and, as his “blisters heal” and “muscles stretch, expand,” a bit of his contempt for the colonizer’s is revealed: “The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.”(17)  His vision of the whites ended with him and his tribe dancing on the shore as “all the white hands waved good-bye” and returned to Europe. 

What was originally introduced as an amusing bit about kids and their hallucinogens might have exposed a mass notion (maybe grudge is a better word?) of an Indian nation.  Junior explained to them the concept of skeletons: “Your past is a skeleton walking one step beside you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you.” (21)  Junior also emphasized that skeletons have the power to entrap the mind, yet the ability for them to be evil is completely an individual’s choice.  As the components of such skeletons, as Junior says, are “memories, dreams, and voices,” Victor’s trip is characterized by his confrontation with his skeletons. 

On whiteness, Indian identity and colonialism, Alexie says, “What is colonialism but the breeding out of existence of the colonized? The most dangerous thing for Indians, then, now and forever is that we love our colonizers. And we do.” He goes on to say, and I paraphrase, that Indian identity now is mostly a matter of cultural difference; that culture is received knowledge, because the authentic practitioners are gone. The culture is all adopted culture, not innate. Colonization is complete. Think about how what he is discussing plays out in his stories. Choose one (a different one than for the first question) and discuss how a story represents the characters' relationship to the tribe's past and to the colonizing culture.

In “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangeled Banner’ At Woodstock,” Alexie offers a few examples, some obviously negative, of the Indians’ ultimate adoption of white culture.  “My father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians,”—a first line that indicates an Indian’s opportunity to parallel with modern American culture. Especially because the “Make Love Not War” crowd is a youthful one, Victor’s father’s enticement with Jimi Hendrix, and embracement of society’s new cultural wave signifies a loss of “authentic practitioners.”  Instead of reserving certain aspects of his native culture to himself, he meshed it with the colonizers, as the hippies were compelled by Native American fashion.  Victor imagines his father doing so: “I dreamed my father dancing with all these skinny hippie women, smoking a few joints, dropping acid, laughing when the rain fell.” (31) Chances are, if the traditional elders were alive to witness this, they would have probably not approved such a cultural compromise. 

Alexie also touches on a change in Indian family structure; When Victor tells of his father’s leave from him and his mother, he notes how such paternal actions were the emulation of the white family: “On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing.  It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how.  That’s how assimilation can work.” (34)