Sherman Alexie Article

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Sherman Alexie's Autoethnography

Author(s): John Newton
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 2, Special Issue: American Poetry of the 1990s (
Summer, 2001), pp. 413-428
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209128
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JOHN
NEWTON
ShermanAlexie's Autoethnography
or ShermanAlexie,1993was a famousyear.His workhaving first appeared in book form a year earlier, with a poetry chapbook, I WouldStealHorses,and a fatter collection
of poetry and fiction, TheBusinessof Fancydancing,in 1993
he published three full-length works: a volume of poems, Old Shirts
and New Skins, a book of short stories, The LoneRangerand Tonto
Fistfightin 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 of
Alexie's work. "I'm not aware," says Krupat, "of any Native American writer working today who has not declared some kind of
indebtedness and / or allegiance to the narrative primacy of the oral
tradition" (171). Sherman Alexie appears on cue, the exception
which such a remark perhaps inevitably anticipates: "People keep
asking me how my work is influenced by the oral tradition," 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 I typed it'" ("Sherman Alexie" 14). But the timeliness of
his project goes deeper than this. It isn't just that he contravenes
this seemingly plausible outline of a dominant Native American
mode, but also that his work disturbs just as explicitly a number
of the most fundamental assumptions that shape the broader context out of which Krupat is speaking-namely those cluttered demarcation debates of the late eighties and early nineties around the
postmoder and the postcolonial.
LiteratureXLII,2
0010-7484/ 01 / 0002-0413
Contemporary
? 2001 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
414
C O N T EM P O RA RY
LI T E RA T U R E
Alexie's refusal of this "oral tradition" is indicative of the way

he distances himself from the writers of the Native American renaissance. Scornful of a so-called "corn pollen and eagle feather
school of poetry" ("Sherman Alexie" 15), Alexie stresses instead
his own easy affiliation with urban mass culture and the contemporary reservation.1On more than one occasion, he cites as key influences Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and TheBradyBunch,while in
conversation with John Purdy he remarks: "I don't know about
you, but growing up all I got exposed to was Mother Earth Father
Sky stuff, or direction stuff. That's how I thought Indians wrote. I
didn't know I could actually write about my life.... I could write
about fry bread and fried bologna" ("Crossroads" 13).
At the same time, Alexie is utterly emphatic about the relation
of his writing to the ravages of colonial history: "I'm a colonized
man.... The United States is a colony, and I'm always going to
write like one who is colonized" ("Seeing Red"). To an Anglophone reader like myself working outside the United States, this
self-positioning in relation to American history has an inescapable
resonance. Those theoretical skirmishes which Krupat invokesabout just what it means to "write like one who is colonized"have by and large been conducted elsewhere, in the tracks of that
imperial formation which used to be referred to as "Commonwealth literature" or "New Literatures in English." But inasmuch
as those debates have returned so insistently to the question of
where postcolonialism either departs from or collapses into postmodernism, there is a sense in which the United States and the
Native American experience have always awaited recognition as
a kind of limit case. If postmodernism, in Stuart Hall's oft-cited
aphorism, is about how the world dreams itself to be American
(132), then the subject of America's internal colonization is signally
positioned in the crosscurrents of imperial and neo-imperial force.
Teaching American literature at entry level, half a world away here
in New Zealand, it is striking to experience the instant recognition
with which poetry-shy undergraduates respond to Alexie's work.
No doubt his reader-friendly textures and ambivalent good humor
1. Alexie sources the expression back to Adrian C. Louis. The phrase recurs in "Crossroads" (11).
N E W T O N * 415
go some way towards explaining. But to my ear the implications

extend further. As the subjugated "other" of an invader discourse
synonymous with global media saturation, the Native American
subject finds himself spectacularized on a global scale. And if
Alexie makes his stand in the struggle for subjective agency not in
some autochthonous interiority but on the flat, open ground of the
invader's own image-repertoire, the result is a comedy whose figures and gestures communicate lucidly on a global stage.
I don't mean by this to disinter a dispute which was losing its
momentum just as Alexie was taking off-Alexie being the inheritor, I would argue, not so much of the theoretical debate as of that
moment in the global history of decolonization to which it
speaks2-but simply to observe how in Alexie's playful activism
so many of that argument's enabling distinctions appear to unravel
or deconstruct. In distancing himself from Krupat's native oral tradition, Alexie detaches himself from a complex of neighboring assumptions: that an appeal to indigenous metaphysical systems will
take precedence over self-reflexive textuality; that a contestation of
imperial agency will supplant a critique of the humanist subject;
that the urgency of active resistance will prohibit the sportive indulgences of postmodernism. In Alexie's poetics of the contemporary reservation, history is neither metaphysical nor even tribal,
but always emphatically a history of contact. Indigenous mythology and figurative systems give way to the Esperanto of American
mass culture, the "narrative primacy" of oral tradition to the cartoon dramaturgy of the reservation drive-in. Swaying between
flippancy and the most acute seriousness-he himself describes it
as "the humor of genocide" ("Screenwriter")-Alexie's work employs a cheerful pop-cultural globalism in negotiating a history
which is drastically specific. The result is a "postcolonialism" that
makes no claim to disentangle itself either from the colonial past
or from the postmodern present.
In the wake of that recent theoretical debate, readers of the (post)colonial nexus now have at their disposal an ample terminology
for exploring the forms of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridityof transference and transmutation, translation and transcultura2. For a pithy retrospect on this debate, see During 31-34.
416
? C O N T EM P O RA RY
LI T E RA T U R E
tion-that energize the writing of anti-imperial resistance. To keynote this reading of Alexie, however, I have preferred Mary Louise
Pratt's less familiar coinage, autoethnography:
"If ethnographic texts
are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their
(usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the
others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (7). Pratt describes anti-imperial texts which
stare down directly the ethnographic project, and indeed there are
times when Alexie's poems come close to being autoethnographic
in this quite specific sense. But the term responds, too, to a broader
application wherever "colonized subjects undertake to represent
themselves in ways that engagewith the colonizer's own terms" (7).
Where the colonizer's discourse is at its most racist, its stereotypes
at their most vicious and demeaning, is where Sherman Alexie's
poems set the root of their anticolonial self-fashioning. And it's this
I wish to highlight in Alexie's work: his fearless determination (in
the words of an unlikely ally, N. Scott Momaday) to "go into the
enemies' camp" (qtd. in Lincoln 159), and to tackle the construction
of indigenous identity there,on precisely that ground which has
been most destructive of it.3
To a large extent, the dramatic tension which animates Alexie's

earlier works derives from the depiction of a personal relationship,
romantic but also intensely political. By lining up the pronouns,
the dedications, and the cross-references between various poems
and stories, it is no doubt possible to reconstruct the outline of a
quasi-confessional narrative. In the end, however, it isn't clear, nor
does it matter, if the "you" or "she" is one person, several people,
or simply the imaginary or allegorical figure of the object of desire.
The crucial thing is that she is white. Consequently, the couple's
relations effect an ongoing reenactment of the history of colonial
contact, with the place of her whiteness in the subject's imaginary
as the ever-insistent index of his fissured (post)colonial subjectiv3. Alexie is explicitly critical of Momaday ("We've been stuck in place since House
Made of Dawn") in "Crossroads" 8-9.
N E W T 0 N * 417
ity. This drama appears in capsule form in the third of the "Indian
Boy Love Songs" from The Business of Fancydancing:
I remember when I told
my cousin
she was more beautiful
than any white girl
I had ever seen.
She kissed me then
with both lips, a tongue
that tasted clean and unclean at the same time
like the river which divides
the heart of my heart, all
the beautiful white girls on one side,
my beautiful cousin on the other.
(56)
In establishing whiteness as a measure of desire, the subject translates the history of colonialism into a kind of internalized racism. As
another poem notes, "There is nothing as white as the white girl an
Indian boy loves" (Old Shirts 86), while the uncertain taste of the
cousin's kiss confirms a troubling ambivalence which, for Alexie,
inevitably marks postcontact identity.
The hero of this fraught romance is typically figured in these
texts as displaced-that is, in the wrongplace, given what he knows
of colonial history. In the narrative poem "Tiny Treaties," in First
Indianon theMoon, the speaker is hitchhiking at night in a blizzard,
"on my way back home from touching / / your white skin again."
Here, as so often, the subject appears through the lens of what
W. E. B. Du Bois called "double-consciousness" (5), viewing himself as the unseen drivers see him, "my hair long, unbraided, and
magnified / in headlights of passing cars." Specifically, he imagines himself as he might have appeared to his white lover:
I waited seconds into years
for a brake light, that smallest possible treaty
and I made myself so many promises
418
LI T E RA T U R E
that have since come true

but I never had the courage to keep
my last promise, whispered
just before I topped a small hill
and saw the 24-hour lights
of the most beautiful 7-11 in the world.
With my lungs aching, my hands and feet
frozen and disappearing, I promised
to ask if you would have stopped
and picked me up if you didn't know me....
(56-57)
If in the end he doesn't want to hear the answer, it is of course

because he knows that, as surely as he reduces his lover to the
metonymy of her white skin-and reduces himselfin identical fashion when projecting himself into the place of the white driversso she too will always see color before she sees him.
Ultimately, therefore, the narration of this romance serves to memorialize that history of colonial conflict which is the lovers' differential legacy. Trudging through the blizzard, the speaker imagines
himself as "a twentieth century Dull Knife," grimly playing the
part of the Northern Cheyenne leader whose signature on the Fort
Laramie treaty did nothing to prevent the virtual annihilation of
his people when the forced Cheyenne exodus culminated in the
massacre at Fort Robinson in 1878 (Brown 131, 344-49). Each act
of love, then, is a "tiny treaty" contracted against the background
of all those treaties which have stood for nothing, a background
which inevitably overwhelms the foreground of a personal relationship collapsing under the weight of the history that bears on
it. In the story called "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven," the narrator dreams of the couple's lovemaking as the
catalyst for a massacre on a continental scale (LoneRanger186). A
poem which follows closely on "Tiny Treaties" is titled "Seven
Love Songs Which Include the Collected History of the United
States of America" (First Indian62-65).
Alexie's romantic protagonists, then, are divided by historyfrom one another, and from themselves. The prose poem "Captiv-
N E W T O N * 419
ity," also from First Indianon the Moon, pushes this contact history
back to 1676 and the ur-captivity of Mary Rowlandson.
1.
When I tell you this story, remember it may change: the reservation
recalls the white girl with no name or a name which refuses memory.
October she filled the reservation school, this new white girl, daughter
of a BIA official or doctor in the Indian Health Service Clinic. Captive,
somehow afraid of the black hair and flat noses of the Indian children
who rose, one by one, shouting their names aloud. She ran from the room,
is still running, waving her arms wildly at real and imagined enemies.
Was she looking toward the future? Was she afraid of loving all of us?
2.
All of us heard the explosion when the two cars collided on the reservation road. Five Indians died in the first car; four Indians died in the second. The only survivor was a white woman from Springdale who
couldn't remember her name.
3.
I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down
directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to
stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776
or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice? September, Mary Rowlandson, it was September when you visited the reservation grade school. The
speech therapist who tore the Indian boy from his classroom, kissed him
on the lips, gave him the words which echoed treaty: He thrusts his fists
againstthepostsbutstill insistshe seestheghosts.Everythingchanges. Both

of us force the sibilant, in the language of the enemy.
4.
of
the
enemy: heavy lightness, house insurance, serious vanity,
Language
safe-deposit box,feather of lead, sandwich man, brightsmoke,second-guess,
sick health, shell game, still-waking sleep, forgiveness.
5.
How much longer can we forgive each other? Let's say I am the fancydancer and every step is equal to a drum beat, this sepia photograph of
420
LI T E RA T U R E
you and me staring into the West of our possibilities. For now, you are
wearing the calico dress that covers your ankles and wrists and I'm wearing a bone vest wrapped around a cotton shirt, my hair unbraided and
unafraid. This must be 1876 but no, it is now, August, and this photograph
will change the story....
(98-99)
Once more the lovers find themselves trapped in an ongoing transference of the past ("Nothing changes.... Was it 1676 or 1976 or
1776 ... ?"), powerless to extricate themselves from the structure
of enmity that conquest imposes. Nor, in the construction of their
identities and desires, can they wean themselves off the images
furnished by colonial history. Changing the story-a repeated refrain and strategic ideal in Alexie's work-is a question of trying
to step outside this loop, with its specular certainties and binary
antagonisms.
But exiting this colonial story is an undertaking fraught with the
most fundamental ironies of (post)colonial writing. In "Captivity,"
the white woman as teacher and muse brings the "Indian boy"
(of the "love poems"?) the invasive, paradoxical offering of poetic
language. It is, we are reminded, the language of the enemy, as
embodied ("heavylightness")in Shakespeare, from the first act of
Romeoand Juliet.The star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare's play are,
in part, a conventional figure of transculturalmesalliance (Lubiano
221). But as the Shakespeare text performs its accustomed colonial
function, as mask of conquest, or hegemonic "speech therapy," it
reminds us that a Native American literature in English is also oxymoronic and star-crossed, historically inapt.
Captivity, then, comes in myriad guises-a white boy in a
chicken coop, "an Indian in a Bottle," "the iron bars ... painted
on your U.S. government glasses" (99-100)-but wrapped around
them all is the metastory of colonialism and literary form. To operate the tools of the invader's literary culture is inevitably to work
in a kind of imprisonment. But Alexie is unafraid to confront this
problem head-on: it is autoethnography's chosen ground. Advisedly, therefore, the text takes its stand inside the racist imaginary
of the Puritan captivity narrative. For Alexie, what Andrew Ross
calls the "politics of appropriation" implies not just a sampling of
European styles but a fastening on to those idioms and forms in
N EW TO N
421
which indigeneity has most derisively been enclosed.4 The story

that desperately needs to be changed is a story in which the subject
appears as a stereotype, in relation to others, who are stereotypes,
too, and who repeat that story with him.
In these terms, the title piece from Alexie's 1993 book of short
fiction, The LoneRangerand Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, reads like a
kind of oblique manifesto. Here, his familiar star-crossed lovers are
just one of three interracialcouples whose misalliances run a parallel course. In one of the story's three interwoven narratives, this
romantic couple is seen coming unstuck. In a second, the narrator
recalls a reservation showdown in which he is defeated in a highly
personalized encounter with a white basketball player. Finally, in
the present tense of the story, the narratorwhiles away an evening
in Seattle by taunting the graveyard-shift cashier in the local 7-11.
This involves acting out the white clerk's racist assumptions-"He
looked me over so he could describe me to the police later" (182)in a calculated effort to wind him up.
"Can I help you?" the 7-11 clerk asked me loudly, searching for some
response that would reassure him....
"Just getting a Creamsicle," I said after a long interval.... I grabbed
my Creamsicle and walked back to the counter slowly, scanned the aisles
for effect....
"Pretty hot out tonight?" he asked, that old rhetorical weather bullshit
question designed to put us both at ease.
"Hot enough to make you go crazy," I said and smiled. He swallowed
hard like a white man does in those situations. I looked him over. Same
old green, red, and white 7-11 jacket and thick glasses. But he wasn't
ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness. If he wasn't working there
that night, he'd be at home alone, flipping through channels and wishing
he could afford HBO or Showtime.
"Will this be all?" he asked me, in that company effort to make me do
some impulse shopping. Like adding a clause onto a treaty. We'll take
4. Ross writes: "[T]his politics of appropriation, for so long exclusively the discursive
preserve of the colonizer, has more recently been crucial to groups on the social margin,
who have preferred, under certain circumstances, to struggle for recognition and legitimacy on established 'metropolitan' political ground rather than run the risk of ghettoization by insisting on the 'authenticity' of their respective group identities, ethnic, sexual,
or otherwise" (xi).
422
LI T E RA T U R E
Washingtonand Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-newChrysler
Cordoba.I knew how to make and break promises.
"No," I said and paused. "Give me a Cherry Slushie, too."
"What size?" he asked, relieved.
"Large," I said, and he turned his back to me to make the drink. He
realized his mistake but it was too late. He stiffened, ready for the gunshot
or the blow behind the ear. When it didn't come, he turned back to me.
"I'm sorry," he said. "What size did you say?"
"Small," I said and changed the story.
(183-84)
The buddy-movie image of the Masked Man and his Faithful Indian Companion locked in their perpetual cartoon punch-up highlights the queasy intimacy of the transcultural play of recognitions
which makes this counterdiscourse possible. "I know that game,"
the narrator confides. "I worked graveyard for a Seattle 7-11 and
got robbed once too often. The last time the bastard locked me in
the cooler. He even took my money and basketball shoes" (181).
Abjectly though the clerk is presented, the narrator's part in this
endless feud is made possible only by a sympathy for him that
dates from his own stint on the far side of the counter: "Acne scars
and a bad haircut, work pants that showed off his white socks, and
those cheap black shoes that have no support. My arches still ache
from my year at the Seattle 7-11" (181).
The combatants are bound together by a shared experience and
a shared image-repertoire: as if they had grown up watching the
same movies, their common array of stereotypes keeps alive their
ritualized conflict. Thus to rewrite the buddy relation as a fistfight
does not in itself undo the hegemonic work of the invader's mythology. Asked about the experience of watching Westerns as a
child, Alexie replies: "I rooted for the cowboys just like everyone
else. When we played cowboys and Indians on the rez, only the
unpopular kids played Indians" ("Talking"). If he also has a poem
called "My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys" (First Indian 1024), a vacillation or ambivalence remains; the story's interchangeable feuding couples fistfight not only on the screen but in the Native subject's divided consciousness.
Changing the story, then, is not to be achieved by the binary
inversions of any straightforward politics of identity. Focused as
N EW TO N
423
he is on that "language of the enemy" as scene of the subject's

entrapment and division, Alexie seems never to imagine for a moment that his debt to invader discourse can simply be written off.
On the contrary, the politics which is modeled in this routine involves the sense of a concrete tactical advantage to be had from
this allo-identification. By virtue of his experience quite literally in
the other's shoes ("My arches still ache from my year at the Seattle
7-11"), the narrator in Alexie's story is able to think himself into
the place of the white interpreter of indigeneity. His gambit is
therefore to make himself appear as a difference from that stereotype which he not only knowingly represents but self-consciously
plays up to. What changes the story is the moment where this difference unsettles the binary symmetry of that ritualized conflict,
obliging the clerk to confront in the same moment both the stereotype itself and his antagonist's active nonidentity with it. The result
is a hiccup-a double take-in which the feedback loop of colonial
antagonism is interrupted by a flash of uncertainty, long enough
perhaps for a different outcome to be plotted: "He looked at me,
couldn't decide if I was giving him serious shit or just goofing"
(184).
Alexie's career of the later nineties is marked by a diversified output and a sense of expanding possibilities. On the one hand, there
are the increasingly sustained excursions into prose fiction, in ReservationBlues (1995) and the bulky, plot-driven IndianKiller(1998).
Also of notable strategic interest is the production of Alexie's first
screenplay, SmokeSignals (1998). Jennifer Gillan's instructively titled essay "Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie's Poetry"
identifies cinema as a kind of locus classicus for the complicated
politics of identity in which Alexie's work deals. For Alexie to
plunge headlong into the celluloid matrix (a film treatment of Indian Killer has also been proposed) might well appear to be the
inevitable conclusion of his consistent determination to join issue
with American mass culture. At the same time, however, there has
been no obvious slackening of his commitment to verse, with The
Summerof Black Widows(1996) being his thickest volume to date,
and in many ways his most ambitious.
424
* C O N T EM P O RA RY
LIT E RA T U R E
In relation to what I have said about the earlier volumes, the

most obvious shift to notice is in the configuration of the implicit
domestic background. The "she" of these poems is now Native
American, and the troubling ambivalence of transculturalromance
drops out of the picture. In tandem with this appear certain intimations of a more fundamentalist take on postcolonial identity:
Let's begin with this: America.
I want it all back
now, acre by acre, tonight. I want
some Indian to finally learn
to dance the Ghost Dance right
so that all of the salmon and buffalo return
and the white men are sent back home
to wake up in their favorite European cities.
("Bob's Coney Island" 138)
In an uncharacteristic invocation of oral tradition, a Coyote story

appears in "That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump" (19). In
"Fireas Verb and Noun," the author insists on his proprietary right
to distinguish, contra an unnamed reviewer, between "metaphor"
and personal anguish: "There is a grave on the Spokane Indian
Reservation / where my sister is buried. I can take you there" (55).
Thus to some extent the picture begins to emerge of a more affirmative production of oppositional truth claims, and of a willingness to reach for an indigenous authority in the promotion of what
Stephen Slemon calls "alterior'knowledge'" (6). But as I read Alexie's procedures in this volume, he doesn't so much adoptthe more
conventional identity politics which these gestures might seem to
announce as mobilize that politics as a signifier in the contact imaginary. The difference, in other words, is between a "strategic essentialism" and a strategic appropriation of the stereotypes of essentialist thought.
Exemplary here are the thirty-three fragments (thirty-threeways
of looking at Sasquatch?)which make up the book's longest single
work, "The Sasquatch Poems." "I believe in Sasquatch / just as
much as I believe in God," the first fragment explains, adding that
this is illogical since fewer people have seen God (103). Sasquatch,
then, is a relativist lever, in a poem which is as much a meditation
on Catholicism as a celebration of any more traditional discourse:
N E W T O N * 425
Do you take the bread and wine
because you believe them to be the body and blood?
I take them, as other Indians do, too
because that colonial superstitionis as beautiful
as any of our indigenous superstitions.
(108)
However, with these telling instabilities in place, the poem sets a

platform for something we have not come to expect in Alexie's
work, namely a tour of Sasquatch lore which in places seems to
edge toward the certainties of the anticolonial sublime. Thus Sasquatch appears as the unspeakable truth which marks the outer
limits of Western thought:
Late night on the SpokaneIndian Reservation
we can hear the shrill cry echo through the pines.
We have recordedthe cry and played it for the experts
who cannot tell us which animal made that sound.
(110)
No less unusual in Alexie's work, Sasquatch, as the object of a sacred, or at the very least secret knowledge ("N" who once was
chased by a Sasquatch "refuses to speak of this even now" [104]),
structures an affiliative network organized not in terms of the contemporary reservation but of the deep history of the tribe:
We tell these Sasquatchstories
because we are SpokaneIndian.
We are Spokane
because our grandparentswere Spokane.
Our grandparentstold Sasquatchstories.
Our grandparentsheard Sasquatchstories
told by their grandparents.
In this way, we come to worship.
(104-5)
And yet at the very heart of Alexie's Sasquatch folio-at the moment where the poem comes closest to saying directly what the
are offered not the gravity of tribal
speaker himself "believes"-we
orature but the solemn truth of a video clip:
426
- C O N T EM P O RA RY
LI T E RA T U R E
... the Sasquatch woman

who walked across deadfall in the film
shot by Roger Patterson on the Hupa Indian Reservation
in Northern California. We have all seen
her pendulous breasts, prominent brow, large feet
and shadowed eyes as she turns to face the camera,
and the commotion caused when Patterson's horse threw him.
Patterson continued to film as he fell ....
His home movie
has never been discredited...
(107)
From the depths of its classified, alterior knowledge, the poem

invokes the open secret of global mass culture. Wehaveall seen this
image-Native Americans, other Americans, and the rest of us,
too. Its leverage here is an effect of its currency in the vernacular
syncretism of video-bite culture and urban myth. And it's the way
it looms up out of this global soup- "Sasquatch did not crash land
in Roswell, New Mexico. / . . . /Sasquatch
did not write Shake-
speare's plays" (109)-which renders so inscrutable the poem's

blank-ironic avowals (Is he serious or just goofing?) and puts steel
in its poker-faced obeisance to the superstitions of the invader. For
the Native American, the ongoing struggle with settler representations of indigeneity has become a contest with the century's most
aggressive and most highly capitalized media industries. The Native American becomes a planetary "other" (even little New
Zealanders play cowboys and Indians, perhaps as a way of forgetting to play Maori and Pakeha). But at the point where the movie
turns into the "home movie"-Roger Patterson, a Yakima Indian,
was also a cameraman with the film company ANE-Alexie's
work finds a vein of resistance whose strength is in proportion to
the scale of that Orientalist history. Alexie's home movies, his reappropriations, fill the screen with household names; in this sense,
at least, he has a billion-dollar budget with which to try to unsettle
this conversation in which a global audience has been accustomed
to find comfort.
In an essay from 1990 which I have cited once already, Canadian
critic Stephen Slemon cautions against "Western postmodernist
N E W T 0 N * 427
readings [which] can so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energies of postcolonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them" (7). In
context there is no denying Slemon's point. Unfortunately, however, this perception has tended to function as the leading edge of
a systematic binary inflation. The postmoder and the postcolonial
(Pomo and Poco as they are known to their familiars) tend to come
across here like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, slugging away in a
ritualized turf war whose stakes from some angles might in fact
appear rather trivial. The protagonists, of course, are stereotypes:
a postcolonialism global and homogeneous, and a version of postmodernism which tends to mean (in this debate) simply that which
allows no political agency.
By the time we get to Sherman Alexie, however, these binary
discriminations are clearly untenable. Instead, a residual politics
of recovered authenticity (Slemon's "important recuperative
work") is played out deconstructively on the terrain of the global
popular, where Sasquatch rides with the Lone Ranger and Tonto,
the poet scans the aisles for effect, and a superstitious cleaving to
"referentiality" is simply another primitivist cliche-grist to the
mill of Alexie's autoethnographic parody. All that Alexie's poems
reclaim is the Native American's own alienated image-the Indian
viewed by the white Other in the headlights' (or the cinema's) spectacularizing glare. His ethnographic rewrite is not preemptive: he
cannot set the terms of this narrative exchange. Nor, in any positivist sense, is it recuperative: he has no older story with which to
supplant it. Instead, the image is reclaimed by Alexie as image,thick
with its history of use and abuse, the banality and trauma which
are fused in its "heavy lightness," and which prime it for redeployment in the long siege of postmoder decolonization.
Universityof Canterbury
WORKS
CITED
Alexie, Sherman. TheBusiness of Fancydancing.New York: Hanging Loose, 1992.

. "Crossroads: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie." With John Purdy.
Studies in American Indian Literature9.4 (1997): 1-18.
. First Indian on the Moon. New York: Hanging Loose, 1993.
428
C O N T EM P O RA RY
LI T E RA T U R E
. I Would Steal Horses. Niagara Falls, NY: Slipstream, 1992.

. Indian Killer. London: Secker and Warburg, 1997.
. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic
Monthly, 1993.
. Old Shirts and New Skins. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center,
UCLA, 1993.
. ReservationBlues. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1995.
. "Screenwriter Identifies with Character in Smoke Signals." Interview
with John Hartl. Seattle Times 28 June 1998 (http://www.seattletimes.
com/web).
. "Seeing Red." Interview with Gretchen Giles. Sonoma Independent3
Oct. 1996 (http: / /www.metroactive.com).
. "Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel." Interview with John and Carl Bellante. BloomsburyReview 14 (1994): 14-15, 26.
. SmokeSignals. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
The Summer of Black Widows. New York: Hanging Loose, 1996.
. "Talking with the Writer: Way beyond Tonto." Interview with Serena
Donadoni. Metro Times [Detroit] 7 Aug. 1996 (http: /www.metrotimes.
com/).
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at WoundedKnee:An Indian History of the American
West. 1971. London: Vintage, 1991.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of BlackFolk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989.
During, Simon. "Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation
After All?" Postcolonial Studies 1.1 (1998): 31-47.
Gillan, Jennifer. "Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie's Poetry." American Literature68 (1996): 91-110.
Hall, Stuart. "On Postmodernism and Articulation." Interview with Lawrence
Grossberg. Stuart Hall: CriticalDialogues in CulturalStudies.Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 129-50.
Krupat, Arnold. "Postcoloniality and Native American Literature." YaleJournal
of Criticism 7 (1994): 163-80.
Lincoln, Kenneth. "Native Poetics." Modern Fiction Studies 45 (1999): 146-84.
Lubiano, Wahneema. "Shuckin' Off the African-American Native Other:
What's 'Po-Mo' Got to Do with It?" Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation,
and PostcolonialPerspectives.Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella
Shohat. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 204-29.
Pratt, Mary Louise. ImperialEyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.London:
Routledge, 1992.
Ross, Andrew. Introduction. UniversalAbandon?:The Politics of Postmodernism.
Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. vii-xviii.
Slemon, Stephen. "Modernism's Last Post." Past the Last Post: TheorizingPostColonialismand Post-Modernism.Ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. Calgary:
U of Calgary P, 1990. 1-11.

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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Sherman Alexie's Autoethnography

Alexie's refusal of this "oral tradition" is indicative of the way

go some way towards explaining. But to my ear the implications

To a large extent, the dramatic tension which animates Alexie's

that have since come true

If in the end he doesn't want to hear the answer, it is of course

againstthepostsbutstill insistshe seestheghosts.Everythingchanges. Both

which indigeneity has most derisively been enclosed.4 The story

he is on that "language of the enemy" as scene of the subject's

In relation to what I have said about the earlier volumes, the

In an uncharacteristic invocation of oral tradition, a Coyote story

However, with these telling instabilities in place, the poem sets a

... the Sasquatch woman

From the depths of its classified, alterior knowledge, the poem

did not write Shake-

speare's plays" (109)-which renders so inscrutable the poem's

Alexie, Sherman. TheBusiness of Fancydancing.New York: Hanging Loose, 1992.

. I Would Steal Horses. Niagara Falls, NY: Slipstream, 1992.

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