sherman alexie article

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University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. http://www.jstor.org 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 Accessed: 07-03-2015 04:16 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 210.212.129.125 on Sat, 07 Mar 2015 04:16:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Sherman Alexie Article-Native American Poet & Novelist

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  • University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature.

    http://www.jstor.org

    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. 413-428Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209128Accessed: 07-03-2015 04:16 UTC

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    This content downloaded from 210.212.129.125 on Sat, 07 Mar 2015 04:16:25 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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  • JOHN NEWTON

    Sherman Alexie's Autoethnography

    or Sherman Alexie, 1993 was a famous year. His work hav- ing first appeared in book form a year earlier, with a po- etry chapbook, I Would Steal Horses, and a fatter collection of poetry and fiction, The Business of Fancydancing, in 1993

    he published three full-length works: a volume of poems, Old Shirts and New Skins, a book of 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 of Alexie's work. "I'm not aware," says Krupat, "of any Native Amer- ican 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 con- text out of which Krupat is speaking-namely those cluttered de- marcation debates of the late eighties and early nineties around the postmoder and the postcolonial.

    Contemporary Literature XLII, 2 0010-7484 / 01 / 0002-0413 ? 2001 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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  • 414 C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A 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 re- naissance. 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 contempo- rary reservation.1 On more than one occasion, he cites as key influ- ences Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and The Brady Bunch, 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 An-

    glophone 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 invokes- about 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 "Common- wealth 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 post- modernism, 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 "Cross- roads" (11).

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  • 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 fig- ures 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 inheri- tor, 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 tra- dition, Alexie detaches himself from a complex of neighboring as- sumptions: 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 in-

    dulgences of postmodernism. In Alexie's poetics of the contempo- rary reservation, history is neither metaphysical nor even tribal, but always emphatically a history of contact. Indigenous mythol- ogy and figurative systems give way to the Esperanto of American mass culture, the "narrative primacy" of oral tradition to the car- toon 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 em- ploys 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 hybridity- of transference and transmutation, translation and transcultura-

    2. For a pithy retrospect on this debate, see During 31-34.

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  • 416 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

    tion-that energize the writing of anti-imperial resistance. To key- note 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 metropoli- tan 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 engage with 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 subjectiv-

    3. Alexie is explicitly critical of Momaday ("We've been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn") in "Crossroads" 8-9.

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  • 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 un- clean 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 trans- lates 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 wrong place, given what he knows of colonial history. In the narrative poem "Tiny Treaties," in First Indian on the Moon, 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 him- self as the unseen drivers see him, "my hair long, unbraided, and

    magnified / in headlights of passing cars." Specifically, he imag- ines 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

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  • 418 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A 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 himself in identical fash- ion when projecting himself into the place of the white drivers- so she too will always see color before she sees him.

    Ultimately, therefore, the narration of this romance serves to me- morialize that history of colonial conflict which is the lovers' differ- ential 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 rela-

    tionship 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 (Lone Ranger 186). 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 Indian 62-65).

    Alexie's romantic protagonists, then, are divided by history- from one another, and from themselves. The prose poem "Captiv-

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  • N E W T O N * 419

    ity," also from First Indian on 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 reserva- tion road. Five Indians died in the first car; four Indians died in the sec- ond. 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 nec-

    essary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within un-

    easy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall be- neath 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 prom- ised you nothing but the sound of his voice? September, Mary Rowland-

    son, 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 against the posts but still insists he sees the ghosts. Everything changes. Both of us force the sibilant, in the language of the enemy.

    4.

    Language of the enemy: heavy lightness, house insurance, serious vanity, safe-deposit box,feather of lead, sandwich man, bright smoke, 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 fancy- dancer and every step is equal to a drum beat, this sepia photograph of

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  • 420 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A 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 wear-

    ing 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 trans- ference 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 re- frain 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 ("heavy lightness") in Shakespeare, from the first act of Romeo and Juliet. The star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare's play are, in part, a conventional figure of transcultural mesalliance (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 oxy- moronic 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 oper- ate 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. Advis-

    edly, 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

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  • N E W T O 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 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, reads like a kind of oblique manifesto. Here, his familiar star-crossed lovers are

    just one of three interracial couples whose misalliances run a paral- lel 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 narrator whiles 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 legiti- macy on established 'metropolitan' political ground rather than run the risk of ghettoiza- tion by insisting on the 'authenticity' of their respective group identities, ethnic, sexual, or otherwise" (xi).

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  • 422 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

    Washington and Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-new Chrysler 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 In- dian Companion locked in their perpetual cartoon punch-up high- lights 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 my- thology. 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 102-

    4), a vacillation or ambivalence remains; the story's interchange- able feuding couples fistfight not only on the screen but in the Na- tive 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

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  • N E W T O 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 mo- ment that his debt to invader discourse can simply be written off. On the contrary, the politics which is modeled in this routine in- volves 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 stereo-

    type which he not only knowingly represents but self-consciously plays up to. What changes the story is the moment where this dif- ference unsettles the binary symmetry of that ritualized conflict, obliging the clerk to confront in the same moment both the stereo-

    type 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 out-

    put and a sense of expanding possibilities. On the one hand, there are the increasingly sustained excursions into prose fiction, in Res- ervation Blues (1995) and the bulky, plot-driven Indian Killer (1998). Also of notable strategic interest is the production of Alexie's first

    screenplay, Smoke Signals (1998). Jennifer Gillan's instructively ti- tled 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 In- dian 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 Summer of Black Widows (1996) being his thickest volume to date, and in many ways his most ambitious.

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  • 424 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A 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 transcultural romance

    drops out of the picture. In tandem with this appear certain intima- tions 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 "Fire as 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 affir- mative production of oppositional truth claims, and of a willing- ness to reach for an indigenous authority in the promotion of what

    Stephen Slemon calls "alterior 'knowledge'" (6). But as I read Alex- ie's procedures in this volume, he doesn't so much adopt the more conventional identity politics which these gestures might seem to announce as mobilize that politics as a signifier in the contact imag- inary. The difference, in other words, is between a "strategic essen- tialism" and a strategic appropriation of the stereotypes of essen- tialist thought.

    Exemplary here are the thirty-three fragments (thirty-three ways 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:

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  • 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 superstition is 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 Sas-

    quatch appears as the unspeakable truth which marks the outer limits of Western thought:

    Late night on the Spokane Indian Reservation we can hear the shrill cry echo through the pines.

    We have recorded the 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 sa-

    cred, 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 con-

    temporary reservation but of the deep history of the tribe:

    We tell these Sasquatch stories because we are Spokane Indian.

    We are Spokane because our grandparents were Spokane.

    Our grandparents told Sasquatch stories. Our grandparents heard Sasquatch stories

    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 mo- ment where the poem comes closest to saying directly what the

    speaker himself "believes"-we are offered not the gravity of tribal orature but the solemn truth of a video clip:

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  • 426 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A 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. We have all 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 representa- tions of indigeneity has become a contest with the century's most

    aggressive and most highly capitalized media industries. The Na- tive American becomes a planetary "other" (even little New Zealanders play cowboys and Indians, perhaps as a way of forget- ting 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 reap- propriations, 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

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  • N E W T 0 N * 427

    readings [which] can so overvalue the anti-referential or decon- structive energies of postcolonial texts that they efface the impor- tant recuperative work that is also going on within them" (7). In context there is no denying Slemon's point. Unfortunately, how- ever, 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 post- modernism 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) spec- tacularizing glare. His ethnographic rewrite is not preemptive: he cannot set the terms of this narrative exchange. Nor, in any positiv- ist 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 redeploy- ment in the long siege of postmoder decolonization.

    University of Canterbury

    WORKS CITED

    Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing. New York: Hanging Loose, 1992. . "Crossroads: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie." With John Purdy.

    Studies in American Indian Literature 9.4 (1997): 1-18. . First Indian on the Moon. New York: Hanging Loose, 1993.

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  • 428 C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

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

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    . "Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel." Interview with John and Carl Bel- lante. Bloomsbury Review 14 (1994): 14-15, 26.

    . Smoke Signals. New York: Hyperion, 1998. The Summer of Black Widows. New York: Hanging Loose, 1996.

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    Article Contentsp.[413]p.414p.415p.416p.417p.418p.419p.420p.421p.422p.423p.424p.425p.426p.427p.428

    Issue Table of ContentsContemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 2001Front MatterAmerican Poetry of the 1990s: An Introduction [pp.195-205]The Nineties Revisited [pp.206-237]Awash with Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry [pp.238-269]"Concrete Prose" in the Nineties: Haroldo de Campos's "Galxias" and after [pp.270-293]"The Fluidity of Damaged Form": Apostrophe and Desire in Nineties Lyric [pp.294-324]Charles Wright's "Via Negativa": Language, Landscape, and the Idea of God [pp.325-346]Joan Retallack: A Philosopher among the Poets, a Poet among the Philosophers [pp.347-375]"Fields of Pattern-Bounded Unpredictability": Recent Palimptexts by Rosmarie Waldrop and Joan Retallack [pp.376-412]Sherman Alexie's Autoethnography [pp.413-428]"Coming Back Here How Many Years Now": August Kleinzahler and James Wright's "Shall We Gather at the River" [pp.429-458]Back Matter [pp.459-460]