Andrea Paola Martinez
Dr. Guthrie 110 C
9-25-06
Alexie Paper
“Indians have a way of surviving…it’s almost like Indians can easily survive
the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small
things that hurt the most (Alexie 49)”. In Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in
Heaven, Alexie illustrates the harsh living conditions and suffering that
the Indians on the Spokane Indian reservation endured on a daily basis.
Disgraceful health care, government-issued food, sickness, alcohol, humiliation
and racial discrimination are few among a multitude of hardships that
reservation Indians were presented with. In his compilation of short stories,
Alexie weaves fictional characters with real life instances to reveal to the
reader the ways in which colonial Indians deal(t) with the pain and hardships
of their past and present sufferings. Through an evaluation of the respective
roles of Dance and alcohol among the Indians in the reservation and the manner
in which the reservation Indians distance themselves from or destroy that which
reminds them of their painful past, one can obtain an understanding of how
Indians battled to survive the ‘big stuff’ (Alexie, 49).
Dance has always played a vital role through out Native American History. Tribal
Indians incorporated dance into their initiation rituals, used it as a means of
prayer and spiritual connection with mother Earth and for healing, hunting and
tribal celebrations (Bress and Pruitt & Associates, Inc). Dance in Alexie’s
novel is also a major facet of life on the Reservation. Though no longer used
as often in the traditional sense, we see it serving as a means of social
interaction and most importantly, as a means of connecting with the traditions
of the past and the pain that the past entails:
“I’ll dance a Ghost Dance. I’ll bring them back…I dance one step and my sister
rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the
sky…With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls…
My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. The
buffalo come… (They) knock all the white people from their beds…We dance in
circles larger…watching all the ships returning to
In this excerpt Victor is dancing the Ghost Dance; a dance that, at the hands
of Paiute Indian Wovoka (or Jack Wilson), evolved into a religious movement to
bring a peaceful end to colonial expansion (Ghost Dance: Wikipedia). Victor’s
dance is an expression of pain for the sufferings wrought upon his people, and
a means of emotional healing for his own “blisters”. The use of dance in order to cope with ones
personal wounds is a reoccurring theme throughout Alexie’s novel; “All he
(Victor) knew was that he was dancing with one the hundredth Indian woman in
the one hundred dancing days since the white woman he loved had left him. This
dancing was his compensation, his confession, largest sin, and penance (Alexie
83)”. Here Alexie exemplifies the extent to which dancing is used as an
emotional relief and its important role in the courting ritual.
Observing life for American Indians on the reservation and the role that dance
plays in it, one cannot help but notice that despite countless hardships and irreparable
damage inflicted on Indian People, they are able to produce from it a beautiful
physical expression of emotion; “We danced, under wigs and between unfinished
walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards. It was a dance (Alexie, 195)”.
Just as dancing was used as a proactive means of dealing with life’s painful
circumstances, the opposite can be said about the use of alcohol in the novel
as well as in Native American history up until the present day; concentrated
mainly on the Indian reservations. The long and debilitating battle with
alcohol began with its introduction to the Native Americans by government
agencies and traders partly as a means to exploit the Indians and cheat them of
their land rights (J. Miller).
Alexie addresses the issue of alcohol
abuse constantly through the characters and their individual battles with the
poison as a means of coping, forgetting, and hurting; “He thought one more beer
and every chair would be comfortable. One more beer and the light bulb in the
bathroom would never burn out. One more beer and he would love her forever. One
more beer and he would sign any treaty for her (Alexie 89).” Here Victor
confirms to the reader that alcohol was a major method of dealing with the
disheartening circumstances on the reservation. This narration illustrates the
misuse of alcohol as a coping mechanism for pain on many levels; physical pain
from lack of proper health care, pain stemming from their inadequate living
conditions, the suffering caused by emotional anguish, and the pain of past
transgressions. As often happens, alcohol not only served as a means of
achieving numbness, but as an instigator of a domino effect; tumbling all the
surrounding pieces involved; “Victor’s father remembered the time his own father
was spit on as they waited for a bus in Spokane… (Victor) watched his father
take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that
near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood…His mother and father breathed
deep... Alcoholic snores. They were sweating…and Victor thought the alcohol
seeping through their skin might get him drunk, might help him sleep…Victor
dreamed of whiskey, vodka, tequila, those fluids swallowing him just as easily
as he swallowed them (Alexie, 7,8,9).” As Victor’s father uses alcohol to drown
away the anguish caused by humiliation, Victor makes use of the same medicine
to heal his own pain, causing a web of self destruction that became common
among tribes in the reservations.
Common sense often indicates to us that the easiest way to end ones
suffering
is to distance oneself from or destroy the origin of the pain. When
pain is
left to accumulate for so many years it becomes hard to pinpoint the
exact
source. This is the case of the Indians on the reservation; the source
of their
modern-day torment could be directed towards a variety of
circumstances, mainly
the intrusion of Euro-American colonizers; “Last night we burned
another house.
The Tribal Council has ruled that anything to do with the whites has to
be destroyed
(Alexie 105)”. Through this narration Alexie demonstrates how
feelings of
resentment are still very much alive and directed towards the white
community.
However, instead of aiding their community towards healing and
providing them
with the prospect of a better future, the Tribal Council instigates
situations
which forbid the Indian community to rebuild itself and move on:
“A
storytelling Fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth.
Dangerous… We don’t need his kind around here any more
(Alexie 94)”. “Honesty is all I have left, Thomas
said
(Alexie 96)”. This interaction between the tribal council and
Thomas
Builds-a-Fire is a perfect example depicting how the characters in the
novel
cope with their pain by attempting to destroy or shun that which
reminds them
of the pain of their past and of their present neglect for their
people’s
traditions. Thomas Builds-a-Fire is the embodiment of the old ways of
the
People of the Land; he hears the messages carried
through the Earth, believes in the
traditions of his people and is the community’s sole connection to their
history though his stories. Thus, shunning Thomas, they shun their own history
and the suffering that it is ridden with. In this manner, the Indians on the
Sherman Alexie merges the use of fictional characters with factual occurrences in
Indian History. This allows the reader to better relate to the characters
through observing how they cope with their past traumas that haunt their
present ways of life. Through observing Alexie’s characters and they way in
which they utilize dance, alcohol, and shun that which presents the possibility
of more pain, the reader is able to come to an understanding as to how the
American Indians are able to cope with a history of devastation. Dance serves
as a physical representation of emotion as well as a revival of forgotten
traditions, while alcohol is the means by which the Indians on the reservation
drown their painful pasts. Destruction or avoidance of that which gives birth
to feelings of guilt or memories of a history of oppression is also a common
occurrence throughout Alexie’s novel. Having
established that everyone has different methods of coming to terms with their
pasts, upon completion of the novel one can also begin to question the
‘rawness’ of Alexie’s writing. More than
a compilation of short stories, Alexie’s novel is a compilation of vivid and unrefined
memories and emotions presented as broken segments. The fact that the novel is
written through the viewpoints of a variety of different narrators leads the
reader to speculate whether Alexie chose to write in this manner so that his
own emotions and experiences could be expressed through the voices of the characters.
Alexie’s writing style is so descriptive, and his emotions; so real, that they
can only be the result of personal experience. We know that Alexie experienced
life on the
:
Works Cited
Alexie,
Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven.
Falls Apart Productions.
Official
Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc. Ghost Dance. GNU Free Documentation License. 10:19, 21
September. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance.
09/24/06
A BRIEF
INTRODUCTION TO NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN DANCE. Bess Pruitt &
Associates, Inc. http://uniqueartists.com/html/dance_information.html.
09-23-06.
Miller, J. SEVEN FIRES COUNCILOur People,Our Future Our People, Our
Future. 1998. http://www.merceronline.com/Native/native10.htm.
09/24/06.
ENG 110
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