Sherman Alexie

I have never been too interested in reading about Native Americans. It isn't that I didn't like their culture or that I just assumed that the Native American experience wasn't interesting, it just never occurred to me that modern Indian culture had such universal problems. I had always just assumed that the life of a reservation Indian would be similar to the life of any non-native American's. After reading some of Sherman Alexie's short stories and his young adult novel, I realize that I am most likely wrong about that. I'm sure that Alexie is not able to write an account that doesn't somewhat exaggerate (or possibly over spotlight) the problems of the late 20th and early 21st century Indians, so I will not say that I was totally wrong about Reservations being similar to small towns (I would need to do more research to fully abandon that idea.)

I think the number one thing I thought about while reading these books was the despair that Alexie put into his Indian characters when they thought about their past and looked towards their future. The characters would see their beloved tribal tradition fading away, and in it's place there is a hopeless reservation culture that is defined by poverty, alcoholism and "Indian tears." (I quote that because it is a phrase commonly used in Alexie's books.) Although some of the characters are able to move on from their hopelessness, the way that this happens is through assimilation into the white culture around them.

I wonder how common this was when a civilization was overrun and allowed to live outside of their occupier cultures. I suppose this is different than most occupations because a new country and new culture was built on the lands of the occupied. Imagine if someone broke into your home and you had a long, bitter battle over control of the house, and when it was over instead of kicking you out the people occupying your house gave you and your family a couple of their extra rooms to inhabit. How would that feel to wake up everyday in a two room basement apartment and hear the sounds of a party upstairs in the home that you and your family lived in and loved. Then the occupants of your home change everything about the house, the layout, the paint, everything until it didn't look like your house anymore. I think that would be pretty depressing. I might start drinking. I might start forgetting what the house looked like before. I might forget what it was like to live in that house completely. Then I might just become a basement apartment dweller and pass that culture on to my kids, because taking back the house is beyond possible at this point, and it wouldn't even be the same house anyways. I wonder how long it would take for my family to just die out completely.

Anyways, this book made me think a lot about things I have never thought about before. It also made me feel a lot of emotions for people I didn't even know needed sympathy. Reading this author was a very great experience. If I was ever a literature professor, I would make Sherman Alexie required reading.