Sometimes it seems like all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Sherman Alexie, © 1993, published by HarperCollins
“Indians have a way of surviving. But 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. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.
“And, just like everybody else, Indians need heroes to help them learn how to survive. But what happens when our heroes don’t even know how to pay their bills?”
When I read Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” (Lone Ranger), I read pain. There is laughter between the pain, or pain between the laughter, it is sometimes hard to tell. Throughout the entire book, the sense of loss that came with being put on a reservation and having their traditions stripped from them manifests itself strongly. Constantly, wryly, Alexie narrates stories of the attempt to hang on to the past in the face of the general White population surrounding the reservation.
Identity in History: Introduction
N.B. I chose to structure this report around quotes from the book. The quotes are not in the order they appear in the book; I have rearranged them to fit my thought flow in building this report. It may seem the report is overly composed of quotes from the book. I preferred to let the words of Alexie speak for themselves while I provide a companion narrative of what he told me.
With chapter titles such as “A Drug Called Tradition”, “Family Portrait”, and “The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue”, it is clear from before chapter one that Alexie is going to get personal about the Native Americans’ relationship with their past. It takes less than 20 pages for him to hit his stride:
“Although it is the twentieth century and planes are passing overhead, the Indian boys have decided to be real Indians tonight. They all want to have their vision, to receive their names, their adult names. That is the problem with Indians these days. They have the same names all their lives. Indians wear these names like a pair of bad shoes.”
Throughout the rest of the book , Alexie sets in a glaring relief the effects of how White and Native American cultures have interacted. The transition from free life to life dictated by White culture weighs heavily on the thoughts Alexie expresses. He finds himself speculating at one point on what effects White culture has had on the lives of Native Americans.
“Imagine Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C. Would the urban Indians still be sprawled around the one-room apartment in the cable television reservation? Imagine a loaf of bread could feed the entire tribe. Didn’t you know Jesus Christ was a Spokane Indian? Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or other drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?”
“Happy birthday James and I’m in the Breakaway Bar drinking too many beers when the Vietnam war comes on television. The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting. All I know about this war is what Seymour told me when he came back from his tour of duty over there and he said all the gooks he killed looked like us and Seymour said every single gook he killed looked exactly like someone he knew on the reservation.”
The wry pain fills every sentence. Stripped from their ancestry, forced to fit within the construction of White society, the Indians try to function within the values system of their past, wondering what life would have looked like had they been left in peace. Instead, they encounter the demands of White society and face the pressure to give up their identity, or live in constant conflict with their White neighbors. The result, as portrayed by Alexie, is a psychological weariness that devastates the morale and identity of the Native Americans.
While reading Lone Ranger, two main themes kept appearing to me. The first dealt with the past. Indians have memories, memories of what their ancestors achieved, memories of the ways that they proved their identity and asserted their character. Having to survive in a White-dominated culture means that they are stuck in a difficult limbo – any actions they take to further their personal identity merely engender and evidence culture clashes between Natives and Whites. The second dealt with the present, and how the Whites stereotype the intelligence and the behavior of the natives. It’s not a positive stereotype either – but rather one that leads to additional conflict as the Natives sense the negative connotations that the Whites put upon “being Indian.”
The identity of the Natives in their traditions hold strong, yet clash with the customs of the Whites, and since the Whites are the dominant culture, the Natives draw the short straw. Alexie narrates, through one of the characters, a story of young Native men who could not steal horses to prove their manhood, so they stole a car, drove it to a police station and parked it, and left. Later, Alexie narrates the desire of other young Indian men to participate in the ancient Native rituals of chants and dances and spiritual trances. Instead, limited by White rules and assimilating with White culture, they spend an afternoon and evening getting high on an unnamed drug.
“They all want to have their vision, to receive their names, their adult names. That is the problem with Indians these days. They have the same names all their lives.”
Left bereft of traditions, Indians make do with “White-culture” acceptable substitutes. When even those run out, and there is nothing left but White culture, nothing is left but a very White remedy - drowning their sorrows in drink. Even drink doesn’t let them escape the skeleton of their past, though:
“With each glass of beer, Samuel gained a few ounces of wisdom, courage. But after a while, he began to understand too much about fear and failure, too. At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.”
Through the story of another Indian, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, arrested and arraigned on no charge, but ultimately for telling stories which roused the spirit of the Indians from the emotional stupor, Alexie narrates the relation of the past to the identity and courages of the Natives in the now.
“Later that night, Thomas lay awake and counted stars through the bars in his window. He was guilty, he knew that. All that was variable on any reservation was how the convicted would be punished.”
Yet, the proud hopelessness of the situation brings out the burning spirit of the storyteller, as he proudly owns the deeds of his ancestors to be his own personally. Judged already by virtue of his ancestry, he takes the opportunity to stoically recite tales of Indianhood, of rebellion and battle against White domination, of abuse and cruelty by White culture in years and centuries past. This section of the book was one of the most gripping and most tragic, as the Natives are denied their very identity by the force of law and the rules of the White culture. In the face of this the Whites continue to refuse to acknowledge the errors of their White forebears. Conflict is inherent to the White-Native relationship so long as the Natives draw identity from their past and the Whites object to their doing so.
It’s a short step from denying the Natives their past to looking down on them and treating them with either a mockery or a denigration. Sometimes it is thoughtlessness, sometimes it is ignorance, other times it’s downright cruel, but the sting is not lost on the Natives, although Alexie writes off the pain, again, with a wry sarcasm. Through the eyes of Victor, another frequent protagonist in the novel:
“I took James down to the reservation hospital again because he was almost five years old and still hadn’t bothered to talk yet or crawl or cry or even move when I put him on the floor and once I even dropped him and his head was bleeding and he didn’t make a sound. They looked him over and said there was nothing wrong with him and that he’s just a little slow developing and that’s what the doctors always say and they’ve been saying that about Indians for five hundred years.”
Not even laughter always covers the bitterness, though. The opinion that Whites have of Natives is all too well known to the Natives and engenders no feelings of love, reconciliation, or forgiveness on the Native part, but rather an offended desire to correct their detractors.
“I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl who would later be raped by her foster-parent father, who was also white. They both lived on the reservation, though, and when the headlines and stories filled the papers later, not one word was made of their color.
“Just Indians being Indians, someone must have said somewhere, and they were wrong.”
By the time these damaging effects have taken place, there’s very little that does not sting or burn to the Natives who see a cruel jest in every reference the Whites make to them.
“Last night, I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is named the “Indians,” and I’m probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.
“This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.
“Go ahead and tell me that none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.”
With that sort of background, is it not surprising that even the young children grow up with a pain and a bitterness towards Whites, fostering generations of further intercultural conflict? Alexie relates just such a story of the intergenerational identity and pain as Victor’s young adopted son interacts with a White woman at the World Fair one year.
“In one little corner there’s a statue of an Indian who’s supposed to be some chief or another. I press a little button and the statue talks and moves its arms over and over in the same motion. The statue tells the crowd we have to take care of the earth because it is our mother. I know that and James says he knows more. He says the earth is our grandmother and that technology has become our mother and that they both hate eachother. James tells the crowd that the river just a few yards from where we stand is all we ever need to believe in. One white woman asks me how old James is and I tell her he’s seven and she tells me that he’s so smart for an Indian boy. James hears this and tells the white woman that she’s pretty smart for an old white woman.”
The intergenerational transmission of grudges is clear to see. As younger generations grow within the identity of their ancestors, they and observe the bias and tension that occurs between Whites and Natives. These tensions arise from the stereotyping and personal affronts offered by the Whites, and the resentment and unhappiness which those have ingrained in the Natives. Reconciliation and culture merge will happen, but it will be slow and painful. In the meantime, the deep sense of identity loss among the Natives and the regular cultural slights by the Whites will cause Natives to withdraw into themselves, keeping alive the perceptions that the Whites have of them.
I found Sherman Alexie’s novel to be one of the most provocative books I have ever read. Why do we treat Natives the way we do? From whence comes our identity, and what do we do when it is challenged? Are there ways to provide some of the current federal lands to them and allow them to resume some of their old traditions that they currently cannot? How can we retrain cultural thinking to afford them more respect and yet help them make the adjustments to White culture that they need to?
Regardless of what choices are made, though, either living in the past or the future will provide no resolution and no satisfaction to anyone. Alexie stresses this multiple places in the book. The past will haunt you, and the future will daunt you, but every moment that is past is unchangeable, and every moment that is future is uncertain. In my favorite quote of the book, Alexie urges that we not get caught in the mistake of dwelling in any time other than the one given to us.
"There are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, those skeletons are made of memories, dreams, voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they're not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.
… But, no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don’t wear a watch. ... See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now.”
*Note: Book not recommended for those who desire to not read books with profanity, drug references, and occasional non-explicit sexual content.