July 11, 2000

THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD
by Sherman Alexie (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Sherman Alexie, known as much for being a Coeur d'Alene/Spokane Indian as for his wordsmithery, instantly became one of my favorite authors after I read his debut fiction collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and his novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer did nothing to damage that status. Alexie wrote about late 20th century Indians and their lives on the reservation with no mercy, no compromise and no surfeit of intelligence or compassion. His works were angry, but rarely in an all-out raging inferno sort of way; he was quite content to let his characters' actions, dialogue and social intercourse indict white America for its treatment of the tribes on this land mass before it. He was also just as comfortable with mythology-charged dreamscapes that drew from American Indian legends as he was with hard-hitting, precision-cutting prose; this was a writer that knew how to use the storytelling legacy of his tribe and the poetry training he received in college to map out his own literary terrain. There's no one quite like him.

So I've been anxiously awaiting his latest collection of short stories. At first I was a little disappointed in The Toughest Indian in the World; with the exception of the hallucinogenic nightmare "The Sin Eaters," there's little of the old anger here. But my trepidation was unwarranted; Alexie has merely shifted his playing field from sociopolitical statements about life on the rez to the uncharted territory of the human heart, particularly the trails blazed by the relationships that spring up between Indians and Caucasians. He uses this to explore more aspects of Indian life; what happens to so-called urban Indians like the protagonists of "Class" and "Assimilation," how they relate to the Indian culture they left behind. He uses humor of "Dear John Wayne," which imagines the story of Wayne having an affair with one of the Indian extras on the set of The Searchers, the emotionally blasted truths found in "Assimilation," or a mixture of both, as in the alternately droll and devastating "Indian Country." He uses the structure of archetypal Indian fairy tales for the quirky road trip narrative "South By Southwest" and explores introspection with a son returning to the rez to care for his dying father in "One Good Man." My favorite is also the sweetest and most sentimental piece, "Saint Junior," in which a middle-aged rez couple look back on the paths that brought them to where they are, and realize that despite hardship, they wouldn't have it any other way. It's an old and classic theme, done extremely well, and proves that Alexie is capable of using the styles that came before him as well as the ones he creates or revivifies. It may not be as rife with black humor or righteous anger, but The Toughest Indian in the World is easily as brilliant and wonderful as the rest of Alexie's esteemed oeuvre.