LITR 5731: Seminar in
American Minority Literature
Student Research Project
Brendan Foley
November 30, 2004
Seeing Red: Survival, Resistance and Other Tricks from Down on the Reservation
A Postindian
Reading of Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Sherman Alexie is an up and coming Native American voice that has appeared on the American literary scene in recent years. Both an author and poet, Alexie’s collection of interconnected short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, contains elements of prose and lyric that at times form a synthesis that dazzles the reader with their charm and humor. At other moments, the attempt seems flat or contrived. However, critics, like Denise Low, recognize that the writing, despite its shortcomings, reveals a talent that is reflective of today’s trends in aesthetic production. Low comments:
[The collection reads] like a casebook of postmodernist theory-beyond surrealism and absurdity, and certainly beyond classicism. Irony, pastiche, and mingling of popular cultures occur throughout the book […] Alexie’s Native American characters journey through a collage of urban and reservation referents. Postmodernism is the technique of communication- as well as survival –in this simulated world that resembles Washington state. (123)
Alexie’s collection indeed steps beyond many traditional boundaries that are typical of any traditional narrative form, and it is quite an interesting statement to refer to the postmodern quality of Alexie’s writing. Especially, her use of terms such as referent and simulated for reasons which will be examined below.
Gerald Vizenor is a Native American spokesperson, scholar, and critic who writes with a postmodern sensibility to act as a counter to “the tragic themes, individualism, and modernism” (3) that Vizenor sees as the prevailing qualities that are apparent in most representations of Native Americans. Postmodernism, for Vizenor is “a clever condition: an invitation to narrative chance in a new language game and an overture to amend the formal interpretations and transubstantiation of tribal literatures” (4). This overture is what Vizenor attempts to theorize in
the opening chapter of his book, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance.
The title contains three primary terms relevant to Vizenor’s argument: manifest
manners, postindian, and
survivance.
For Vizenor, these terms best apply to the postmodern condition,
borrowing from Jean Beaudrillard, of “simulations” in which humanity is so
far removed from “the real” representation is no longer truly possible, but
only a simulation. However, Vizenor,
quoting Beaudrillard notes:
But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate
is not simply to feign. Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and
make believe he is ill. Someone who
simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms […] feigning or
dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact:
the difference is always clear, it is only masked, whereas simulation
threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’ between ‘real’
and ‘imaginary.’ Since the
simulator produces ‘true’ symptoms, is he ill or not? (1983)
Vizenor refers to
simulations of dominance as manifest
manners. Vizenor
describes the term as being born out of the ideology of “manifest destiny”
which was responsible for “the death of millions of tribal people from
massacres, diseases, and the loneliness of reservations” (1977).
In the post-conquest world, “[t]hese histories are now the simulations
of dominance, and the causes of the conditions that have become manifest manners
in literature” (1978). In
translation, since the ideology of manifest destiny has completed its work all
that remains are the “simulations” that are present in modern times.
These “simulations of dominance” or, manifest manners, are
responsible for the stereotypes and misrepresentations that act as the authentic
representations of Native American
Indians in literature, film, and other forms of discourse.
In an attempt to distance the Native American Indian from the misrepresentations created by the simulations of manifest manners, Vizenor creates two terms: postindian and survivance. Postindian is the term Vizenor creates to represent the new contemporary native identity that resists the simulations of manifest manners, “[t}he postindian warriors hover at last over the ruins of tribal representations and surmount the scriptures of manifest manners with new stories” (1978). In the post-conquest world, in Vizenor’s opinion, the Native American needs a postindian identity. The new stories of the aforementioned “postindian warriors” are described by Vizenor as “simulations of survivance” (1978). Survivance is a hybrid of “survival + resistance” and the simulations of survivance act as a replacement for “the tribal real” that was destroyed in the conquest of the continent. However, as Vizenor argues, both the histories of these conquests and the tribal real, as they exist now, are only simulations. There is no active conquest underway now and the tribal identity that existed centuries ago is no longer truly alive. Any manifestations of either are merely a simulations in today’s reality. However, the threat of manifest manners and the simulations of dominance is still a real threat to the Native American postindian identity. In order to persevere, the postindian must respond with, again, the simulations of survivance. Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a literary work that reveals the manifest manners in the simulation of Native American Identity, and Alexie creates his own simulations of survivance to act as a counter. These strategies include the transformation of both modern American and traditional Indigenous practice into forms of survivance and the use of what will be called “trickster discourses.”
In order to grasp the concept of survivance, time needs to be spent in elaborating on the presence of manifest manners in the TLRATFIH. Vizenor states, “the simulations of manifest manners are the continuance of surveillance and domination of the tribe in literature” (1983). In the post-conquest world the Euroamerican culture has established hegemonic control over the lands that were once home to the indigenous peoples. Now the work of manifest manners is to maintain dominance and hegemony in the way these people are represented in works of cultural production. The Spokane Indians of Alexie’s collection, “wage daily battle against small humiliations and perennial hurts. Situated on a reservation where the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) houses, The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) trucks, and commodity foods continually mirror paternalism and dependency and where ‘tribal ties’ and a cohesive ‘sense of community’ have waned” (DeNuccio 86). HUD homes, BIA trucks, and commodity foods are but one example of manifest manners at work. Two other primary forms are the denigration of culture and Indian experience, and the scourge of alcohol that is nearly omnipresent throughout the collection.
In Alexie’s collection he presents a culture that is marginalized and facing possible extinction. However, it is not by the traditional methods of conquest that were used in past history. Marginalization of culture appears in “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.” As Victor reflects, “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” (49). Victor’s thoughts here have a comedic effect in order ameliorate the pain that underlies them, Joseph Coulombe argues this use of humor serves a “myriad” of goals including to “protect self-esteem [and] heal wounds” (94). They also reveal how racism and stereotypes have damaged Native American Identity. If they are even mentioned at all, mass murder, loss of language, and land rights are stories in history books. The remnants of these histories; one-dimensional stereotypes and blatant racism are the simulations of dominance that remain.
Alexie gives another example of other simulations in “Every Little Hurricane” with nine year old Victor witnessing a fight a between two of his uncles. As Victor watches his uncles, the narrator comments, “For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale. Victor’s uncles were in the midst of a misdemeanor that would remain one even if somebody was to die. One Indian killing another did not create a special kind of storm. This little kind of hurricane was generic. It didn’t even deserve a name” (3). History has “named” the epic crimes genocide or holocaust. Yet, for Victor and the other residents of the reservation, this fight is a sort of historical fallout from the past. The issues that underlie the uncles fighting—poverty, alcohol, marginalization—are all referents to the past crimes of epic scale that were committed in the name of manifest destiny, or again, in Vizenor’s words, “[t]hese histories are now the simulations dominance, and the cause of the conditions that have become manifest manners in literature” (1978).
A second trope for these manifest manners and the simulations of dominance takes the form in the collection as “alcohol.” Throughout The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, alcohol acts as symbol for the hopelessness that many of the characters feel in and around the reservation. Again, in “Every Little Hurricane,” the story recalls a dream of Victor’s:
Victor dreamed of whiskey, vodka, tequila, those
fluids swallowing him just as easily as he swallowed.
When he was five years old, an old Indian man drowned in a mud puddle at
the powwow. Just passed out and
fell facedown into the water collected in a tire track.
Even at five Victor understood what that meant, how it defined nearly
everything. Fronts.
Highs and Lows. Thermals and Undercurrents.
Tragedy. (7)
Victor’s memory of the old man dying in the puddle explains his fear of drowning in the rain (7). In the case of the above passage, Alexie creates an interesting association between the notion of “drowning” and being “swallowed,” by alcohol. It seems Freudian in nature because in the act of drowning what really happens is the person is swallowed by the liquid they are immersed in be it water, alcohol or both. Victor’s dream of being swallowed can be extended to all the Indians who are at the party, if not most of them on the reservation, where their lives are seemingly swallowed up in alcohol abuse and alcoholism.
Alcohol also plays a pivotal role in “A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result.” It relates the story of Samuel Builds-the-Fire, either the father or grandfather of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who upon losing a job, takes up the seemingly stereotypical form of unemployment compensation for Native Americans: drinking. “He found himself walking to the Midway Tavern, where all the Indians drank in eight-hour shifts ” (133). Upon taking his first drink Samuel has a similar revelation that Victor had as a child seeing the dead old Indian, “He drank. Emptied the glass. Set it down gently on the bar. I understand everything, Samuel thought. He knew all about how it begins; he knew he wanted to live this way now” (135). The “everything” that both Samuel and Victor understand is the role alcohol is meant to play for their race. In the post-conquest world alcohol is another form of manifest manners in the simulations of dominance. Despite these simulations, however, both Vizenor and Alexie imagine alternatives to what the larger culture projects on their people.
Vizenor’s alternative to the simulations of dominance and manifest manners are what he refers to as “simulations of survivance” which are postindian strategies that incorporate survival plus resistance in their representations: “The postindian warriors are new indications of a narrative recreation, the simulations that overcome the manifest manners of dominance” (1978). While Alexie may not be aware of Vizenor’s theories he certainly taps into their spirit in TLRATFIH. In the short story “Imagining the Reservation,” Victor muses on the survival of his race and comes up with the following formula, “Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation” (150). Both anger and imagination if properly channeled can become tools of resistance that when combined with survival equal Vizenor’s idea of survivance. Alexie provides several representations of these “simulations of survivance” to counter the representations of manifest manners throughout the collection.
One method that Alexie uses as a mode of survivance in the collection is by appropriating a mainstream cultural practice and transforming it into a ritual of tribal culture. One primary example of this that appears throughout the collection is “basketball.” In fact, Alexie goes as far as to appropriate basketball into Native American culture, “ ‘Do you think it’s any coincidence that basketball was invented just one year after the Ghost Dancers fell at Wounded Knee?’” (147). Basketball for the characters of the collection replaces traditions, like buffalo hunting or salmon fishing, and becomes a ritual that creates new legends and heroes. An example of this is when Victor recalls game where he watched Julius, the latest up and coming basketball star from the reservation, play: “I was there when he grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked the that fucking ball. And I don’t mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period” (47). Julius, eventually, does fall prey to the traps of reservation life, “I hear he’s even been drinking Sterno.” However, his stories become the fabric that reinvigorates the oral tradition within Native American culture, “A reservation hero is a hero forever. In fact, their status grows over the years as the stories are told and retold” (48).
While Alexie may appropriate modern rituals, like basketball, to survive and resist the workings of manifest manners in TLRATFIH, he also transforms the cultural rituals that are indigenous to Native American culture. One briefly mentioned above is the oral or storytelling tradition within Native American society. Gordon Slethaug comments that the storytelling Alexie uses within the collection “can take the narrative of failure and victimization and turn it into one of success” (134-5). These stories can counter “the products of white rewritings of Native Culture” and create a “more authentic representation of Native Americans” (134). “A Good Story” tells of a conversation between Junior and his mother who complains how sad her son’s stories are, and she asks Junior to tell a “good” story “[b]ecause people should know that good things always happen to Indians too” (140). This line by Junior’s mother is a response to an unspoken statement that probably goes something along the line of: “everything that has happened to the Indians has been a ‘bad’ thing.” In essence, this resonates with the stereotype of the “tragic Indian” or the “vanished Indian” which is an often-used misrepresentation with the larger Euroamerican culture. Vizenor quotes literary scholar Larzer Ziff who says, “those who[…] wrote ‘Indian history as obituary’ were unconsciously collaborating ‘with those bent on physical extermination […] the process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers began representing there own culture” (1980). Alexie is one of these writers who want to counter these misrepresentations. Junior’s “good” story provides a counter by containing passages such as this:
The Indian children would come with half-braids,
curiosity endless and essential. The
children would come from throwing stones into water, from basketball and
basketry, from the arms of their mothers and fathers, from the very beginning. This was the generation of HUD house, of car wreck and
cancer, of commodity cheese and beef. These
were the children who carried dreams in the back pockets of their blue jeans,
pulled them out easily, traded back and forth.
Dreams like baseball cards,” Uncle Moses said
to himself, smiled hard when he saw the first child running across the field.
(142)
This passage certainly carries elements of utopia that act as a counter to the larger culture’s misrepresentations of Native Americans. The children run to Uncle Moses, an elder of the tribe, to hear his stories. They come from participating in activities that include play—throwing stones and basketball –and traditional crafts –basketry. The children still have a love and respect for the their elders, be it mothers and fathers or Uncle Moses. The reservation, with its commodity food and HUD houses, has not stolen their childhood, and they still carry their dreams in their “back pockets.” Alexie uses Junior’s story to provide a counternarritive of survivance that resists the manifest manners of the larger culture.
A second story where the native oral tradition acts in a postindian mode of survivance is “Witnesses, Secret and Not.” Victor’s father is called into Spokane by the police to be questioned about the disappearance ten years prior of another Indian, Jerry Vincent. Victor goes with his father to Spokane and his father recounts the story to Victor who replies, “You got the whole thing memorized, don’t you” (214). Victor’s father’s memorization of his alibi and his yearly retelling of it acts as a resistance strategy against the police investigations. While he is innocent of any crime, Victor’s father is aware he still needs to be careful as a Native American in the “White Man’s World.” Joseph Coulombe notes also that Victor’s laughter at the detective writing, “his tongue poking out of his mouth a little. Like a little kid” (221), has a disarming effect in the interview that “allows them to transcend the situation temporarily, to forget their roles as detective/white and suspect/Indian, and instead to connect in a wholly humane manner” (Coulombe 102). Humor in the oral tradition, as Alexie views it, has the capability to not only resist dominance but also bridge difference and allow a for a deeper understanding and tolerance between the two cultures.
A second tradition Alexie perceives as a form of survivance is the art of dancing. Dancing acts a form of empowerment for several of the female characters in the collection. Nezzy, in “The Fun House,” despite the oppressive conditions of reservation life and the humiliations she experiences by her own family, dons the “dress too heavy for anyone to wear” and begins to dance.. While the dress and its weight may be symbolic of the oppression –economic, patriarchal, racial, et al. –that Native American women endure on the reservation her response by dancing reflects how the old tribal ways still can resist the simulations of dominance of the modern world and act as a simulation that both resists and allows survival. Similarly, after being abandoned by her husband, Victor’s mother began “travel[ing] to powwows [and] started to dance again” (33). Denuccio notes, “[h]aving revived her traditional dancing ability enables her to provide a countering nurture to the emptiness caused by her husband’s abandonment” (92) Alexie seems to recognize these tribal traditions as a valid form of expression, and they do useful work in countering the conditions that threaten to destroy tribal life and identity.
A third idea that seems to run concurrently in both the theories of Vizenor and Alexie’s collection is the trickster figure. For Vizenor, the trickster figure is a multifaceted presence in the stories of Native Americans. It is a figure that “is androgynous, a comic healer and liberator in literature” (188), and it is also a “communal sign” in the semiotic sense, shared by the “author, narrator, characters, and audience” (187-8). This interaction forms what Vizenor refers to as “the comic holotropes in trickster narratives” (188). A holotrope (with Vizenor playing on the term hologram as used by Beaudrillard) being interpreted as a simulated trope or literary device. However, within Vizenor’s understanding, such simulations are an inherent part of the postindian identity: “Trickster stories are the postindian simulations of tribal survivance” (1984).
In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, elements of Vizenor’s theory regarding the trickster figure are present and play a role in the survivance aspects at work in the collection. Alexie invokes “Coyote”, one of the most common of trickster figures in Native American lore, in “A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result.” Coyote appears in a creation story told by Samuel Builds-the-Fire about the creation of the Indians, “Now, [Coyote] liked the Indians, liked what they were doing. This is good he kept saying to himself” (135), and the creation of the Whites, “The clippings burrowed into the ground like seeds and grew up to be the white man. Coyote, he looked down at his newest creation and said, ‘Oh, shit’” (135). If the trickster is a communal sign shared by the author, narrator, characters, and audience elements of all four should be present in the narrative. They can be found in the unifying trope of the story, its humor. Vizenor’s discussion of the trickster as androgynous is semiotic because of the shift in each meaning for each of the for elements –author, narrator, character, audience –which Coyote signifies in its discourse. Samuel, as narrator, tells “funny stories that would make each day less painful” (134). Humor alleviates pain for Sam. Alexie, as author, uses the story and its humor to create a subversive association between the white man and “shit.” The white man, as a character in the story, is the victim of the humor. And the reader, as the audience, consumes the whole simulation as humor and entertainment.
Alexie’s main trickster in the collection is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is the storyteller on the reservation, and his stories rewrite the simulations of dominance that are present within the collection. He is also the personification of Alexie’s attempt to reinvest the Native American oral tradition with the power to promote resistance and allow survival. The best example of this is the surreal story, “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire”. Thomas’ behavior is described as, “[a] storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth.” (93). The “dangerous” aspect of Thomas’ stories is what allows them to be seen as simulations of survivance and trickster stories. At his trial, Thomas assumes the voice of Qualchan, a Native American who fought the U.S. government and was executed when he finally surrendered to the whites. When asked his point by the Judge, Thomas replies, “ ‘The City of Spokane is now building a golf course named after me, Qualchan, located in that valley where I was hanged’” (98). Thomas recovers the story of Qualchan from the dominant cultures attempt to castrate the name from its historical significance. The retelling the story acts as reminder to the dominant culture of the crimes committed against the Native Americans in order to gain the land that will now become a golf course. However, Thomas is found guilty of his crime and is sentenced to prison. Yet, the oral tradition survives and is, perhaps, given a chance to spread outside the bounds of the reservation when one of Thomas fellow inmates on the bus says, “ ‘Yeah,’ one of the African men said. ‘You’re that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop’” (103). Thomas continues the tradition and “told this story” (103).
In the wake of genocide, loss of land, confinement to the reservation, and cultural emasculation, it would be easy to assume, the Native American, is either a vanishing or vanished figure that is tragic in character. However, scholars like Vizenor reveal the ideology and simulations at work that feed into those misrepresentations and deconstruct them by creating and developing the theory of the postindian and the simulations of survivance. Sherman Alexie, a contemporary Native American author, through his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven represents this struggle between the two cultures. Indeed, Alexie seems to appropriate some of Vizenor’s theoretical ideas and bring them to life in his literature. However, like any truth teller Alexie does not declare any victors in the struggle. However, the fact that the struggle does continue means that Tonto might some day win the fistfight, even if it is in Heaven.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Harper, 1993.
Coulombe, Joseph L. “The
Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections in The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” American Indian Quarterly 26 (2002): 94-105.
Denuccio, Jerome. “Slow Dancing
with Skeletons: Sherman Alexie’s The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” Critique
44 (2002): 86-96.
Low, Denise. “Book Reviews: The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”
American Indian Quarterly 20 (1996): 123-125.
Slethaug, Gordon E. “Hurricanes
and Fires: Chaotics in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke
Signals and The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven.” Literature
and Film Quarterly 31 (2003): 130-40.
Vizenor, Gerald. “From Manifest
Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance.” 1994. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen.
Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 1977-86.
-“A Postmodern Introduction” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 3-16.