Secrets, lies and the key to being Indian

The Toughest Indian In The World By Sherman Alexie(Vintage, #6.99)

BORN in 1966, novelist and poet Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/ Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up on a Washington State reservation, and his writing emerges from that identity. Indian, not Native American, is how his book blurbs describe him: in one short story in this collection a character dryly observes that "Native American" is an oxymoron. In Dear John Wayne, set in the year 2052, an anthropologist interviews the 118-year-old Etta Joseph, "last of the Spokane Indians". "Really?" says the anthropologist, "I had no idea you were the last." "Well, actually, I'm not," says Etta, "there's thousands of us. But it sounds more romantic, enit?"

This nod at Little Big Man signals the story's target: white portrayals of the Indian past. It turns out that Etta was an extra in the John Ford western The Searchers, and that during the shoot she lost her virginity to John Wayne. Wayne, it seems - delicious irony! - lived a lie: beneath the stereotype he was a sensitive, gentle man, who preferred his lover to use his birth name Marion, wept during sex and encouraged his sons to embrace their feminine side. When the interviewer suggests Etta's story might not be true, she replies: "Well, now, an Indian has to keep her secrets, or she's just not an Indian. But an Indian a lot smarter than me once said this: If it's fiction, then it better be true." The interviewer sarcastically comments: "How oxymoronic," at which point Etta makes her quip about "Native American".

The idea of defending yourself by retaining secrets crops up elsewhere. In Saint Junior an overweight, middle-aged man remembers the recipe for salmon mush passed down to him by his grandmother on her death bed. It is significant that this weighty information is not revealed to the reader. That kind of secret is what will enable him to survive.

"What is an Indian?" is a problem repeatedly posed in another story and in addressing this question, Alexie has found a way of asking what it is to be human. The stories are the testimony of people who have had to overcome massive challenges - poverty, racism, alcoholism, unemployment, the legacy of ethnic cleansing - in order to assert their humanity. That they do so is what Alexie celebrates, and he does it beautifully, addressing their lives with immense tenderness.

Not that he is a sentimentalist. There is a bitter humour running through his work which makes you laugh even as it subverts your expectations. In South By Southwest Seymour - white - and Salmon Boy - Indian - set out on a kind of Thelma And Louise journey holding up fast food restaurants with an empty gun. "I aim to go on a non- violent killing spree and I need somebody who will fall in love with me along the way," Seymour has declared, and Salmon Boy signs up, though neither of them is gay. They pass a dead coyote nailed to a fence post. "That's a bad sign, ain't it?" asked Seymour. "Yes, it is," said Salmon Boy. "What does it mean?" asked the white man. "I have no idea," said the Indian.

The longest story, The Sin Eaters, is a spectacular piece of writing: using nightmare holocaust imagery, it brilliantly and terrifyingly satirises how America first destroyed the Indians, then picked over their bones for the bits it needed to make itself feel better. Through these varied and impassioned tales, Alexie shows a defeated culture emerging resilient and precious in the wreckage of the white American dream.

Copyright 2001
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