ALEXIE, BARRUS & LOUIS

The strange thing about writing about Native American literature is
that so much of the time it's not about the writing. It's almost
always about the writers, in that weird twist of celebrity culture
that has become the norm. Instead of discussing the actual acting in
movies, we discuss the private lives of the actors. Is it because no
one really knows all that much about good acting? Do people talk
about the Indian writers because they don't know how to judge Indian
writing?

There is a loose posse of people who make it their business to point
out who is a "real" Indian author and who is not, though some of them
-- like James Mackay whose pseudonym is VizJim, an homage to Gerald
Vizenor -- are not American, much less Indian, and have barely been on
this continent. Yet Mackay controls much of the content of Wikipedia
when it comes to NA writing. Most of the people in this witch-hunting
group make it their business to inflate their friends and attack their
enemies, which amount to anyone who resists or questions their
authority and competence. They mostly succeed because people
genuinely can't tell an Indian who isn't wearing buckskin and
feathers. Wes Studi once remarked that he was working in LA as a
clerk in a small shop across from the theatre where "Dances With
Wolves" was playing, and no one noticed he was Indian.

Let's look at some writing:

This is an excerpt from Sherman Alexie's short story, "This Is What It
Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," from his book of short stories called
"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," published in 1993 and
developed into the movie called "Smoke Signals" in 1998.
_____________

Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat on the bicycle, waited in Victor's yard.
He was ten years old and skinny. His hair was dirty because it was
the Fourth of July.

"Victor," Thomas yelled. "Hurry up. We're going to miss the fireworks."

After a few minutes, Victor ran out of his house, jumped the porch
railing, and landed gracefully on the sidewalk.

"And the judges award him a 9.95, the highest score of the summer,"
Thomas said, clapped, laughed.

"That was perfect, cousin," Victor said, "And it's my turn to ride the bike."

Thomas gave up the bike and they headed for the fairgrounds. It was
nearly dark and the fireworks were about to start.

"You know," Thomas said, "It's strange how us Indians celebrate the
Fourth of July. It ain't like it was our independence everybody was
fighting for."

"You think about things too much," Victor said. "It's just supposed
to be fun. Maybe Junior will be there."

"Which Junior? Everybody on this reservation is named Junior."

And they both laughed.
__________

Okay, now here's Barrus in his persona as Nasdijj, from "The Boy and
the Dog Are Sleeping," published in 2003:
____________
I was in a bookstore in White People Town. I was there to read my book.

I am told that when writers do this reading and speaking it sells
books, but I am not sure I believe it.

When you're finished reading, bookstore owners expect you to play
questions-and-answers with white people who want to know things like
what do you really think of Tony Hillerman?

I can only shrug. Tony Hillerman writes Navajo mysteries.

The Navajo are the real mystery.

I do not claim to know them. Does anyone know the Navajo? Is it
possible? I exist outside the context of any group or clan. I was a
migrant worker, just another brat born into a sheep camp. I do not
belong to any tribe. I can only speak for myself.

It is only within the context of recent history that the Navajo
defined themselves within tribal perimeters. They had always been a
loosely knit band of roving clans. For centuries, the warriors were
beholden to no one specific leader, no chief, and warriors could join
the ranks of any guiding star they wanted their family to follow.
When the grazing was good at the upper levels, they moved their sheep
there. When the mountain weather turned ugly, they moved their sheep
down into the valleys.

_______

The first excerpt is two boys talking and acting on a reservation on
the Fourth of July. The paragraphs and dialogue are short and
aphoristic, humorous banter. Sherman Alexie often does stand-up humor
on a stage alone, but his stories tend to have dialogue between two boys.
The second piece is first-person, reflecting and rueful but not quite
so ironic as Alexie. In fact, the author can't resist lecturing a
bit.

Reading Barrus made Alexie, by his own account, "angry, competitive,
saddened, self-righteous and more than a little jealous." He unmasked
him as a white man and claimed Barrus was "stealing my
autobiographical thunder." And he said Barrus didn't even get all the
inside anthropological knowledge right. I don't know how Alexie knew
that, since his tribe is entirely different from the Navajo, drawn
from the NW salmon ecology rather than the dry sheep pastures. All
Indians do not have intuitive access to all Indian knowledge. Barrus,
however, had lived and taught on the Navajo reservation. His books
have not been made into a movie.

Everyone fed off the feud between these two writers and felt righteous
that Alexie "won," as Alexie is one Indian writer who is accessible to
white people, while Barrus ripped into white people and then turned
out to be white himself. Actually, Barrus has one story that he
repeats and repeats: it is about a misfit thrown-away boy and how
Barrus helps that boy. Since he has spent his life as a teacher and
guardian of misfit thrown-away boys, he has lived that story again and
again. It is quite real. This is NOT Sherman Alexie's story as
Alexie is not a teacher and carefully protects his own children. No
author has custody of all stories that happen on reservations. In
fact, Alexie now lives in Seattle and has for a while. Nothing wrong
with that. I like Sherman and his writing, but he CAN be a bit much.

Here's a mischievous bit from an indubitably Indian writer, Adrian
Louis. The book is "Wild Indians & Other Creatures," published in
1996. His book "Skins" was made into a movie in 2002. This quote is
from "Sunshine Boy."

________

In the spring she gave birth a chubby, dark boy. She named him
Sherman, although she knew nobody with that name. It was a White
man's name. The name fell off her lips awkwardly. Even as she named
them, she knew that Sherman was a foolish name for an Indian, but she
stuck with it. Her son was Sherman, for better or worse.

Sherman was severely retarded with a combination of Down's syndrome
[sic] and fetal alcohol syndrome. He had a head like a pumpkin, a
small brown pumpkin. There was little doubt that Marianne's drinking
had contributed to his retardation. Retarded children were a quite
common occurrence on the reservation. If Mariana had any guilt over
the way Sherman looked, she did not speak of it. The baby boy, with
his fish eyes, his cleft palate, and misshapen head, made his mother
angry at the world, not at herself.

"I bet it was that damn Roscoe," she would mumble to her baby.
_______

If that's not "Indian" enough for you, try this Adrian Louis story in
the same collection: "How Coyote Got Killed and Resurrected."

_______

Three days later, on Easter Sunday, Old Bear went looking for a
cigarette to borrow and stumbled upon a pile of fur and bones stinking
up the High Plains sand. He looked closely and saw it was his old
friend Coyote.

"Yo, Cootie Coyote, dude, are you dead or just trying to fake me out?"
Old Bear asked.

"For sure I'm dead, ayyy," Coyote said in a barely audible whisper.
"Whaddya think, I'm down here doing aerobics or maybe discussing
Nietzche with the grains of sand?"

"Got a cigarette I can borrow?" Old Bear asked as he took off his seed
cap and wiped the sweat from the inside band.

"That nasty crud is what killed me. That and a bullet from a
federale's .357 magnum," Coyote said and then laughed and pointed his
finger at his friend. "If you don't quit smoking, Bear, then you'll
be a dead bag of bones too."

"Awww," Old Bear said and scooped up what was left of Coyote in his
arms and carried him back to his cave. he sat Coyote down in an easy
chair and offered him some leftover watermelon soup.l

"Watermelon soup? Yuck and yuckety," said Coyote.

______

Sherman Alexie's short story was first published in Esquire in 1993,
collected in his book in 1993, and made into a movie in 1998. Adrian
Louis (NO ONE questions Adrian Louis' credentials as a professor and a
journalist) published his short story collection in 1996. A movie of
his novel, "Skins," came out in 2002. The dynamics of this powerful
novel are much more like Sherman's "Smoke Signals" plot, but plays out
in quite a different way, much darker and more tragically. Louis'
short stories had been published in many small journals, but not
Esquire. Tim Barrus had written about teaching on the Navajo
reservation but couldn't sell it until he converted it into a first
person memoir. That became an essay in Esquire in 1999, which was
developed into a book in 2003. No movie.

It looks to me as though Esquire was trolling for another Sherman
Alexie. When Barrus was "revealed," Esquire (which had known all
along who he really was) expressed horror and sent another writer to
interview him with the real goal of distancing the magazine for fear
of political fall-out from that small political-correctness committee
intent on making themselves important by judging others. The one that
now seems to have a grip on all the Native American material on
Wikipedia.