SHERMAN ALEXIE'S CONTEMPORARY GHOST DANCES

Although it has fascinated historians and anthropologists since James Mooney's contemporaneous ethnographic work,Footnote ³ relatively little critical attention has been paid to the Ghost Dance as it appears in fiction, poetry and drama, despite the profound metaphorical richness with which representations of the movement have been invested by both indigenous and non-indigenous authors. It is not surprising that the traumatic events of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre have stirred writers to write: an indigenous aesthetic (the dance) expressing a revolutionary political message is censured, misinterpreted, and violently suppressed by colonial forces, ultimately blamed for a horrendous and unjustifiable massacre of its participants and surrounding community. Further, in historical texts, the Ghost Dance has continued to be conflated with the massacre at Wounded Knee, so shifting aggression and blame from colonizer to colonised, and cementing in American popular culture the mythic teleology of the “vanishing Indian.”Footnote ⁴ This tragic collision of art, politics, hermeneutics and physical violence must first be understood as historical reality, as life and the unwarranted taking of lives, before coming to function at a removed level of metaphor. Of course, it is often on a metaphorical level that the Ghost Dance is understood as it reappears in contemporary literature.

Lisa Tatonetti's essay “Dancing That Way, Things Began to Change: The Ghost Dance as Pantribal Metaphor in Sherman Alexie's Writing” provides the only survey of the Ghost Dance as it appears in Alexie's poetry and fiction, arguing that over the course of his writing “the Ghost Dance image transforms from tragic iteration to triumphant sign, ultimately identifying the imaginative spirit of the dance as the hope for the next generation of American Indian people.”Footnote ⁵ As the communally bonding aspects of the dance have been explored elsewhere in fiction and criticism, so this notion of the Ghost Dance as a pantribal or pan-Indian movement has long been recognised in nonfictional historiography, into which Tatonetti curiously chooses not to delve. In The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements, Hazel W. Hertzberg refers to “the Ghost Dance of the late [eighteen] eighties and nineties” as “the last great Pan-Indian messianic movement,”Footnote ⁶ and, more recently, S. E. Wilmer reads the Ghost Dance as “a political performance” with an ideology that “called for a new nation to be created, a nation that would bring back the buffalo, that would reunite the Indians.”Footnote ⁷ Similarly, Gregory E. Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century characterizes the historical Ghost Dance as developing and maintaining a “shared sense of Indianness,” the movement being “part of a pan-Indian religious continuum, which has included the Sun Dance and the Native American Church as significant expressions of Indian identity.”Footnote ⁸ These assertions certainly support Tatonetti's notion of the Ghost Dance in Alexie's writing as continuing in the established vein of “pantribal metaphor,” and though prior pantribal movements have also prophesied a return to precontact indigenous existence (such as those initiated by the Delaware and Shawnee prophetsFootnote ⁹), Tatonetti here points convincingly to semiosis, the “iconic power of the Ghost Dance,”Footnote ¹⁰ as one reason why Alexie chooses to focus upon this movement over its indirect historical predecessors. Thus the relative overdeterminations of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre allow Alexie to imagine multiple sites of indigenous resistance, from the twisted economics of genocide in “Custer Speaks” (Old Shirts & New Skins Footnote ¹¹) to the visionary possibilities of Native youth in “A Drug Called Tradition” (TLR). Indeed, Tatonetti contends that the Ghost Dance as it appears in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven represents a vital shift in Alexie's approach to the phenomenon, being “imagined as a site of future possibility, rather than historical loss.”Footnote ¹²

There are some notable omissions from Tatonetti's survey – stories and poems that are explicitly concerned with the Ghost Dance, but which do not follow the positive curve of this proposed trajectory.Footnote ¹³ In these texts Alexie directly addresses the “future possibility” of the Ghost Dance by describing imagined contemporary performances. These performances result in violence that divides Indian communities, separating Indians from whites, and Indians from Indians. Alexie's suspicion of the exclusionary politics that motivate the Ghost Dance achieves a distinctly literary focus in his later critique of those separatist scholars who have denounced his writing as narcissistic, irresponsible and potentially damaging to Native communities. In the literary nationalism of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Lakota Sioux) “and her swarm of professorial locusts,”Footnote ¹⁴ Alexie discerns a politics of exclusion that reinscribes the prophecies of that “strange and cruel ceremony.”Footnote ¹⁵ So, for Alexie, criticisms from Cook-Lynn, Gloria Bird (Spokane) and (to a lesser extent) Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee) function collectively as writings towards a contemporary Ghost Dance prophecy, which delineates appropriate political aims and aesthetic forms for the Indian intellectual, whilst evading the difficult realities of twentieth- and twenty-first-century urban Indian existence. Alexie's latest collection, Face (2009), conveys uncomfortably positive views of colonialism alongside negative assessments of his tribal upbringing. In “Scarlet” he asks directly, “Estranged from the tribe that offers protection,/What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?”Footnote ¹⁶ His writing is often intensely personal, but the questions Alexie directs out to the reader are demonstrably anti-narcissistic, prompting reflection primarily upon the boundaries of an individual's moral and political responsibility.

THE GHOST DANCE OF “DISTANCES”

“Distances,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, is one of the texts circumvented by Tatonetti. Set in an apparently twentieth-century postapocalyptic North America, “Distances” provides perhaps Alexie's boldest exploration of the exclusionary politics of a contemporary Ghost Dance. In an endnote, Tatonetti admits that the story “reveals that Alexie's Wounded Knee and Ghost Dance images never entirely fit within a single argument,” followed nevertheless by an attempt to explain away the setting for “Distances” as “what appears to be the aftermath of a nuclear war.”Footnote ¹⁷ This is despite an extended epigraph from Wovoka, the Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah, which appears almost incantatory in its foreshadowing, detailing as it does the physical consequences of the Ghost Dance, underscored immediately by the narrator's pervasive dread that “maybe the Ghost Dance finally worked” (TLR 104). Although the inclusion of an epigraph is relatively commonplace in the American short story, often opening the work of nineteenth-century writers such as Irving, Melville and Poe, the quotation from Wovoka is certainly unusual in its completeness. This is a decidedly functional epigraph in a story that has largely been overlooked, and as such deserves at least a brief critical reflection.

An epigraph typically guides the reader towards a thematic framework upon which to found an understanding of the subsequent narrative. Accordingly, the epigraph may also signal an acquiescence with or departure from the concerns of precedent texts, whilst proclaiming the scholarly delectations (or pretensions) of the selective author. The epigraph of “Distances” is unique in that it tells a complete story, providing in the form of prophecy a sort of imaginative, historical prequel to Alexie's present-day narrative. One is here reminded of the similarly lengthy epigraphs placed at the start of some postapocalyptic science fiction novels, composed by fictional historians to swiftly describe the great disasters that precede the action of the narrative, so accounting for the differences (or distances) between the society of the assumed reader and the society encountered in the novel. Nevertheless, hanging over the inclusion of any externally selected epigraph is the often left unanswered question of its primacy over the main text: did the author choose the quotation before or after beginning to write? In the case of “Distances,” however, we can be almost certain that the nineteenth-century prophecy of Wovoka inspired and, with considerable force, directs the setting and events of the story. As with political speech, it is the rhetorical force of the prophecy, its power to convince and stir, which is the measure of its success. In choosing to root his dystopian tale in this quotation, Alexie emphasizes the practical might of prophetic language, including its political function as a call to follow.

Wovoka's prophecy has three primary objectives through which it might appeal to the listener. First, the revival and restoration of “[a]ll dead Indians”; second, the deaths of “all white people”; third, and most importantly at this moment, the physical atrophy and combustion of all “Indians who don't dance, who don't believe in this word” (TLR 104). Restatement of this last point is perhaps necessary: even those Indians who have been saved by the performance of the Ghost Dance will not survive if they do not continue to perform and affirm their faith in the prophecy. The lives of those “who don't believe in this word” are dogmatically excluded, minimized, and finally engulfed in flames, ceasing to be recognized as Indians. The Ghost Dance prophecy grants and takes life first on the basis of race, then on that of personal belief. Being recognized as worthy of existence becomes not simply a matter of holding the recognized genetics, but of embodying the required epistemology.

Of course, it must be understood that the historical Ghost Dance prophecy was a time-bound response to the oppression that threatened daily tribal survival. Alice Beck Kehoe explains that the 1890 movement, with its

It is understandable that the socioeconomic conditions suffered by Indians of the late nineteenth century produced a movement that found a solution to exclusion in a form of counterexclusion.Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, reproduced in contemporary fiction, for a contemporary audience, Wovoka's prophecy looks more like ruthless segregation than cultural empowerment: Indian adherents gain exclusive cultural freedom, but there are appropriate modes of expressing that freedom, and a morbid compulsion to do so.

On a metatextual level, this lengthy epigraph provides our first indication that Alexie wishes to set this story apart from the rest of the collection. The absence in “Distances” of the various characters, events and settings so explicitly shared by the other stories furthers this sense of segregation, preventing the piece from participating in an established interplay of elements, so temporarily isolating the narrative and the reader from the surrounding community. This is an important aesthetic choice that introduces exclusion at a thematic level, and foreshadows the violent separatism practised by the story's authority figures. The withdrawal from the community of stories and characters shared by the rest of the collection also functions at the level of genre, as some form of staged split from the long-standing present-day society is always necessary for the establishment of a dystopian (or indeed utopian) civilization. Other characteristically dystopian features of “Distances” include the oppressive governmental system, the apparently naive yet dissenting protagonist, the forbidden relationship that threatens the social order, and the ominous lack of a clear resolution. Whilst much of Alexie's poetry and fiction deals explicitly with racial tensions, the epigraph of “Distances” eliminates the possibility of such tensions before the main narrative begins, yet in doing so pushes the issue of intracultural segregation (that between urban and reservation Indians) to the fore. The inclusion of this epigraph does more than just highlight the distance between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian identities; it invites an important question for the reader to consider over the subsequent pages: is a pantribal movement still a relevant method of cultural empowerment when many urban Indians feel excluded from their tribes? The following reading of Alexie's exploration of the consequences of the Ghost Dance suggests that the message of the prophecy is no longer quite so unequivocally marvellous, and that a strict separatist political agenda is likely to weaken the communities it purports to represent.

As we enter the action of “Distances,” then, it becomes clear that the Ghost Dance has in a sense fulfilled its spiritual function as a pantribal movement, and the prophecy is being realized. The whites have drowned, the structural remains of white culture are being systematically torched, and a Tribal Council governs the exclusively reservation Indian community, yet what follows is not hope or triumph, but desolation, disease and death. It is perhaps not surprising that Tatonetti refrains from addressing this difficult story, as the future it presents is decidedly bleak. Far from uniting Indians, this apocalypse has rendered unbridgeable the gaps (being another of the title's “distances’) between reservation and urban Indians, a division now fully activated at a cellular level, causing the atrophy and death of those with the “sickness” brought on by living off the reservation. Here, as in much of Alexie's writing, we find evoked the social significance of blood and DNA, though there is no explicit indication that the “Urbans” are any more or less biologically indigenous than the reservation “Skins.” The practical implication of this post-dance commingling of the one-drop rule and blood quantum specifications is a simple and unremitting distillation of the original Ghost Dance message: belong or begone. The irony here is hardly subtle, the biological and cultural consequences of the contemporary Ghost Dance and the practises of the Tribal Council echoing in subversion the catastrophic diseases and violence brought by European settlers,Footnote ²⁰ as well as the Americanization policies that legally deprived (and continue to deprive) indigenous peoples of lands, cultures, and lives.

Again, such anachronism is a central concern of “Distances,” the story enacting in the late twentieth century a political and spiritual rupture intended for the turn of the nineteenth. Indigenous and nonindigenous cultures have continued to coexist and disperse for over a century since the originary Ghost Dances (the “distance” of anachronism being the perceived discrepancy between present sign and past referent), and so for Alexie a return to a precontact indigenous existence is not only untenable, but potentially detrimental to indigenous cultures as they currently exist. The narrator's recurring nightmares about television (TLR 106, 108) testify to the pervasive influence of the culture that the Tribal Council has defined as “white,” even for a “Skin” such as the narrator. White culture is represented by “artifact[s]”, “sin[s]” (TLR 109) that somehow remain undestroyed: a watch (retained by the tribal chairman), a transistor radio (concealed by the narrator), and a painting of Jesus (a survivor of council-sanctioned arson). The ineradicability of these oddly treasured symbols of white dominance in history, media, and religion dramatizes the internalization of white culture, or rather the impossibility of extracting a precontact indigenous existence from contemporary cross-cultural indigenous experience.

Each object is of particular interest to the narrator, and subject to some unusual description that points to the aforementioned impossibility. The punning query “I want to know why [despite being white] Jesus isn't a flame” (TLR 107) is a confused reaction to the perseverance of this other, white Messiah into what is supposed to be the exclusively indigenous aftermath of the Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah's fulfilled prophecy.Footnote ²¹ The portrait is a reminder that the origins of the Ghost Dance religion were syncretic, incorporating Christian elements into what remained a Native movement. At the same time, such a presence permits competing claims of divinity into an otherwise theologically stabilized community, and reminds the reader that despite his portrait, if Jesus did exist then he surely was not white. The watch is remembered as having measured time “exactly, coldly,” in opposition to the narrator's measuring of time “with [his] breath, the sound of [his] hands across [his] skin” (TLR 109). This is a curious action that appears to indicate the narrator's suspicion that those mechanisms by which experience is regulated in a sense make subjects of those who abide by their divisions. The earlier description of the Urbans' disease as “a wristwatch that has fallen between their ribs, slowing, stopping” (TLR 107) suggests that with their metaphorical absorption of “white” culture, the Urbans have become both anachronisms and anatopisms: out of time and out of place. The narrator is especially fascinated by the possibility of hidden “mistakes” in the inner workings of the waterproof radio, otherwise finding “no imperfection … evident by the smooth, hard plastic of the outside” (TLR 109). This flawless facade houses a complexity of destroyed circuitry, dead batteries, shorted wires and, perhaps most significantly, burst “dams” (TLR 105). That the “mistakes” on the inside jeopardize the smooth functioning of the whole seems a fairly clear metaphor for the diseased and the dissenters in the society of “Distances,” whose presence directly threatens the possibility of maintaining a unified, “pan-Indian” society. Furthermore, the burst dams inside the radio allude to man-made boundaries or geographical borders yielding to forces of nature, or indeed social forces. As metaphor, these borders need not be physical, and the transgression not noticeably natural. By way of example, one might consider the reality of reservation life expectancy as bursting the bubble of fighting fit “Indian” sports mascot iconography, or, conversely, the alleged support of such iconography from the majority of the American Indian population.Footnote ²² Turning back to the text, one might consider the love that persists between the narrator and “Tremble Dancer,” the story's representative “Urban,” as a force of nature that cannot be contained, despite the strict rulings of the Tribal Council against cross-cultural relationships.

Again, Alexie's presentation of the fulfilment of Ghost Dance prophecy not only seems impossible to maintain, but wholly undesirable. Whilst the narrator is geographically (therefore biologically and publicly) acceptable to the Tribal Council, he must permanently conceal the private anguish of his splintered cultural identity. The fulfilment of the Ghost Dance prophecy has stretched the narrator's loyalties to breaking point, as he longs for private contact with urban Indians and pre-dance contemporary culture, whilst being publicly restricted by the rule of the Tribal Council, all the while terrified of the “Others,” being the indigenous ancestors revived by the dance. The stability of the narrator's identity is further threatened by his love for Tremble Dancer, whose gradual, partial decomposition into the narrator's mouth again suggests the inevitable internalization of mixed cultures, passing not only from white to Indian, but from Indian to Indian. Like the burst dams and “mistakes” inside the radio, the continuity of personal cross-cultural attachments in the story, be they emotional, spiritual, or material, hints at a future that threatens the permanence of this apocalyptic terminus.

Despite Alexie's dystopic presentation, the desire for segregation is presented as dominant, historical and far-reaching, with even the Tribal Council appearing relatively moderate when at the mercy of the Others, those giant, revived ancestors whose age and size again reiterate the historical and spatial distance between precontact and contemporary indigenous existence. Though the Others are a permanent reminder of history, they are of a precontact history, and so follow an anachronistic ideology all too similar to that of the Council, attempting to erase all signs of that five-hundred-year interim of colonial contact. In a violent act that closely resembles waterboarding, Noah Chirapkin is tortured and killed by the Others. As the only “Skin” with experience of the urban destruction outside the reservation, Chirapkin represents an undesirable and potentially pernicious link to postcontact, pre-dance culture, and must be destroyed. The eventual rape of Tremble Dancer by the “tallest Other” (TLR 108) provides perhaps the most immediately disturbing action of the narrative, and though the life that springs forth following her impregnation suggests the cultural nourishment that can result from interactions with the excluded, the fact that she is raped and dies indicates that such interactions carry with them the risk of severe exploitation. The domination of the indigenous by their ancestors is a further irony in the story, but also dramatizes the power of the dominant discourses of history to control contemporary experience. For all its mysteriousness and surreality, “Distances” testifies to the historical perpetuation of racial hatred and genocidal tendencies even beyond the bounds of documented colonial experience, affirming the disastrous potential of any society to assert its dominance via turmoil. When the narrator hears “horses exploding” and “the screams of children who are taken” (TLR 108), and when the Others sing and shout over the voices of their progeny, there is a clear sense that the revived Ghost Dance is here imagined as a site of historical loss, rather than future possibility.

From the reading offered above it may seem that Cook-Lynn, Bird and Owens are justified in declaring Alexie's artistic merit to be overwhelmed by his contribution to a literature of “deficit,” “disengagement,” “despair,” and “Doom.”Footnote ²³ Speaking of Reservation Blues (1995), Bird (who as a Spokane might best be situated to critique Alexie's tribal representations) contends that the novel

Cook-Lynn's criticisms of Alexie (and other contemporary Native writing that does not directly indicate the importance of community) are various, concurring with Bird whilst adding more generally that the biography “is written by people who are no longer attached to their native national origins, people who want to exploit themselves, usually giving in to their deficit lives and pimping the stereotypes, with the main purpose to appeal to white audiences.”Footnote ²⁵ This addresses Alexie's self-professed tendency to explicitly work autobiographical and tribally biographical material into his fictional narratives, even when that material reflects poorly on his reservation upbringing and his characters mirror Indian stereotypes. Owens finds himself “in strong agreement with Bird's and Cook-Lynn's critiques,” arguing that Alexie's fiction “too often simply reinforces all of the stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing; there is no family or community center toward which his characters … might turn for coherence.”Footnote ²⁶ “Distances” is notably light on stereotypes, though one can easily assess the overall tone as hopeless, so conforming to the colonist's placatory trope of the irrevocably vanishing indigenous race. More important at this point is the story's relation to a Native community, which is perhaps the decisive factor in much current Native literary criticism. A brief look at literary nationalism helps explain why this is so.

THE LOCATION OF COMMUNITY

The nationalist critical agenda of Simon J. Ortiz's (Acoma Pueblo) “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism” provides the inspiration for Jace Weaver (Cherokee), Craig Womack (Creek-Cherokee), and (Osage) Robert Allan Warrior's American Indian Literary Nationalism, which currently resides at the forefront of Native literary scholarship. Here it is accepted that nationalism is

The authors crucially address misconceptions about the approach, making it very clear that they “do not believe that [literary nationalism] is the only possible approach to Native literature,” welcoming the scholarship of “both Natives and non-Native allies who support tribal national sovereignty and nationalist readings of Native literature” in “the hope of [building] a literary nationalism that endorses free expression as much as uniformity of opinion.”Footnote ²⁷ Briefly, the innovation of nationalist readings of literature is that it is an author's tribal affiliation and/or his or her attempts to represent tribal culture(s) that form the foundation of the critic's interpretive framework. The text is assessed on the basis of its affirmation of distinct tribal identities (and the accuracy of their portrayal), its approach to the decolonization of tribal nations, and its expounding of the specific responsibilities to be accepted by Natives and non-Natives in the advancement towards regaining fully recognized tribal sovereignty. As a nation is built from communities, so communities are responsible for the health of that nation. A literary work that successfully promotes the importance of tribal communities (and is enjoyable to read) is more likely to inspire a sense of national pride and/or respect for tribal nations than one that maintains an individualist stance. In his That the People Might Live, Weaver discusses the “communitist” trend in Native literatures, contending that “the single thing that most defines Indian literatures relates to this sense of community and commitment to it.”Footnote ²⁸ So what is here considered the best American Indian literature is that which is aware of its responsibilities to American Indian individuals, communities and tribal nations. The primary responsibility is to encourage tribal identification amongst individuals, so building tribal communities, and furthering the causes of tribal nations.

What does this mean for “Distances”? I admit that I am not equipped with the relevant tribal knowledge of Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian culture to attempt a fully tribal nationalist reading (indeed, for me it is not clear to which tribal culture the story refers), but hopefully a general reading of the story's sense of community will provide sufficient illumination by which to follow my broader argument. The central community of “Distances” is identified as tribal, but does not provide comfort or “coherence” for its members, who freeze at night and are burned by the sun (or on funeral pyres) during the day. The neglected older members of the community choose to “drown in their own water rather than die of thirst” (TLR 106–7), the implication being that they commit suicide by inhaling their own urine. By the end of the story, there is little indication that the narrator will not suffer the same fate, and so again it seems we are in the realm of despair. Yet embedded at the centre of the story there exists the glimmer of a potentially restorative community. The narrator manages only brief communications with Tremble Dancer and Noah Chirapkin, but in doing so establishes an inclusive sense of personal and social responsibility that is desirable in tribal communities yet absent from that ruled over by the Tribal Council. In his interactions with Tremble Dancer, the narrator discovers memories, love, responsibility for others, and an understanding of his reproductive powers. Noah Chirapkin's survey of the land, empty but for “a single plant, a black flower” (TLR 106), provides the narrator with a sense of place and the possibility of regeneration on reclaimed land. These capacities (to recount or begin a personal history and geography, make emotional connections with others, claim land and generate life) carry with them always the possibility of barbarism, but are tempered by the narrator's appreciation of human fallibility, gained from his reflections on “mistakes” inspired by the radio and the watch. Though oppressed by his peers and continually faced with death, the narrator's struggle to establish some sense of autonomy seems to anticipate Warrior's discussion of sovereignty:

Despite this (admittedly precious) location of community in the story, there remains the problem that this is not the desired type of community, as it stems directly from a relative individualism that defies the political prerequisites of the Tribal Council. The successful Ghost Dance of “Distances” does more than simply reverse the colonial power dynamic through which such a politics previously functioned; it reinvigorates latent intracultural tensions, so marking urban Indians as fresh pariahs. In her investigation of British judicial responses to the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Helen Fein discusses a society's “universe of obligation,” which in its establishment includes those people who “must be taken into account, to whom obligations are due, by whom we can be held responsible for our actions,”Footnote ³⁰ so creating in relief conditions by which those excluded may be ignored or persecuted. The concept is common in the philosophical discussion of monist and utilitarian ethics, with Peter Singer devoting an entire study to what W. H. Lecky termed “the expanding circle.”Footnote ³¹ Wovoka's prophecy established a pan-Indian universe of obligation that forcibly excluded whites, whilst also operating within Indian culture to remove all traces of colonial influence. The exclusion of urban Indians in the story is an attempt to dramatize the anxieties felt by urban Indians regarding their tribal identity. The majority of American Indians are now urban Indians, yet many, like Alexie, feel cast as betrayers of their tribe because of their engagement with urban America, an environment that tends to prioritize the immediate needs of the individual over the achievement of a sense of community.

As Alexie's fiction moves further from the reservation, so his concerns about the status of urban Indians become more focussed, though they are revealed by circumstances no less harrowing. The contemporary Ghost Dances of Indian Killer (1996) and Flight (2007) occur amidst principally urban scenes of homelessness, violence, racism, and childhood sexual abuse, and cause further division between Indians.Footnote ³² When Tatonetti reads the Ghost Dance performed by the killer of Indian Killer as being “the central metaphor for Native resistance in the novel”Footnote ³³ she echoes the deconstructivist assessments of anthropologist-turned-literature professor Dr. Clarence Mather, who interprets the killer as “a revolutionary construct” whose actions are “a metaphor for the Indian condition.”Footnote ³⁴ Mather's ideologically suspect “Native American Literature” course is subject to continued challenges from Marie Polatkin, who, I contend, is that novel's decidedly nonmetaphorical agent of indigenous resistance to racial injustices. Her lucid protests against the cultural appropriation of Jack Wilson's best-selling, heavily exoticized “Indian” mysteries and Mather's poor scholarship, her support of and participation in urban Indian cultural activity, and her voluntary work for the homeless Indians of Seattle surely posit Marie in the role of righteous indigenous citizen. The testimony from MarieFootnote ³⁵ that Tatonetti (again echoing Mather) cites apparently in support of the killer's “revolutionary potential,”Footnote ³⁶ that “Indians are dancing now, and I don't think they're going to stop” (Indian Killer 418) can easily be read as supporting the creative potential of Indians in a culturally mixed society (specifically referring to Marie's promotion of university powwows), rather than any motivation to destroy that society's dominant demographic. The contemporary message of indigenous resistance must not be that divisive, final “message of the knife” (Indian Killer 192) perpetrated by the vengeful killer, whose actions divide Seattle's Indian communities into those who “believed it was all just racist paranoia” and those “few [who] felt a strange combination of relief and fear, as if an apocalyptic prophecy was just beginning to come true” (Indian Killer 185). So the actions of the killer threaten not only the lives of the novel's white population, but the integrity of the novel's Indian communities. Instead, it is in Marie's conscientious, measured approach to tackling the difficult realities of urban Indian living that we might find the potential for revolution. Marie's indigenous pride no longer resides with the reservation of her tribal community (by whom she was bullied for her studiousness), and though she is often suspicious of her white peers, her commitment to nurturing Indian communities within an oppressive urban environment is partially driven by her personal experiences of exclusion at a tribal level.

Yet the novel acknowledges that there must be limits to the inclusivity of any coherent community, and Marie's criticisms of Wilson and Mather help to plot these limits in Indian Killer. It is telling that Alexie chooses to approach the politics of exclusion here in the manner of his critics, through observations on literature and literary criticism. According to Marie, Wilson's “books are killing Indian books” (Indian Killer 68), in that Wilson's exploitative representations of “that shaman thing … talking animals, sacred vortexes” (Indian Killer 162–63) and other such sensationalized “Indian” tropes become the dominant way of writing and reading about Indian cultures, overshadowing the writing of Indian authors who wish to engage with the often difficult realities of a supposed postcolonial existence. As mentioned, Mather is subject to sustained criticism from Marie (until he ejects her from his class), beginning with her observation that on the reading list for his Native American Literature course “there are only three Indian [authors], and their books were really written by white guys” (Indian Killer 59). Like Wilson, Mather purports to be interested in promoting cross-cultural understanding, yet in order to maintain his authority and reputation he must maintain the ignorance of his audience to the everyday realities of contemporary Indian nations, communities and individuals. Both Mather and Wilson believe that they belong to Indian communities, Wilson falsely claiming Shilshomish heritage and Mather proudly proclaiming his “adopt[ion] into a Lakota Sioux family” (Indian Killer 61). Whatever value these assertions might hold for the individual claimants, they fail as claims to any form of culturally indigenous interiority simply because the characters proclaim their Indian associations only for personal gain, neglecting the communities they are alleged to represent. For Alexie, then, being a responsible indigenous citizen does not necessarily involve a fine appreciation of one's tribal nation, or even a sense of belonging to that tribe, rather it requires attention to the need for healthy indigenous communities wherever indigenous peoples might reside, and at the same time an ability to recognize the potential communal advantages of individual progress, again wherever indigenous peoples might reside.

The contemporary Ghost Dance of Flight is again hostile and divisive, taking the form of an indiscriminate attack upon those queuing at a city bank by Zits, a traumatized and delusional fifteen-year-old victim of sexual abuse. This is no metaphor for righteous indigenous resistance: it is another extreme act of aggression against the urban community. Zits performs this Ghost Dance according to the instructions of a hallucinated character called Justice, who convinces him that killing white people will resurrect his dead Irish mother and return his absent Indian father. Thematically this is all rather familiar, dramatizing the dangers of endorsing excessive exclusion in the name of achieving inclusion; nevertheless, our understanding of this sequence allows for a constructive reading of the crisis of origins that exacerbates Zits's psychological symptoms, and leads him to apparent sociopathy. Although Zits claims not to be “Irish or Indian,” describing himself as “a blank sky, a human solar eclipse,”Footnote ³⁷ he plainly chooses to identify with his Indian heritage, primarily due to his physical features. The desire to explore this aspect of his cultural identity is initially a positive one, though as his Indian heritage is neither tribally specific nor legally recognized, sporadic interactions with homeless and alcoholic “street Indians” provide his only sense of participation in an Indian community (Flight 7). At the same time, Zits understands that in interacting with this debilitated community he removes himself from the potentially recuperative regard of those “rich and educated Indians” who see the “drunken Indian [as] just a racist cartoon … [t]he lonely Indian [as] just a ghost in a ghost story” (Flight 6, italics in original). The only Indian community Zits knows is that with which direct association prevents his recognition as a decent Indian citizen. In order to better understand and align himself with the traditional values of more acceptable Indian communities, thus improving his chances of some form of positive cultural recognition, Zits attempts to research “how real Indians used to live and how they're supposed to live now” (Flight 12). Sadly, the principal resources available to Zits are the negative portrayals of Indians in the historical conflicts he sees simulated on television, and so his understanding of Indian cultural values is overwhelmed by representations of hostility towards non-Indians. Zits's ethical development is directed not only by his experiences of abuse at the hands of family members and various foster parents, but also by the impossibility of his locating an acceptable Indian community through which to explore his cultural heritage. Unable to find a sense of belonging in his current social location, Zits conceives his performance of a contemporary Ghost Dance as a means of establishing his Indian ancestry and restoring his tribal identity.Footnote ³⁸

As we have seen, Alexie (amongst others) is criticized for the lack of tribal community in his writing, but it seems that any such aesthetic lack is an expression in fiction of a real, felt distance from the tribal community with whom he is assumed to identify. Affiliation with one's tribal nation provides little support when one feels excluded by the members of that tribe. In “Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers” Alexie baldly explains this reality:

Put simply, how does the nationalist agenda account for urban Indians who no longer identify with their tribal communities? Alexie here asserts that the nationalist emphasis on the importance of identifying with a tribal community may further exclude those Indians who find a sense of kinship in nontribal or pantribal communities. The study of “what separates” him from his tribe, being a subversion of the work of the separatist, reveals the necessity of a tribally specific reading only insofar as the tribe might be held accountable for the treatment of its members. Alexie's concern is that literary nationalism might restrict access to or acceptance of non-tribal and/or urban Indian artistry, and so minimize the sort of engagement with world literatures that allowed Alexie to escape poverty. It is certainly worth considering the writer's position in all of this, given the largely self-reflexive nature of Alexie's writing, and his status as a successful urban Indian. In a recent interview, Alexie notes that

It is with this in mind that Alexie “call[s] bullshit” on the “ugly fundamentalism” of Cook-Lynn, in the aforementioned “hybrid sonnet sequence,”Footnote ⁴¹ proclaiming that it “was all those goddamn texts/By all those damn dead white male and female writers/That first taught me how to be a fighter.”Footnote ⁴² Alexie's problem with authority is not a problem simply with white authority; it is with the reach of authority figures in general. It seems inevitable that certain people will be granted over others the right to decide upon what is correctly “Indian” and what is not, but to exclude work by Indian artists that responsibly considers nontribal, urban matters is to exclude a major Indian demographic that also desperately requires support. A report issued by the Urban Indian Health Commission in 2007 found that “[d]ecades of neglect have placed urban Indians at greater risk of unnecessary death and disability” than the general population and that “although the United States continues to work to address racial and ethnic disparities in health care, American Indians and Alaska Natives living in this country's cities have been mostly invisible.”Footnote ⁴³ Regarding demographics, the Commission notes that although

Alexie's writing alone is unlikely to cure depression, diabetes or heart disease, but his commitment to representing the complexities of urban Indian existence forms a vital contribution to contemporary Indian cultures, and as such deserves the attention of those aiming to foster national pride.

As mentioned above, “Distances” occupies an unusual place at the centre of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, being the only story not to explicitly share characters, settings or events with any other in the collection. These common elements otherwise create connections amidst the various perspectives of the surrounding stories, so forming a nexus of interrelated personal and social histories that supports a distinct sense of community through the collection, albeit a community in need. That this community is struggling does not necessarily imply a lack of core values; indeed, individual responses to the consistently perceived deficit of “tribal ties [and] sense of community” (TLR 74) tend to affirm the crucial function of the “tribal imagination” in ensuring the survival of the tribe (TLR 141).Footnote ⁴⁵ This “tribal imagination” is that which fuels and is fuelled by storytelling, an act conceived in this collection as both individual and communal, in that the stories recounted by individual narrators together provide histories of the local community. The absence of these shared elements in “Distances” places the story at a remove from this community of stories and their storytellers, and in doing so invokes at a metatextual level the potential for those with a separatist agenda to weaken those communities they might claim to empower. As in much dystopian fiction, the significance of this glimpse of a potential future lies in its establishment of a perspective from which to assess the present. This critical distance allows for a reflection upon the wider social and political implications of community-building, here suggesting that indigenous and federal governments should be open to the potentially mutual benefits of nurturing the social links that exist between urban, reservation and rural communities. By distancing both the narrative and the reader from the immediate community established by the rest of the collection, Alexie forces an evaluation of the means by which that community has come to exist, and the ways in which it might continue to do so, even when all seems lost. Due to its relative peculiarities, Alexie's “Distances” succinctly dramatizes specific emotional, social and historical difficulties potentially encountered by contemporary reservation, rural and urban Indian communities, invoking the exclusionary politics of the Ghost Dance to reveal the tensions that exist within and between those communities. An understanding of these tensions is crucial not only to any reading of this collection and Alexie's later writing, but to an appreciation of any artwork that attempts to represent a contemporary urban Indian experience.