So raise your hand if you know more than two honest-to-God Native Americans.
Keep your hand up if your understanding of Native American cultures is limited to Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, Indian Princesses at the YMCA, and playground games.
That’s what I thought.
Related: This dude is funny on Twitter.
I am not better than that. I grew up around few Native American people and haven’t had any close relationship with anyone who had a close relationship with their Native American heritage since about 1995 (hello to my childhood friend Billy Robinson if you’re for some reason reading this blog). I’ll admit that my knowledge of different native cultures is so cursory that I have almost no idea what distinguishes one from the other. I’m not proud of that, but it is the truth. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ton of great, contemporary literature about the Native American experience in the contemporary USA, so I was excited to come across Ten Little Indians.
Sherman Alexie set out to create a short story collection that dealt with the everyday lives of Native Americans without tokenizing them, without being overly sentimental, and without making them seem like some kind of wise, magical, otherworldly beings. The majority of the characters in these stories are Spokane urbanites living in and around Seattle, a demographic of Native people I hadn’t ever really considered prior to reading this. By his own admission, some of these 9 stories are really good, some are okay, and a few are pretty bad. He never comes out and says which ones he thinks are which, so I’m just going to tell you what I thought. Continue reading
