Fighting here or in Heaven? Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Abstract

Confined within the borders of reservations Native identity suffers not only from the traumatic experiences of poverty, unemployment, broken families, alcoholism and oppression but also from systematic racist practices and stereotyping, which reduce the American Indian identity to noble savages, bloodthirsty warriors, prophetic shamans, or drunken outcasts. In resistance to Anglo- American attempts to erase Native identity many American Indian writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor tried to preserve Native American tribal culture and history, and remedy the traumatized Native identity. This paper focuses on how Sherman Alexie in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, standing apart from other Native American writers, portrays the Spokane Indian reservation life with a critical and cynical viewpoint on contemporary Native American’s problems such as poverty, unemployment, hunger, drug addiction, alcoholism, and violence. The paper also discusses the insight Alexie brings to the Native identity problem through his critical reading of both the Native history/tradition and the white culture, and his critique of both the ‘positive’ and the negative stereotyping of the American Indian. The study is based on the premise that Sherman Alexie creates, borrowing from Homi Bhabha’s terms, an ‘interstitial space’ in his answer to the question: how will the Native identity be constructed, based on the American Indian tribal culture, or the dominant Anglo culture, or is there an alternative way?