The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Alexie’s literature is inseparable from the political history of American Indigenous nations broadly, and the Spokane in particular. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson enforced the Indian Removal Act, which pushed Indigenous American tribes living in the Eastern United States west of the Mississippi River. In 1851, Congress passed the first Indian Appropriations Act, which constructed the reservation system. The purpose of the reservation was to avoid the inevitable clashes that would arise as a result of white encroachment into tribal territory. The reservation system also affirmed federal dominance over Indigenous peoples’ physical movement and their means of livelihood, which were typically tied to the land.

Up until 1871, the US government dealt with Indigenous peoples as independent nations through treaties. With the passage of the second Indian Appropriations Act, each tribal nation lost its sovereignty and became subject to all the US government’s laws and provisions. The final military confrontations between Indigenous tribes and the US government took place in the late 19th century. Crazy Horse, a Lakota Sioux, and Sitting Bull, a Cheyenne, fought and defeated General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana.

The Dawes Act of 1887 waged war against tribes on a different front. The Dawes Act divided reservation lands into smaller tracts to be managed by individual tribal families. Each family could hold 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land to work as they saw fit. The US government treated any tribal land that remained after this dispersal as surplus to be sold to white settlers. Besides reducing tribal holdings, the act fostered isolation; communal ways of life were incompatible with the Westernized private farming and family living the law imposed. As a result, continuation of tribal culture and customs was severely hindered. To make matters worse, reservation soil was often infertile and tribal members too poor to purchase the implements required for successful agriculture.

The lower Spokane nation experienced these changes and disruptions, relocating to the Spokane Reservation in 1877. The tribe had been semi-nomadic according to season and highly dependent on fishing the area’s waterways. The building of the Little Falls Dam (completed in 1921) and the Grand Coulee Dam (completed in 1942) along the Spokane River resulted in the loss of annual salmon runs, ending an ecocultural tradition for the tribe. Uranium was discovered on Spokane land in the 1950s and was heavily mined for nuclear purposes for 30 years. Many of these mining sites were left open, contaminating both the land and water supplies.

From this historical context, Alexie fashions a Spokane community that has internalized its political subjugation. Their collective tribal identity was dissolved and then reoriented in direct response to the dictates of the US government. When Victor in “Crazy Horse Dreams” states, “Ain’t no salmon left in our river” (39), Alexie evokes the entire history of land annexation and cultural suppression. When Aunt Nezzy from “The Fun House” drinks brown water from the Tshimikain Creek and says, “I’ll probably get sick” (80), Alexie alludes to the toxicity of reservation water caused by corporate uranium mining. In “Crazy Horse Dreams,” when Victor wishes he could be Crazy Horse, Alexie intends to call forth not just the fame of the Sioux leader but also his resistance to the imposition of Western law and culture on Indigenous Americans. The tropes that Alexie uses originate in realities. The poverty, weak infrastructure, illiteracy, chemical dependence, hunger, violence, grief, disease, and cultural loss that color Alexie’s real and fictive Spokane Reservation cannot be separated from the US government’s past and present policies toward its inhabitants.