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Spokane Words: Tomson Highway raps with Sherman Alexie

Aboriginal Voices, January-March 1997

This interview between Sherman Alexie and Tomson Highway took place at the 17th Annual International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 28, 1996.

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Tomson Highway: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Tomson Highway and I am both your host and interviewer for today's interview. I am a writer here in this fabulous city of Toronto! Please welcome, from the United States of America, Mr. Sherman Alexie.

Sherman Alexie: Thank you.

Highway: I'm curious -- your name, where does it come from?

Alexie: Sherman? I'm a junior. I'm Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. Junior's a very common name on the reservations. Go onto any reservation and say, "Hey Junior!" and 17 men and three women turn around.

My dad was Sherman, my grandfather was Alphonse, my great-grandfather was Adolph; had another great-great-grandfather who was Aristotle...

Highway: Really?

Alexie: No those ones - different ones!

Highway: Well, thank the living Lord Jesus you ain't called "Jim." Now, your tribal affiliation...

Alexie: I'm enrolled Spokane from my mother's side. My father's Couer D'Alene. The name means "heart of --"

Highway: Alene. Who, in this country, is the Prime Minister's wife!

Alexie: Oh, we predicted her arrival, then.

My other tribe is the Spokane, where I grew up, on the Spokane reservation. It's Spo-kan-ee, actually, and it means "children of the sun."

Highway: Why do you say "my other tribe"? Are you half and half?

Alexie: My mother's side is Spokane, Salish, Kootenay and Colville Indian, which are all Salish; they are all related -- speak the same language.

Highway: How many people live on the Spokane Indian Reservation?

Alexie: About a thousand. There's about 2500 Spokanes altogether. Most of the others live in the city of Spokane, which is just off our reservation.

Highway: Tell us a little about Spokane Indian Reservation.

Alexie: We're a Salmon people. Our religions, our culture, our dancing, our singing--had everything to do with the salmon. We were devastated by the Grand Coulee Dam. It took away 7,000 miles of salmon spawning beds from the interior Indians in Washington, Idaho and Montana. We've had to create a religion for many years.

We had fish hatcheries so now our salmon are homegrown. People often ask me, "Why didn't they build a fish ladder?" I say, "You haven't seen the Grand Coulee Dam, have you?"

Highway: The principal source of economic survival today on the Spokane Indian Reservation is...?

Alexie: Forestry. And now casinos and bingo halls. Yes, we are casino-owning Americans.

Highway: Really? How's it doing?

Alexie: Very well, thank you. On my reservation unemployment was about 90% before the bingo hall and casino; now it's about 10%. They worry about the Mafia coming in and taking over the casinos. I say, "Indians couldn't tell the difference between the Mafia and the United States government. Even if the Mafia did come in and take over, we'd welcome them, because we'd be better organized and the government wouldn't mess with us. And we'd have much better pasta! No more Kraft macaroni and cheese.

Highway: The Spokane language, do you speak it?

Alexie: No, I understand it. My parents are both fluent in Salish but they didn't teach us.

Highway: Why not?

Alexie: When I was very young, my mom told us, "English will be your best weapon." My own language wasn't going to save me. English would. And it has. I'm a writer, making my living off writing in English. I do use Spokane language in my work where I would use it myself like in phrases or dirty words. I can tell people what I think of them in two languages.

Highway: Fantastic! Tell us about your education. There was an elementary school on your rez...

Alexie: I went to the tribal school, until eighth grade and then I transferred off the reservations to a border town high school, which was an all-white high school and very German. It was a German immigrant community.

Highway: What do you mean by border town?

Alexie: A town; a not-Indian town on the border of the reservation.

Highway: So there was half-white, half-Indian?

Alexie: No, it was me and all the rest of the --

Highway: You and the Germans!

Alexie: Me and the Germans.

Highway: Oh my God!

Alexie: I started worrying, you know. I started thinking, "They're not going to start those things here, are they?" I thought the whole world had turned blonde overnight!

Highway: That was a very traumatic time in your life?

Alexie: Terrifying. There's a rez accent. I don't know if all these people here have heard it -- it sounds vaguely Canadian, actually.

Highway: Can you just give us a taste?

Alexie: Okay. Idt's sorda like dis -- sordof a liddle sing-song qual-I-ty to it. And dere's a lot of enit which means "ain't it." "Eh" is a word we use a lot, too. I hear people here saying it. I heard this camera guy say, "eh," and I thought, "Is he Indian?"

So I walk off the reservation into this small German immigrant high school and start talking like this. This very pretty blonde woman looks at me and says, "You talk really funny." I didn't speak again for a month and a half.

Highway: How long were you in this linguistic cultural hell - to paraphrase Adrienne Clarkson?

Alexie: Exactly what I was thinking. I was 13 years old and I was thinking. "Ya know, I am in a linguistic hell."

It ended up being fine. All those qualities about me that made me an ugly duckling on the reservation - ambitious, competitive and individualistic - these are not necessarily good things to be when you're part of a tribe. I was into books. I've always loved reading. I planned on becoming a doctor, a pediatrician.

Highway: You weren't sporty?

Alexie: I played basketball, but I was more interested in books. I wasn't a guy who did dangerous things. I remember once we set up this wooden ramp. We'd go down this sand hill and jump over the ramp on our bicycles. The jump took us over an open sewer pit. If you didn't do this, you weren't a man. So, we're these nine-year old Indian kids jumping over open sewer pits, and we didn't always make it.

Highway: This is when you became... intellectual.

Alexie: It was either in the sewer or intellectual. It was either smell like this or smell like that.

Highway: Well thank the living Lord Jesus for that sewer, otherwise we wouldn't have your books. Then you went to high school in Spokane, I take it?

Alexie: No, I went to high school at Reardon; I went to college in Spokane at a Jesuit university. I am Catholic. I'm not sure exactly why I went for more punishment.

Highway: Hang on. You were raised Roman Catholic?

Alexie: Not Roman.

Highway: What kind of Catholic?

Alexie: Spokane Indian Catholic.

Highway: You were raised a Catholic, and then you went to a Jesuit Catholic school, which is a Roman Catholic School. What happened when you first walked in that door?

Alexie: The Jesuits were trying to hold on to their original mission to educate the Indians, and I was the only Indian there so they really tried to educate me. I'd skip class, they'd call me up, "Hey Sherman, why'd you skip class?" "Well, because I was tired." "Why were you tired?" "Well, because I was sleepy." They didn't understand the simplest things.

Highway: These Jesuits were the people who first missionized that area, right?

Alexie: One of my great-great-great-great grandmothers (Christine Polotkin) first saw the coming of the black crows. She had a dream about European contact. She dreamed about three ravens with white stars on their necks showing up and coming to the people, and the ravens saying, "If you don't listen to us and do what we say, you're all going to die."

A week later, three Jesuits showed up, in black, with white stars at their necks. And everybody said, "All right...."

Highway: So you got a degree at this university?

Alexie: No, I transferred -- well, I ran. I fled. They're chasing me still. They were running after me -- the Jesuits -- trying to save me; they lifted up their cassocks and they were wearing Nikes. I didn't realize God had a shoe deal.

I went to Washington State University where I got a Bachelor's in American Studies. That is a real degree. People sometimes think, "What is American Studies?"

Highway: What is American Studies?

Alexie: It's where you study the United States.

Highway: History, literature, sociology, anthropology, all that stuff.

Alexie: I was majoring in most everything. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to be. I was going to be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, an English major. One day I sat down, added up all my credits and looked at the American Studies degree. I realized, "I've got most of those credits." American Studies is for those people who are...eclectic.

Highway: Congratulations! You're a success! When did you start writing?

Alexie: I started writing because I kept fainting in human anatomy class and needed a career change. The only class that fit where the human anatomy class had been was a poetry writing workshop. I always liked poetry. I'd never heard of, or nobody'd ever showed me, a book written by a First Nations person, ever. I got into the class, and my professor, Alex Kwo, gave me an anthology of contemporary Native American poetry called Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back. I opened it up and -- oh my gosh -- I saw my life in poems and stories for the very first time.

Highway: Who were some of the writers in the book?

Alexie: Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, James Welch, Adrian Lewis. There were poems about reservation life: fry bread, bannock, 49's, fried baloney, government food and terrible housing. But there was also joy and happiness.

There's a line by a Paiute poet named Adrian Lewis that says, "Oh, Uncle Adrian, I'm in the reservation of my mind." I thought, "Oh my God, somebody understand me!: At that moment I realized, "I can do this!" That's when I started writing -- in 1989.

Highway: The poetry that you would have studied in American Studies, for instance, the poetry of Wallace Stevens or e.e. cummings or Emily Dickinson never influenced you at all?

Alexie: Of course it did. I loved that stuff. I still love it. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of my favorites. Wallace Stevens leaves me kind of dry, but the other poets, they're still a primary influence. I always tell people my literary influences are Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and my mother, my grandfather and the Brady Bunch.

Highway: Then you moved on to short stories.

Alexie: I'd written a couple of them in college. After my first book of poems, The Business of Fancydancing, was published by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn, New York, I got a great New York Times book review. The review called me "one of the major lyric voices of our time." I was a 25-year old Spokane Indian guy working as a secretary at a high school exchange program in Spokane, Washington when my poetry editor faxed that review to me. I pulled it out of the fax machine beside my desk and read, "...one of the major lyric voices of our time." I thought, "Great! Where do I go from here!?" After that, the agents started calling me.

Highway: Where did the book of poetry come from?

Alexie: It was my first semester poetry manuscript. Part of the assignment was to submit to literary magazines. The one I liked in the Washington State library was Hanging Loose magazine. I liked that it started the same year I was born. The magazine, the press and I are the same age. Over the next year and a half they kept taking poems of mine to publish. Then they asked if I had a manuscript. I said, "Yes!" and sent it in.

It was a thousand copies. I figured I'd sell a hundred and fifty to my family. My mom would buy a hundred herself and that would be about it. But, it took off. I never expected it. Sometimes I think it would have been nicer if it had not been as big, because my career has been a rocket ride. There's a lot of pressure.

Highway: That would have been about six years ago?

Alexie: The book came out in 1992. It was accepted in late 1990.

Highway: Then you moved on to short stories -- how did that transfer?

Alexie: The agents started calling me after the book of poems was published. They asked me if I had a fiction manuscript because that's what they could sell. I said, "Yes," and then went and wrote short stories. I had some from college, but I wrote about half of my first book of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, in three months; in between the review and when I submitted the book to agents.

It was an economic move, I'm not ashamed to say. In fact, you can tell which stories were pre-Fancydancing and post-Fancydancing. The ones pre - are much more like poems. The ones post - are much more straight narrative stories.

Highway: Fantastic! Tell us a little bit more about The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Alexie: The title, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, came to me in a dream. In this dream, I was sitting in a huge arena. I could see people boxing, miles away it seemed. This gentleman with a hawk face, dressed completely in red, everything was red -- boots, shoes cap, top hat -- sat down beside me. I said, "What's going on down there?" He said, "Oh, that the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They're boxing. The winner get to go to heaven and the loser has to go to hell."

I said, "Oh, my gosh." Then I realized this was the devil. (Some people have therapists, I have audiences). I really started getting into it, "Go, Tonto, hit him, hit him!"

I woke up before the fight was over, saying, "Wow, that's a great dream." I thought, "That's a title for a story, or it is a story." I wrote the story as the dream was but it seemed too much a parable. I thought the title would work better as a contemporary story, so I wrote about an interracial romance between an Indian man and a white woman. The theme of the story is the Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven. I think this is the theme between all Indian-White relationships, not only as individuals, but as races, as colonials to colonized.

Highway: Not a relationship of equals, a relationship of subservience.

Alexie: Subservience and antagonistic.

Kemosabe in Apache means "idiot," as Tonto in Spanish means "idiot." They were calling each other "idiot" all those years; and they both were, so it worked out. It's always going to be antagonistic relationship between indigenous people and the colonial people. I think the theme of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is universal.

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