Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his story to every other Skin on the Spokane Indian Reservation before he was twelve years old. By the time he was twenty, Thomas had told his story so many times all the other Indians hid when they saw him coming, transformed themselves into picnic benches, small mongrel dogs, a 1965 Malibu with no windshield.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a recurring character in Alexie’s fiction, memorably portrayed in the film adaptation Smoke Signals by Evan Adams. Thomas is a contemporary member of the tribe living on the reservation but his fundamental personality traces him back through a long lineage to the storytellers who made the oral traditional possible. Without people who like Thomas—who, as indicated here, is views with some suspicion as a little strange and “off”—there would be nothing to know about tribal history since it was never written down. In this sense, one must assume a strong tie between the character and the man who invented him. Not so strong as to be an alter ego, perhaps, but it is surely not accident that the storyteller is one who recurs with regularity in the author’s works.
There is nothing as white as the white girl an Indian boy loves.
It can be a little difficult writing analysis of the work of Alexie because invariably one must use the word “Indian.” That is a term universally considered to be at least outdate and for the most part an example of political incorrectness—it is on a part with using “Oriental” to describe a native of an Asian country. And yet, Alexie does not just use the word, he uses it often and casually and only ironically in the rarest of instances. A series of poems in this volume fall under the umbrella title “Indian Boy Love Song.” In one form of another—referencing the reservation, describing the tribe, as a term of something less than endearment by racists—the word “Indian” pops up more than a hundred times over the course of the text. As the saying goes, for Sherman Alexie, this comprehensive term used to racially stigmatize completely unrelated cultures spread across a continent, it is what is. And so, he seems to be insisting, what’s the point of running away from it?
When my father disappeared, we found him
years later, in a strange kitchen searching
for footprints in the dust:
This extract from a second of a longer poetic work of verse is one of many references to the story of the author’s father. Over the course of stories and poems, a timeline can be constructed about what happened to the narrator’s father, though details remain sketchy and certain aspects of exactly what happened within the domestic arrangement remains ambiguous at best. Much of what is found here in reference to the absent father would be told as in cinematic form as part of the plot of the film Smoke Signals which is partially about Victor dealing with his father’s death years after his having left his mother behind for reasons that only become clear by the end.
