Off the Reservation

Three weeks ago the Fab 5 Book Club took a road trip, leaving our little Dutch lives to enjoy the different vibe of Cincinnati. It's taken me at least this long to recover enough to write about it! Pretty much we ate our way through the town--three of the original Fab 5 lived in Cincinnati for quite a few years together before we came together. They had lots of favorite places to revisit--Graeter's for ice cream, Skyline Chili, the Grand Finale and more. Sonya claimed she was in a food coma for days. But oh how sweet it was.

We looked out over the city from Carew Tower. We toured neighborhoods like Over the Rhine while listening to, well, Over the Rhine. We all coveted mightily at a most awesome architectural antiques store. We stopped in to see Union Station, where in the bathroom we overheard a young boy, after commenting on the state of his mother's rear end, wondered loudly to his mother why a particular portion of his private anatomy is always sticky, a question answered immediately with a burst of laughter from everyone in the bathroom. So it was a pretty full weekend of entertainment.

We combined this inaugural road trip with our book club discussion of Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie. In this novel, Thomas Builds-A-Fire and two of his fellow Spokane form a band. At first they perform covers of famous songs, but eventually Thomas writes his own for the band. The success that they achieve is not welcomed by the rest of their tribe. Along the way two white women join their band briefly, and later two women from another tribe join. Each bring their own complications.

We spent some time regretting the fact that we really know very little about Native American culture. The magical realism in the book can sometimes be hard for us to wrap our minds around, and we want to know how much is the author's style and how much of it is cultural. The novelist gives prominence to the importance of dreams and what they tell the dreamer. Sometimes it was hard to separate the dream from the reality in the story, which seems quite intentional, since they are meant to be so closely related.

The sadness of life on the reservation--commodity foods, hunger, poverty, mass alcoholism, unemployment and violence--come to a crescendo at the end of the book. It's not happy. And the even harder-to-understand part of it is the reluctance of the fellow Spokane to rejoice when someone from their reservation has a chance to excel. Because excelling seems to be equivalent to rejecting their history and their people.

These themes came up in young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, also by Sherman Alexie. The novels are very similar, but I think that Diary is the more entertaining, better crafted of the two.

One thing I really like about Reservation Blues is that the author used the music to further his theme. In the beginning, when they form their band, they only performed covers of music that was written by other people from other cultures in other struggles. What people expected from them was their "Indian" music, a performance taken out of context, sort of like going to an "authentic luau" at the Quality Inn on Maui.

When Thomas begins to write his own songs, he is creating his own music, influenced by his culture and other music cultures, but bringing them into the modern state of his own experience. I think the author sees that as the same situation that the reservation faces. They can perform to the caricature of their history that is expected by the outside world, they can abandon their own history to adopt someone else's culture, or they can take the best of both worlds to create something meaningful for themselves.

One odd association I had while reading this was the character of Big Mom. She is a puzzling character, possibly deity, possibly human, certainly powerful in a limited way. I read one blog that said she symbolized Time, which is an interesting way to interpret it. At the risk of alienating both friends and foes of the loved and hated book The Shack, Big Mom sort of reminded me of "Papa," the black woman who represented God the Father. Big, caring, irreverent, nurturing. I find it interesting that two such radically different books would come up with a character who has so much in common.

One place where you could find both of those books and so many more is Half Price Books. We do not have one of these lovely institutions here in Grand Rapids, though the Fab 5 are considering opening a store ourselves. We made the pilgrimage to two different Half Price Books while in Cincinnati, much to my dear husband's chagrin. Heavenly places. And I even scored a paperback copy of Alexie's book of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which includes many of the characters from Reservation Blues and was the basis for the movie Smoke Signals. I hope to see it soon.

Well, this Big Mom needs to get moving. I know that I do not personify Time, or good use of it, and I have a mountain of chores to attend to. But first, lunch with my mom and sister.