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.

Part-Time Indian, Full-Time Fun

Oh, this was a good one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The title says it all. This is an autobiographical novel written by a Native American man who grew up on a reservation but went to high school at a very white town outside of the reservation. The Neland Women's Book Club faced it head on.

As a boy, Junior is a smart runt reminiscent of Owen Meany from John Irving's novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Intelligent, basketball-playing, stuttering, lisping, small and prone to seizures, Junior does not fit in. His best friend, Rowdy, is a big kid who is abused by his father and protective of the smaller, picked-on Junior.

During his first week of high school, one of Junior's teachers pulls him aside and tells him he MUST get off the reservation. Junior's extremely poor parents somehow scrape together the tuition to send Junior to Reardan, where he is the lone Spokane at the school.

This is a book about a young man straddling two cultures, as the title suggests. He sees the pros and cons of both sides, and the author tells truth about both cultures. The novel is full of humor and reality. Any teen who has felt like the odd man out will relate to the character. Parents will be a bit concerned about the all-too-honest treatment of a 14-year-old boy's life--the kind of vulgar humor and curiosity about sexuality that is likely the hallmark of that stage of a boy's life.

Still. This story is so full of honesty. What it is like to be left out. What it is like to have your wildest dream come true, even when there is a price to pay. And most of all, what do you do when you don't fit in at home or away? Alexie's story is at heart an immigrant story. Junior enters a strange new land. He is renamed Arnold (his given name, which no one at home has ever called him); he has to learn new ways and a new way of speaking. He has to learn the expectations and traditions of a completely new culture. At the same time, he must switch back to the reservation, a homeland loaded with its own expectations and alienation. Junior is looked at as a traitor, betraying his tribe.

This is the same sort of experience that many others experience--mission kids who switch between the "home culture" and the mission field, children of poverty who want to get higher education, or immigrants who come from poorer countries and somehow have to straddle the expectations of people back home and the realities of a whole new culture.

One part that was hard for us, as a church book club, to read was the short description of Junior's thoughts about Christianity and what it has done to Indian culture. He describes how the whites brought Christianity and intolerance; that the missionaries brought expectations of how the Indians should behave in all areas of life, which in turn made Indian culture less tolerant. Given that our denomination's mission agency was once called the Heathen Mission Board, and it originated in Native American missions, we don't have a lot of self-righteousness to stand on. We have been part of the problem in trying to make everyone look and act like white Europeans, even as we try to bring the news of all-encompassing love and forgiveness. So it behooves us to have some humility when we look at the not-so-lovely view of Christians in the book.

Thankfully this is a brief moment in the novel. Like the rest of the book, it is honest.

I ended up listening to this one on CD because all the library print versions were out. In some ways this was wonderful, as it was read by the author, and I completely enjoyed his cadence and personality. On the other hand, the actual book has great illustrations that illuminate the story, and I will probably re-skim this book just to see the illustrations.

In fact, I fully expect to buy a copy of this book in spite of the fact that I've already listened to it. I look forward to sharing it with my son. I'll also be looking for more work by Sherman Alexie.