Table Of ContentTHROWING BOOKS INSTEAD OF SPEARS:
The Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share
Ezra Whitman
Critical Paper and Program Bibliography
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in
Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2011
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Throwing Books Instead of Spears: The Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share
Following the 2006 publication of David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A
User’s Manual, Minneapolis-based publication Secrets of the City interviewed
Spokane/Coeur D’Alene Indian writer Sherman Alexie. This gave Alexie an opportunity
to respond to the User’s Manual’s essay “Indian/Not-Indian Literature” in which the
Ojibwe writer points out the tired phrases and flawed prose of Alexie’s fiction.
“At one point,” Alexie said in his interview with John Lurie, “when [Treuer’s]
major publishing career wasn’t going well, I helped him contact my agent. I’m saying
this stuff because this is where he lives and I want the world to know this: He wrote a
book to show off for white folks, and we Indians are giggling at him.”
Alexie takes the debate out of the classroom into the schoolyard by summoning
issues that deal less with literature, and more with who has more successfully navigated
the Native American fiction market. Insecurities tucked well beneath this pretentious
“World’s Toughest Indian” exterior, Alexie interviews much the way he writes: on the
emotive level. He steers clear of the intellectual channels Treuer attempts to open, and at
the basis this little scuffle is just that—a mismatch of channels; one that calls upon
intellect, the other on emotion.
Treuer’s approach is a heady one concerned with what has gone awry in the genre
of Native American fiction. Alexie would rather stick with the wisecracks which have, in
essence, cracked the code for success for him in the same genre. What this skirmish
between Treuer and Alexie opens up is a much needed discussion on what has become of
the Native American fiction genre.
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For Alexie, the genre is a comfort zone, a well-grooved rut in style that has
awarded him handsomely. For Treuer, Native American fiction is a genre experiencing
self-inflicted disservices, and its market has been less receptive to his work. The skirmish
comes down to who has managed to dig in and exploit the Native American fiction
market, and who has not. It is a question of selling the Indian.
Buried within each stance of the Treuer vs. Alexie skirmish is a cautious non-
acknowledgment of the possible tactics used by best-selling authors to best-sell the
Native American experience. There is a deeper—and simpler—disservice to their arts: a
market that expects and responds to a certain, generic Native American story. This is at
the base of what undermines Native American fiction as literature.
In Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, David Treuer’s core argument is that a
sincere longing for cultural artifact by both writers and readers undermines the art of
Native American fiction. Native artisans whose medium is that other than the written
word specifically create objects to be sold as an authentic, and most importantly, tangible
pieces of Native America. The fallacy is that stories written in English using Western
literary devices belong to this category of Native American cultural art. The
misconception by both Native writers and critics is that written English has successfully
produced relics of Native cultures, when it has not.
Treuer is convinced that some of Native American fiction’s defining voices,
writers like James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie, are
undermined by both audience desire for and authorial willingness to provide relics or
extensions of Native American culture. Treuer suggests that Native American fiction be
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examined and held accountable for stylistic and artistic use of the English language, not
as sacred testaments or cultural artifacts. The art is derailed by a boasted authorial
intention different from what actually exists on the page.
Alexie doesn’t seem to care whether or not the written word of the Native
American is presented as cultural artifact. His primary concerns seem to rest with issues
of his own Nativeness, socioeconomics, and just how far he’s come from “rez” to high
rise. Any interview or review spends word count running down the emotions evoked in
his work, or reaffirming how he tuned into the Native American experience he is,
followed by a congratulatory rundown of his accomplishments. For Alexie, if a reader
criticizes his work in this regard, it is simply an attack that denies the height of his art,
and overlooks how “books work in the world” as he states in an article by Dinitia Smith
for the New York Times.
James Welch’s Fools Crow, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, Winter in the Blood; Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony; Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine; most of Sherman Alexie’s
work; and David Treuer’s Little and The Hiawatha, all come furnished with similar
aspects of the Native American experience. These features include mention of or the
direct involvement of the U.S. government’s betrayal; the reservation; poverty; and the
wandering protagonist who, if not grief-stricken throughout the length of the story, is
burdened with the need to come to terms with the death or absence of a family member;
in short, varying doses of landscape, poverty, and victimhood.
As a fan of both writers (for different reasons, and in varying degrees), I know
that Treuer and Alexie could be doing ever-changing, evolving, and progressively more
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meaningful work if they only didn’t feed into this market (which Alexie so far has done
more successfully than Treuer). Since they’ve felt compelled to do so, the market has
consequently undermined their literature more fundamentally than the culprits Treuer
names.
Though Treuer overlooks that his own work has fed into marketed norms of the
Native American experience, his argument that Louise Erdrich undermines the art of her
debut novel Love Medicine by claiming it functions as a piece of Chippewa culture rings
blatantly true. However enthralling and eye-opening his essay “Smartberries” is, he still
overlooks the market motivations that might have prompted her frivolous claim.
Love Medicine is arguably one of the most recognizable and cornerstone works of
the genre, and Treuer establishes his admiration for the literary achievement it is, but
before long he veers a bit to focus on the claims Erdrich makes that the novel uses a
storytelling technique of multiple voices or “polyvocality” operating in a non-linear
fashion, and that this combination is something authentically “Chippewa.” What Treuer
uncovers is that this technique is not Chippewa or even Native in origin. Moreover, there
is no “polyvocality” at play, just first-person narratives that all contain the same authorial
consciousness or voice using identical rhythmic devices in structure and form to create
their own stories (Treuer 46). So what is boasted as being many voices is actually a
singular one through the course of the novel, and the structure has nothing to do with
Native techniques in storytelling but has its basis in Western literary device. What has
been lavishly labeled as a Chippewa sensibility is actually a more general ambiguity,
“intercutting” and a tandem of figurative and literal language (Treuer 34-48).
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My concern is that Treuer stops short of suggesting market motives behind
Erdrich’s claims. After all, Love Medicine experienced its own fair share of rejections
before eventually being published in 1983. In notes from an interview included in a
revised edition of the novel, Erdrich is quoted as saying the novel was “a leap of
desperation” and that she “had to write something and get it published before [she] was
thirty” (Farry 31). Was “Chippewa polyvocality” a way to fine tune the literature or dress
up the query letter for acceptance into a market? This alters somewhat how I’ve viewed
Erdrich’s own artistic intentions, which now seem slightly fraudulent and more of a sales
pitch than art.
I still admire her craft, but I wonder why Erdrich felt the need to make these
claims. The craft alone should have been enough. Did Erdrich sincerely feel she was
summoning aspects of Chippewa culture? Whatever the case, using this extra push over-
markets—and thus undermines—what is otherwise astounding literature. This is what
Treuer does not directly voice. Perhaps as a reader, I am supposed to take my cue from
him, and make this connection on my own.
This example suggests that the author of Native American fiction is aware of something
that drives the market. It is part of the reason why for all his talent, the originality of his
voice and poetic prose—captivating at the sentence level—his flare for linguistics,
Treuer’s own fiction might also be a laborious read for a market that prefers more easy-
to-follow recipes for conjuring the Native American experience. His pace is both constant
and relentless, meandering through this recipe of what has worked in the Native fiction
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market: poverty, crime, displacement, death, a haunting past, the longing for tribally
ancient values; in short—landscape, poverty and victimhood.
Selling The Experience: Landscape, Poverty And Victimhood As Sellable Features
Landscape. The Native experience in fiction is based on characters seeing and watching
the world in nostalgic and contemplative ways. Characters tend to have a strong tie to a
climate, a region, or the landscape or formations of a particular region. The Native
character always feels some unrelenting connection (positive or otherwise) to a well-
defined area, and it is this connection that adds to the tension of the story. This is
understandable. After all, the words native and American imply first and foremost a bond
to land itself.
Whether meaning is extracted from the wandering of a protagonist on and off the
reservation as in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, or the central tension is guided by a
protagonist’s estrangement from, and longing for, his homeland as in The Heartsong of
Charging Elk, the Native isn’t much for story if he isn’t devising or contemplating ways
to stay on, get back to, or flee from a homeland or reservation.
For Erdrich, the mysterious lure of homeland is what kills the central character
right at the beginning of Love Medicine, and the first-person narratives that follow are
like satellites orbiting this occurrence. For Alexie, the security of a protagonist’s Native
identity teeters on the decision of whether or not they must remain on a reservation. For
Treuer, the entrance point of his story is urban relocation.
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Poverty. No native would be complete without his or her lack of funds. A poor Native is
an authentic Native. Lack of money commonly serves as the premise for the challenge of
how a character gets from point A to point B. If a protagonist must make a journey, literal
or figurative (i.e. spiritual) it is complicated by expense. Or, if a Native has money, that
part must be explained and becomes a way to add tension to the story.
For instance, poverty is ever-present but escapable with a dose of gumption,
followed by a meditation on guilt in the works of Alexie. For Erdrich, poverty becomes
the story’s beauty. For Treuer, the poverty is there probably because he’s seen that that’s
what other Natives are writing about.
Victimhood. Whether the character is victimized by the imposing government taking over
lands, or the lingering weight of some past memory, or by some other form of oppression,
Native fiction always includes an individual wronged in some way, and the resulting
trauma stands in as a symbol for a mistreated people as a whole. One constant is the idea
of “them and us.” The “them” is almost always white people or the white world in
historical and modern contexts. The “them” seem to somehow have the upper hand, and
the victims are the “us” of the equation. And there is always grief in the victimhood.
Landscape, Poverty And Victimhood In The Works Of Sherman Alexie
Perhaps no other Native writer more blatantly operates off the premise of the down-and-
out ways of the Native experience than Sherman Alexie. Although his work is largely
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concerned with issues of identity, his central tension seems always how tough it must be
to be an Indian, to constantly be in the throes of only one kind of exaggerated and
unfortunate reservation experience. In his latest acclaimed title, The Absolutely True
Diary of a Part-time Indian, the protagonist, Junior, is in limbo between his reservation
and off-reservation selves.
Alexie is stuck in one thematic rut that speaks loud and clear to a market that has
been kind to him. In order for Alexie’s fiction to work, he must maintain that the
reservation is a depressing place, a place where the only way the Indians can cope with
their shabby existence is to laugh about it, get drunk, and beat each other up.
In a story like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Alexie needs a
greater, non-Indian readership to believe that the reservation is a bad enough place for a
kid with brain injuries, misshapen glasses, the appearance of a “retard” to get beat up on a
regular basis (4). The protagonist’s defiance of his own self-pity pulls the story’s
narrative through the cumbersome rise and fall of its joy and tragedy, where Alexie
continues to insist on his version of the reservation—a bittersweet and sour brine of
forlorn pride, self-sabotage, hatred, and passive-aggressive humor.
Alexie might not intend for the events in The Absolutely True Diary to be taken
literally. He relies on exaggeration, his weapon of choice, and this over-the-top story
functions largely as metaphor. But take away the hyperbole, and the story is left with
these ingredients: a weak, poor and medically fragile kid is beaten up, ridiculed, pitiful,
and lonely. Hyperaware of his own Indianness, Junior is far too hung-up on explaining
the differences and disadvantages of an Indian world vs. a white world. His story relies
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on the same tensions and recycled themes of landscape, poverty and victimhood in order
to achieve meaning.
Alexie sets the story in a time when reservation kids email each other, use
webcams and watch shows like The Sopranos. This isn’t an era with AIM on the mind,
yet somehow the kids and the grown-ups in the novel are overly sensitive to what is white
and what is Indian to the point that mere mention sparks a century-old animosity they
should hardly have any perspective on, being at least two generations removed from
gross civil injustices. Even such claims as the one that appears right away on page two,
“our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did,”
alludes to a time far before any of the other cultural references.
That isn’t to say the situation is post-racial. Racism is still a modern issue.
However, the modern medical community will not overlook pain based on ethnicity
alone. Perhaps at one time a provider might have (I accept that providers unethically
misunderstood pain during Alexie’s childhood, on which the novel is loosely based) but it
is hard to believe that this would occur during a time period referenced by The Sopranos,
which debuted on HBO in 1999, and the widespread use of webcams.
Furthermore, it’s a bit of a disservice to imply kids on the reservation are so
uncaring, so thoughtless as to beat up a seemingly retarded kid just because he’s an easy
target (unless of course he’s bratty and obnoxious, but this is never implied). If anything,
I remember reservation schools to consist of mostly compassionate kids who looked out
for the meek and even those destined for other places, and this was at a time before the
widespread use of email, webcams, and certain television shows. So, again, Alexie must
maintain that even in modern times his version of the reservation persists. This has no
Description:thirty” (Farry 31). Was “Chippewa polyvocality” a way to fine tune the literature or dress up the query letter for acceptance into a market? This alters
