The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“‘They’re going to kill each other,’ somebody yelled from an upstairs window. Nobody disagreed and nobody moved to change the situation. Witnesses. They were all witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale.”

Alexie interrupts the narrative to allude to the broader historical plight of Indigenous Americans. Using the fight between Adolph and Arnold, Alexie critiques bystander inactivity and promotes resistance on two levels: the private and the public. He portrays indifference to violence within families as representative of indifference to racial subjugation.

“Van Gogh should have painted you.”

Alexie returns to concepts of beauty frequently in this collection. In this quote, Thomas has a vision of Victor in the Spokane tribe’s glory days. In traditional braids, Victor steals and rides a black horse by moonlight. The passage presents a heroic rather than defeated image of the Indigenous male to counter colonial narratives, but it also borrows a well-known figure from Western artistic and cultural history—Van Gogh—to do so. This illustrates the Eurocentrism of contemporary beauty standards, which Thomas uses as his frame of reference, but it also challenges them by suggesting that the American Northwest and its original inhabitants are an “appropriate” subject for an artistic masterpiece. The passage thus depicts the crafting of Identity Through Dreams and Visions.

“We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.”

Junior’s vision while taking psychedelic drugs rewrites history for his nation. He sees Thomas, who doesn’t dance, ceremonially dancing along with the tribe in order to create a new reality. Together their Ghost Dance—a 19th-century spiritual movement closely tied to Indigenous American resistance—pushes back the white colonizers. Their ships vanish, symbolizing the disappearance of Western domination, enforced culture, and dictated poverty. The dance resurrects Junior’s ancestors and their hunter-gatherer ways of life, restoring his cultural identity.

“There are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.”

This passage occurs immediately after Junior and Victor mock Thomas for believing in his vision that rewound their personal histories to a time when none of them had tasted alcohol. The skeletons represent versions of oneself: Past memory is the skeleton behind you and future dreaming is the skeleton in front of you. Where alcohol consumption is concerned, Thomas recognizes that the space between a drunk and sober existence is one of time. As an addiction, it carries a haunting quality. Nevertheless, Thomas’s vision reclaims an empowered state where he and his friends are agents of their personal and collective futures.

“During the sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all hippies were trying to be Indians.”

The white “hippies” of the 1960s idealized peace, yet many of the era’s protests were not peaceful. Alexie contextualizes the characterization of Victor’s father in political terms. He wears Indigenous dress while raising a rifle to protest war. On one level, the image symbolizes relations between the US government (bent on conquest) and tribes generally (committed to peaceful independence). On another level, the seeming contradiction of using the threat of violence to ensure peace parallels Victor’s father’s inner conflict. He antagonizes those around him to protect the vestiges of peace remaining within him.

“He wished he was Crazy Horse.”

An icon of the American West, Crazy Horse led the Lakota people in battle against the US government and inspired them to hold fast to their ancestral way of life. In “Crazy Horse Dreams,” Victor grapples with disillusionment following a sexual encounter with an Indigenous woman. In straddling the space between a man attempting to conquer and a man conquered, Victor embodies conflicted tribal identity and the tension between Cultural Belonging and Isolation. He wants to desire this woman but is repulsed by her, stating she is “just another goddamned Indian like [him]” (41). If Victor were Crazy Horse, his internal conflict would not exist. He would have pride in himself as a Spokane man and a deep desire to be intimate with his people.

“But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most […] Indians need heroes to help them learn how to survive.”

“The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” recounts the rise and fall of local high school basketball heroes on the Spokane Reservation. These young people provide the reservation community with collective hope that they might break out of the cycle of poverty and chemical dependence. With their talent that might capture the attention of the outside white community, they have the potential to garner fame and respect, countering the historical narrative of Indigenous defeat and obscurity. The “big stuff” for their culture has passed and is unchangeable, whereas the small stuff offers hope for a more prosperous future, making it “hurt” even more when those hopes fall apart.

“A century ago she might have been beautiful, her face reflected in the river instead of a mirror. But all the years have changed more than the shape of our blood and eyes. We wear fear now like a turquoise choker, like a familiar shawl.”

While Sadie and Victor discuss the fate of Dirty Joe, Victor assesses Sadie as a possible love interest. Objectively, he recognizes her attractiveness, but because she is Indigenous, Victor looks beyond her exterior hoping to discover inner beauty; if he found it, it would imply the possibility of positive Indigenous identity in the present. However, Victor can only imagine Sadie as beautiful in a precolonial past where she would not have been the descendant of a decimated tribe, but rather would have retained her dignity and pride. The quote also evokes a life devoid of Western manufactured goods: The manmade mirror has replaced the natural river as a reflecting tool, echoing the shift toward white and Western beauty standards.

“Nobody talked to Thomas anymore because he told the same damn stories over and over again. Victor was embarrassed, but he thought that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor felt a sudden need for tradition.”

Thomas is a social outcast principally because his peers are disconnected from their roots and their agency. Unlike Thomas, who keeps tribal ways of life alive in his imaginings, his peers have no such vision. However, the death of Victor’s father has quite literally disconnected Victor from part of his heritage, thus impressing on him the importance of finding belonging in what remains.

“Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other.”

Thomas’s experience with Victor’s father contrasts with Victor’s childhood memories. Alexie’s first depiction of Mr. Joseph suggests his emotional volatility. From his crying to his depression to his drinking and parental neglect, Victor’s father does not figure as a role model. Thomas shares a counternarrative, giving Victor a new perspective on who his father was. Thomas, who never knew his father, sought a “vision” for himself and found it in a man who, despite his flaws, generously took care of Thomas’s physical needs. The message Mr. Joseph delivers to Thomas—to “take care of” Victor—is that the members of the reservation will only survive to the extent that they act compassionately toward each other.

“In his memory she was all kinds of colors, but the only one that really mattered was white.”

Victor’s bias against Indigenous women and preference for white women is established in “Crazy Horse Dreams” and “All I Wanted to Do Was Dance.” Victor’s deep love for and grief over his white girlfriend is not simply a matter of sexual preference, but rather reveals his desire to achieve status and distinction. Victor is deeply attracted to mainstream white ideals, which also carry political power; he therefore devalues the powerless racial station into which he was born. His memories contrast with the more positive interracial relationship that Junior experiences in “Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show,” highlighting the divergent paths of the two friends.

“Builds-the-Fire has a history of this kind of behavior […] A storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth. Dangerous.”

The voice of Thomas’s nation (as well as other Indigenous nations) has been politically silenced. Likewise, in this short story, Thomas’s 20-year silence has endured for too long. The truth of Indigenous cultural annihilation, assimilation, poverty, and oppression threatens the dominant sociopolitical order, making Thomas “dangerous” and illustrating the theme of Storytelling as Creative Agency (93)

“Thomas lay awake and counted stars through the bars in his window. He was guilty, he knew that. All that was variable on any reservation was how the convicted would be punished.”

As Thomas awaits trial, Alexie uses a turn of phrase that indicts America as a whole. The US flag, also termed the “stars and bars,” represents “liberty and justice for all,” yet because Thomas is Spokane, he is “guilty” merely by existing. In his cell, Thomas looks through the bars to count the stars, revealing how inaccessible the American ideal is for him.

“All his life he had watched his brothers and sisters, most of his tribe, fall into alcoholism and surrendered dreams.”

Samuel Builds-the-Fire lives an orderly sober life until the day he loses his job and finds himself alone and directionless in the city. He understands the risk he is taking as well as the potential long-term effects of developing a drinking addiction; nevertheless, he has reached his breaking point. He gives up on the happy life he had envisioned for himself and throws his lot in with chemical escape, as many of his own relatives have done: Because tribal hopes are relentlessly dashed, its members cannot see anywhere else to turn.

“Imagine Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C. Would the urban Indians still be sprawled around the one-room apartment in the cable television reservation? [...] Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester Falls Apart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?”

In this opening of “Imagining the Reservation,” the narrator examines the causes of the present stresses and traumas on the Spokane Reservation. As cultural tradition, language, and stories are lost with each generation, so too is the connection to history. The narrator’s rhetorical questions bridge this gap. By suggesting the historical origins of the tribe’s decline, the narrator shifts the burden of blame, allowing those who have been victimized to claim more hopeful futures for themselves.

“How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt.”

The stated goal of the 1869 Indian Peace Policy was to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” One of the methods of “killing the Indian” was to forbid speech in Indigenous languages. Here, Alexie alludes to this cultural silencing of tribes. The word “dismembered” evokes Indigenous bodies torn apart in war as well as tribal families torn apart in assimilation. Although this short story encourages using imagination to rewrite history, Alexie recognizes that a new future is impossible as long as Indigenous voices remain suppressed.

“‘Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,’ she said. ‘And that hurts more because I don’t know how much of a future we have.’”

Norma Many Horses says this after traveling long distances to ease tribal elders' fears in their dying hours. The elders are the repository of cultural knowledge: When they die they carry their knowledge with them, resulting in a net cultural loss. Norma fears a time when tribal knowledge will cease to be passed down to new generations, destroying the tribe’s cultural identity.

“That was Randy, my soon-to-be first and best friend, who taught me the most valuable lesson about living in the white world: Always throw the first punch.”

The “Sixth Grade” section in “Indian Education” recalls the playground taunting between Randy and Stevie at the reservation school. The narrator (either Victor or Junior) is amazed by the moxie of Randy, who acts on the challenge to strike first; this teaches the narrator that existence in a white supremacist society requires confrontation. Additionally, the quote communicates a broader message about the way power functions: White colonials rose to dominance militarily, politically, and culturally because they “punched” first.

“When one person starts to look at another like a criminal, then the love is over.”

Victor’s statement operates as a proverb both politically and romantically. In the literal sense, both the 7-11 cashier as well as the residential neighborhood police have racially profiled Victor. He also recalls how his ex-girlfriend stated that she didn’t trust Victor because of his anger. The unwillingness to extend good faith to the Other prevents love and tolerance from growing.

“Indians can reside in the city, but they can never live there”

“Distances” describes two groups of reservation members, the ones who have always lived there (“Skins”) and the ones who leave and return to the reservation (“Urbans”). This line observes that the reservation is always true home: Though one may move away, their perspective and sense of belonging are inevitably rooted in their tribal identity. Since this identity goes without acknowledgment and respect abroad, Indigenous Americans can never truly be themselves and, therefore, cannot truly live in the city.

“The most intense competition on any reservation is Indians versus Indians.”

Alexie challenges a variation on the “noble savage” myth: the idea that Indigenous American communities are inherently harmonious. Intratribal conflict is virtually essential in these short stories. Here, Victor is trying to prove himself not only to the tribe but to himself. He downplays the challenge of his upcoming basketball game against a skillful white player by stating that the contests that really matter are the ones within reservation boundaries. Victor’s ultimate defeat implies a possible reason for the higher stakes at home: It is the tribe’s belief that white people will inevitably prevail in confrontations with Indigenous people, making “Indians versus Indians” the only contests in which one has a chance (188).

“We don’t just watch things happen. Watching automatically makes the watcher part of the happening.”

In “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow,” Norma teaches Junior a lesson about active witnessing: The “watcher” absorbs as much of the event as the participants. This subtly contradicts any idea of an innocent bystander or a powerless victim, empowering Junior with ideas of choice and agency.

“I mean, I had to figure out what it meant to be a boy, a man, too. Most of all, I had to find out what it meant to be an Indian, and there ain’t no self-help manuals for that last one.”

Many stories in Alexie’s collection could be considered coming-of-age narratives. Here, the unnamed narrator voices grief over the absence of a masculine compass and a roadmap to adulthood. While longing for guidance and experiencing identity confusion is commonplace among adolescents, the narrator’s ethnicity adds a layer of uncertainty because Indigenous identity is so historically fraught.