The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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Stories 1-11

Stories 12-24

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Themes

Storytelling as Creative Agency

Content Warning: This section references racism, genocide, and alcohol addiction.

A primary theme in Alexie’s collection is the power of storytelling itself. His 24 short stories present multiple points of view from a large cast of characters, all of whom experience internal conflict due to the pressure to contain painful personal and communal stories. The work turns readers into witnesses to the cycle of spiritual, cultural, and economic loss prevalent on reservations, even as it depicts the characters struggling to become participants in their own stories.

In “Every Little Hurricane,” young Victor watches the story’s violent plot unfolding between his uncles, yet he notes that those in attendance are “witnesses and nothing more” (3). This passivity exacerbates the helplessness that Victor feels. Not only do they refuse to engage or intervene in the story’s events, but they also neglect to help Victor process its meaning. Victor, like several of Alexie’s other protagonists, responds by sealing his own story within himself, fueling his resentment and disconnection. If this is the effect of suppressing one’s narrative, storytelling itself would seem to be a form of agency—a way to externalize pain and resist the structures that impose victimhood.

The premiere storyteller in this collection is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is both the symbol for and apotheosis of storytelling. He simply won’t stop talking. By juxtaposing the “dangerous” stories that Thomas needs to tell with the closed ears of his audience, Alexie reveals the community’s denial of reality. He posits that through revisiting past racial injustices by means of oral tradition, the tribe can restore their cultural identities and heal their historical traumas. Among the stories he tells during his trial, for example, is that of a horse captured during a US raid on a Spokane chief; although the army kills most of the horses—an allegory for the genocide of Indigenous Americans, the protagonist of Thomas’s story escapes and “gallop[s] into other histories” (97). Thomas’s grandfather, Samuel, also displays the power of story by using event fragments to “change the world for a few moments” (132).

Such storytelling is at the heart of “Imagining the Reservation,” where the narrator urges the reader to “imagine” historical events unfolding differently—e.g., Jesus as a “Spokane Indian” who “feed[s] the entire tribe” with a loaf of bread (149). These alternative histories are subversive, placing Indigenous Americans in positions of religious, political, and military authority, but they do more than simply challenge the status quo. In “Family Portrait,” Junior perceives that “each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now” (196); memory is fluid, and people forge their identities through rewriting it. Victor similarly comments that his father believed, “If you don’t like the things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories” (33). In suggesting that neither personal nor collective history is fixed, Alexie offers the potential to draft a new reality—one in which Indigenous nations are not lost and tribal customs can live on. In this way, storytelling refutes the colonialist historical record. Indigenous nations can reject the view that they have been and are (and therefore will continue to be) conquered, removed, hidden, and unheard.

Identity Through Dreams and Visions

Whereas storytelling draws on past and present experiences to counter subjugation, the theme of dreams and visions capitalize on future possibilities. The authors of “Sherman Alexie’s Discursive Reconstruction of the Native American Subject” note that a defining feature in Alexie’s narratives is that “the subject undergoes anguish and suffering but its humor and power of imagination enable it to endure the trauma and preserve its identity” (Murtaza, Ghulam and Bhatti, Shaheena. NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, 2016). Visions, dreams, and imagination are potent weapons against dissolution and despair.

One common Indigenous American practice in the pre-Columbian era was the vision quest. Usually observed as a rite of passage, the vision quest clarified a tribal member’s purpose and granted them special knowledge regarding their future. Alexie never illustrates the traditional ritual, instead embedding it in everyday occurrences such as dreams, nightmares, reflections, hallucinations, and imagination. This makes the process of identity clarification more accessible and turns sacred what is ordinarily mundane.

In the first story, young Victor wakes from “his latest nightmare” only to find himself facing a nightmare of a domestic kind (1). Later, he “dream[s] of whiskey, vodka, tequila, those fluids swallowing him” (7). With this initial pair of visions, Alexie depicts and links the internal and external traumas that saturate the reservation community. This is the frame of reference that the collection’s characters try to subvert. They desperately seek to make meaning of themselves and their role within Spokane culture by looking beyond the loss and hardship that seem to define it. In the case of nine-year-old Victor, his home life lacks promise because of his “dreamless parents” (10). They cannot see their way through.

In the collection’s second story, “A Drug Called Tradition,” visions become more explicit. Victor, Junior, and Thomas experiment with mushrooms, and each receives visions of one of the others in an almost perfected, divine form. In sharing these visions with one another, they provide each other with glimpses of what they each could be; vision-Victor, for example, steals, rides, and communes with a beautiful horse named Flight. As the omniscient seer Thomas tells his friends, their past and futures “are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be” (21-22).

It is on the point of becoming and choice that the collection hinges. Each character orients their self-understanding by choosing the extent to which they follow the guidance of the visions they have received or imagine new ones to take their place. Thomas becomes the Ghost Dancer of Junior’s vision, using his storytelling to resurrect an Indigenous culture and identity. By contrast, Victor struggles to imagine a place for himself in contemporary society (on or off the reservation); assuming Victor is John-John’s missing POW brother, Thomas’s vision of him unfolds only in tragic and distorted form in “Flight”—the story that shares the name of his vision-horse.

Cultural Belonging and Isolation

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven suggests that Indigenous sociopolitical discrimination involves cultural ignorance, racial intolerance, and physical separation—all forms of isolation or alienation (from others, from one’s heritage, etc.). While some of Alexie’s short stories point to political or economic policies that undermine those living on the reservation, the social isolation that Alexie features does not primarily come from an outside white source, but rather from within the tribe. In “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” Victor rhetorically asks, “Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community?” (74). His question reflects the shame he feels for ignoring Thomas in public when Thomas has so generously accommodated him on their trip to Phoenix. Victor confesses, “The only real thing he [Victor] shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams” (74).

Attempts to connect with tribal custom to achieve a sense of cultural (and therefore personal) belonging abound in the text. Fry bread, fancydancing, powwows, braided hair, buckskin outfits, and beaded dresses all surface during moments of strife and emptiness. However, these measures often seem like stopgaps, temporary solutions—and not necessarily effective ones. As Norma says to her husband, “[M]aking fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at” (170). The remark, though joking, associates even the attempt to preserve culture with death, as though all Norma can hope to do is manage the inevitable decline of both the tribe and its practices. The loss of elders and traditional practices, which are central to a tribe’s collective and personal identity, creates an emotional vacuum that is difficult to fill. At Samuel Builds-the-Fire’s point of desperation in “A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result,” the narrator adds, “[T]here is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future” (134).

In a 2010 interview, Alexie expounded on the geographic disunity of Indigenous Americans today. He stated “somewhere around 70 percent of Natives live off-reservation. And yet our literature doesn’t reflect that” (Alexie, Sherman. “Humor Is My Green Card, A Conversation with Sherman Alexie.” Interview by Joshua B. Nelson. World Literature Today, July 2010). In this collection, Samuel, Victor, and Junior all spend time away from the reservation with varying measures of success. All hesitate to leave the reservation in the first place: For example, “Samuel lived on the reservation, alone, for as long as he could, without money or company” (135). Ultimately, each feels out of place, as shown when Victor remarks, “I didn’t really fit the profile of the country” (183). The threat physical and social isolation pose to the cultural longevity and emotional well-being of Indigenous people is a theme that these narratives illustrate in sharp detail.