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  • Not Another Dead Indian:Young Adult Fiction, Survivance, and Sherman Alexie's Flight
  • Domino Renee Perez (bio)

In 2007, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.1 Earlier that same year, Alexie also published Flight. Though not specifically identified as young adult fiction, it too is a bildungsroman, told in the first person, and features a teenaged protagonist. Since its publication, Diary has become required or recommended reading in schools across the country. At the same time, it also earned the top spot in a 2014 report from the American Library Association as the "most banned or challenged book" due to its references to masturbation, alcohol, gambling, and drugs ("Top Ten").2 Often overlooked in conversations about YA, Flight is equally controversial with its depiction of an intended mass shooting, as well as references to child sexual abuse. Both books, set in Washington state, focus on American Indian young men and offer, as Jan Johnson observes, "empathy, compassion and forgiveness [as] a possible way out of suffering and grief" (224–25). Another connection exists between the two protagonists—loneliness. The feeling impacts the teens disproportionately. In Diary, Arnold Spirit, Jr., or Junior, especially in his decision to attend high school off the reservation, struggles with his isolation at home and in the white world. At times Junior worries that his loneliness will overcome, and also change, him into something monstrous. Even in difficult times of tragedy and uncertainty, his family and his best friend, Rowdy, provide the fourteen-year-old with a strong support system on which he can depend. For Zits, the self-named protagonist who narrates Flight, the path to alleviating his painful isolation is neither visible nor readily available. Zits' father abandoned his family, and Zits' mother died when he was still a boy. He also spent most of his early life in foster [End Page 285] homes where he endured physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. After a brief stint in jail, he meets Justice who teaches Zits that hate can be empowering. Together they practice shooting people, and Zits ends up in a bank where he opens fire into a crowd. Zits feels a blow to the head, which sends him back in time. The book describes Zits' transmigration through the bodies of several individuals from differing time periods, including Hank Storm, an FBI agent; a mute Indian boy; Gus, a white "Indian tracker"; Jimmy, a tragic pilot, and, finally, his own father. When Zits returns to his own body, he has achieved the self-awareness he needs to pull his life together, which he does with the aid of an understanding police officer.

In Zits, Alexie's portrayal of an orphaned fifteen-year-old mixed-blood American Indian protagonist seems to perpetuate the tragic or vanishing Indian trope and the on-going literary erasure of Native subjects, which has a long history. The novels Hobomok (1824) by Lydia Maria Child, Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper, and Ramona (1884) by Helen Hunt Jackson all perpetuate the prevailing popular image of nineteenth-century American Indians. The Indians who appear in these works are either romantic noble savages or tragic mixed-bloods who most often end up dead. Countless other mass market books and dime novels of the nineteenth century, such as Ann Sophia Stephens' Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) and Paul Preston's Wild Bill the Indian Slayer (1867), captured the attention of older children and adult readers with tales of U.S. frontier exploits and the taming of the American West. In the twentieth century, several children's classics, including Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie (1935), Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn (1935), and Walter D. Edmonds' The Matchlock Gun (1941), feature American Indians, implicitly and explicitly, as violent, threatening, or obstacles to settler colonialism that must be managed or eliminated.3 Concerning Little House on the Prairie, in particular, Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson (Wahpetunwan Dakota) observes: "There are literally dozens of derogatory, dehumanizing, and damaging messages—somewhat more subtle than suggesting the...

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