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514 SHERMAN ALEXIE b. 1966 One of the leading writers and cultural figures on the contemporary American scene, Sherman Alexie is a cutting-edge poet, fiction writer, and screenwriter. Whether dressed in U.S. colonial costume with long pink evening gloves and mimicking Martha Washington telling the audience “Feed me,” or using a more understated style, Alexie draws in his audience with humor and then delivers a resounding, acerbic attack against such problems as imperialism and genocide. His extraordinary gifts in storytelling, mimicry, burlesque, and stand-up comedy draw attention to the long-overlooked Native American traditions of performance that include such artists as twentieth-century comedian Will Rogers and poet Alexander Posey. Married, with two children, Alexie has won dozens of awards, including the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the Shelley Memorial Award in Poetry, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Alexie spent his childhood in Wellpinit, a small town in eastern Washington on his father’s Coeur d’Alene tribal lands. His experiences with the Coeur d’Alene as well as his mother’s Spokane tribe shaped his awareness of the genocide as well as other hardships and injustices suffered by Native Americans. The ancestral lands of the Coeur d’Alene once covered thousands of acres in Idaho, eastern Washington, and western Montana, encompassing major rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges. The Spokanes settled along the Spokane River and Falls and were split up by the U.S. government. The Grand Coulee Dam was built on their lands. Alexie’s lifetime struggle with living as a Native American male in a whitedominated culture increased greatly when he left the reservation to attend high school. During these years, he started playing basketball and felt that he had found himself on the court and with his team. Because of his interest in basketball , he decided to attend Gonzaga University in Spokane, but he became disenchanted with the university’s rigid social structure. Transferring after two years to Washington State University in Pullman, Alexie enrolled in a pre-med program and then moved into the American studies program. He recognized himself more fully in this environment, and he began developing his writing talents in poet Alex Kuo’s class, which included many Native American poems on the syllabus. Alexie studied tribal poets alongside Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He also started to think seriously about popular film and television. Not surprisingly, then, his poetry is filled with national cultural icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Defending Walt Whitman Ø 515 1. Alexie prefers the term “American Indian” to “Native American.” 2. During the Gulf War of 1991–92. 3. American poet (1819–1892). Alexie’s career in writing did not begin immediately after graduation. When his first book of poetry was published, he was serving as a secretary in a high school exchange program in Spokane. Recently, he has been focusing increasingly on developing programs for young adults when he is not writing or performing . In 2005 he became a founding board member of Longhouse Media, which teaches filmmaking to tribal youths. He has described writing as both a cultural privilege and a responsibility. He uses writing as a way to negotiate his pain and anger about being caught in a mainstream-dominated world that is prone to misrepresent his tribal cultures. His poetry explores the defeats and triumphs of Native American life. further reading Sherman Alexie. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Boston: Little, Brown, 2007. — — — —. Face. New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1996. — — — —. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Vintage, 1993. — — — —. The Summer of Black Widows. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1996. — — — —. War Dances. New York: Grove Press, 2009. — — — —. www.fallsapart.com. Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, eds. Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010. Nancy Peterson, ed. Conversations with Sherman Alexie. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi , 2009. Defending Walt Whitman Basketball is like this for young Indian1 boys, all arms and legs and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown! These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill, although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,2 waiting for orders to do something, to do something. God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot on a reservation summer basketball court where the ball is moist with sweat, and makes a sound when it swishes through the net that...

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