A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues

With the title of his first novel, Reservation Blues, and the presence of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson on the first page, Sherman Alexie quickly and clearly acknowledges similarities between the social and economic conditions of African Americans and American Indians. Concurrently, he signals the possibility of a cross-cultural exchange between these two groups of Americans that offers hope for emotional and material improvements in their lives. Early in the novel, its protagonist, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, says that blues music, combined with reservation stories, could offer his troubled community a "new road," a new way of seeing old problems and defeating them. However, despite the hopeful beginnings of Thomas's efforts to "save his little country" (16), the novel cuts short the possibilities of this "new road" and the music is silenced. Rather than exploring the exciting opportunities that cross-cultural exchanges can create for individuals and communities, the novel resorts to a puzzling sense of despair and settles for survival rather than imagining success for its protagonists. The novel bitingly and comically criticizes popular culture's consumption of American Indians and the influence these pop culture creations have on American Indians who use these images to build their identities. However, while Reservation Blues may criticize the "Vanishing race rhetoric" that permeates much pop culture productions, as James Cox has discussed (63), it also participates in that rhetoric when it silences Thomas's band and its message of hope. Alexie's novel depicts multiple, intriguing hybridities—mixed musical styles, mixed heritages, and mixed bloods—in ways that Douglas Ford says "makes the old equation of dominance and submission unsustainable" (204), but the failure of Thomas's band suggests that dominance and submission are still in place. This essay explores the possibilities of that cross-cultural exchange and the ambiguity of its failure.

If the living conditions of African Americans in the South helped generate the blues as a musical form, then that form could seem appropriate for those American Indians living with severely limited opportunities. Long after slavery's end, African Americans continued to be exploited—limited freedoms, governmental harassment, poverty, poor or nonexistent health care, etc. In Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture, William Barlow discusses the social and economic conditions that gave birth to the blues. He writes that the blues "have always been a collective expression of the ideology and character of black people situated at the bottom of the social order in America" (xii). The blues provided "critical assessment of the working conditions, living conditions, and the treatment of African Americans by the white-controlled criminal justice system in the South [that] helped to sharpen the contradictions between the black and white social orders" (Barlow 6). The blues artists were "the oracles of their generation, contrasting the promise of freedom with the reality of their harsh living conditions" (6).

Many of the living conditions and injustices that Barlow describes easily could apply to many American Indian communities in recent years. In The Turn to the Native, Arnold Krupat says it is tempting to label American Indian literature as post-colonial, since it frequently asserts its differences from the "imperial center," as do many of the accepted works of post-colonial literature. But Krupat points out that "there is not a 'post-' to the colonial status of Native Americans . . . . a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity" (30). He then cites the material effects of this condition:

Indians experience twelve times the U.S. national rate of malnutrition, nine times the rate of alcoholism, and seven times the rate of infant mortality; as of the early 1990s, the life of reservation-based men was just over forty-four years, with reservation-based women enjoying, on average, a life-expectancy of just under forty-seven years.

(30–31)

Given these conditions, the appeal of an "Indian blues artist" seems evident. Many Indians, it seems, have earned the right to sing the blues.

Blues music was born in the South from the mediation of poverty and plenitude...