The Violence of Collection: Indian Killer’s Archives

At the close of Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, in a final chapter titled “Creation Story,” a killer carries a backpack containing, among other things, “dozens of owl feathers, a scrapbook, and two bloody scalps in a plastic bag” (419). Readers schooled in the psychopathologies of real and fictional serial killers will be familiar with the detail: body parts or other “trophies” (to use this killer’s term) often serve to memorialize a murderer’s acts (149). That the tokens of violence here are scalps and owl feathers reflects the racial entanglements of this particular killing spree and of Alexie’s novel in general. The accompanying scrapbook points to a less spectacular, if no less significant, concern of the text, a concern with the systematized collection and preservation of artifacts of violent racial encounter. As the chapter title indicates, the killer’s collection creates: it produces a narrative of ethnographic trauma and racial identity. The archive is resistant to tribal specification. The killer, wearing a mask of “cedar, or pine, or maple,” brings his archive to “this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation” (419). Still, the killer’s dance, “over five hundred years old,” draws hundreds of indigenes, “all learning the same song, the exact dance” (420). At the center of a spontaneous, revelatory ceremony, the archive seems to generate an indigenous identity that is both specific and generalized, a touchstone for all Native American experience since European contact.

The creation of “Creation Story” enacts a central paradox of collections, which theorists have argued serve to contain objects in a system of knowledge and simultaneously to solidify the identity of the collector. Collections, it has been argued, reveal more about those who create them than about the objects collected. The scalps and scrapbook in the killer’s backpack may memorialize acts of violence against white men, but they are by no means a contemporary adaptation of the warrior’s counting coup. Rather, the artifacts are at the center of a radical redefinition of indigenous identity produced through the archive of racial encounter. The anonymous Native Americans seemingly drawn by the items in the killer’s pack are poised to learn “the exact dance” of indigenous identity. That identity is predicated here on artifacts of non-Native being, on objects—white scalps—that define the non-Native other as victims of violent interracial encounter.

The killer’s collection reflects Alexie’s penchant for ironic reversal: in contrast to the familiar dynamic of western museums and private ethnographic archives, white men are the objects of collection rather than the collectors here, and Native Americans are the ones reveling in the accumulation of artifacts. In fact, the killer’s collection serves as counterbalance to the many collections in the novel that are created by whites to define Native Americans and, consequently, to maintain a racial hierarchy in the modern world. An anthropology professor covetously files away audiotapes of tribal elders performing oral narratives. The white father of an adopted Native American son pores over his atlases of colonized spaces, while his wife conducts research in her collection of books on Native American history and culture. A detective novelist eavesdrops in an indigenous watering hole, accumulating material for his book. A white professor’s syllabus for his course on Native American studies gathers a more conventional set of “Indian stories” in the required readings. Through such collections, white authority figures mark their understanding of and their authority over “authentic” Native American culture by accruing both real and imagined artifacts of indigenous existence.

To various degrees, these white acts of collection resemble the anthropological appropriation of tribal objects that has been the subject of intense debate between tribal leaders and administrators of mainstream cultural institutions in recent years. While that debate centers on material artifacts, on art works, ceremonial items, and human remains, Alexie focuses on the collection of more abstract cultural property taken, sometimes forcibly, off the reservation. Such collections serve as the basis for Alexie’s critique of cultural imperialism. In Indian Killer, collections are part of the mechanism of racial and ethnic...