"A Limited Range of Motion?": Multiculturalism, "Human Questions," and Urban Indian Identity in Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians

Despite the fact that more than two-thirds of American Indians live in urban areas, many readers and scholars of American Indian literature continue to associate Indigenous peoples with natural environments rather than urban ones.¹ In the minds of many non-Native Americans, Indians still wear headdresses, live in tipis, paddle canoes, and live in perfect harmony with plants and animals in a prehistoric pastoral world. Such stereotypes are problematic not just because they romanticize, generalize, and eulogize Indians; these myths also fail to represent contemporary demographics and effectively ignore the real lives and concerns of the majority of today's American Indian population. As historian Donald Fixico explains in The Urban Indian Experience in America, the relocation years of the 1950s and 1960s saw "as many as one hundred thousand" Indian citizens make their homes in the city, and several generations have "survived" urban life since then (4, 27). In spite of "a long road of overcoming socioeconomic obstacles, cultural adjustments, and psychological struggles," many urban Indians now hold professional careers and are established members of the American middle class (7). Accordingly, Fixico notes, the image of the victimized and "downtrodden" urban Indian—unable to fit in due to insufficient training or skills or a lack of education, and either homeless or living in dilapidated housing—has become less and less representative (26–27).²

Highlighting literary texts written by Native authors that reflect the multifaceted dimensions of urban Indian life is one way to begin combating lingering stereotypes and complicating notions of contemporary Indian identity in productive ways. As Paula Gunn Allen has noted, "images of Native people [have] come increasingly under the control of Native writers" over the course of the twentieth century (4). Among recently published texts by what Allen calls "third wave" American Indian authors, Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians (2003) stands out as worthy of special attention. With a cast of characters that are endearing, fallible, sincere, loveable, and of course, funny, this collection of stories depicts life as an Indian in the city of Seattle, a place of blurry cultural boundaries where one can eat at restaurants like "Good Food, a postcolonial wonder house that serve[s] Japanese teriyaki, Polish sausage sandwiches, Italian American pizza, and Mexican and Creole rice and beans" (69). Throughout this set of stories, Alexie implicitly theorizes the ways in which Spokane and other Indian identities are negotiated in this multicultural city.

I deliberately use this descriptor in reference to Seattle so as to draw attention to the ways in which even a relatively progressive city replicates some of the problems associated with multiculturalism. In his cogent critique, Vijay Prashad charges multiculturalism with reifying notions of cultural and racial purity and authenticity, reinforcing hegemonic power dynamics and precluding truthful discussions about historic and present-day injustices. The idea that "people come in cultural boxes that are hermetically sealed, that their culture is a thing that is immutable and pure," exacerbates these problems ("Interview"). Prashad claims that we are in the midst of a two-way struggle between a "top-down" multiculturalism and a more promising polyculturalism—a way of understanding identity that works "from the bottom up" to debunk the myth of authenticity and form alliances across lines of perceived racial difference ("Interview"). Specifically, Prashad defines polyculturalism as "a provisional concept grounded in antiracism rather than in diversity"—a concept that, "unlike multiculturalism, assumes that people live coherent lives that are made up of a host of lineages" (Everybody xi–xii).³

Seen through this framework, Ten Little Indians might be described as a text that illuminates the problems with multiculturalism while simultaneously imagining a polycultural world. The Alexie who, ten years earlier, wrote that "sharing dark skin doesn't necessarily make two men brothers" seems to have evolved into an author with considerable hope for human compassion that crosses racial, ethnic, tribal, geographic, and socioeconomic boundaries (The Lone Ranger 178). Alexie's Seattle, with its incessant motion, fleeting interactions, and excessive individualism, can be alienating and cold...