Sherman's March

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Alexie memorizes his stories and then acts them out at the lectern, making his readings a kind of free-form theatrical performance. He has developed this skill to further his career, he says, and because he’s often been turned off at readings by writers who deliver their work, no matter how brilliant, in a monotone. "I care about my writing so much, and I’m so involved in it and so emotionally connected to it, and I want that passion, that caring, that hatred of it, that incredible relationship I have with my own work, I want people to know about that," he says. "I want them to feel it when I’m up in front of them talking about what I do."

His central goal, he says, is to get his books read by 12-year-old reservation kids, who, like him, grow up either with heroes created by the white media or no heroes at all. "In order for the Indian kid to read me, pop culture is where I should be," Alexie says. " I’d rather be accessible than win a MacArthur." Few Indian writers have had Alexie’s mainstream ambitions, and he’s the first to admit that he has worked the Indian angle for all it’s worth. "It’s a crowded world out there, and everybody is clamoring for attention, and you use what you’ve got," he says. "And what I’ve got that makes me original is that I’m a rez boy."

Alexie’s father is Coeur d’Alene Indian, and his mother is Spokane Indian. One of six siblings, he was born October 7, 1966, in the tiny reservation town of Wellpinit. Soon after his birth, he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a condition in which expanding cranial fluid puts too much pressure on the brain. At six months, Alexie underwent drastic surgery. The doctors told his parents that if he survived at all, which was doubtful, he would most likely be mentally handicapped. As a result of the surgery, he dealt with seizures and uncontrollable bed-wetting late into childhood, eventually becoming what he describes as a math geek who played Dungeons and Dragons by himself in the basement. He was smart and tall, though, so he went to Reardan, a white high school, where he was the only real Indian on the Reardan Indians basketball team. He went on to Washington State University in Pullman and, after taking a writing class, gave up his plans to be a doctor.

Success kills some pop stars, but it’s bringing Alexie to life—and in some ways making him larger than life, as suggested by his crowded readings. The success of Smoke Signals certainly helped. Cobbled together from situations and characters first developed in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, it is a road-trip movie about Northwest Indians Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who drive to the Southwest to claim the ashes of Victor’s dead father. After winning the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, it became the first feature film written, directed, produced, and acted by Indians ever distributed in the United States. And as Alexie likes to point out, "the Indians weren’t played by Italians with long hair."

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