The Toughest Indian In The World (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Sherman Alexie is a bigot and a prophet and a warrior and a poet. His stories don’t so much predict the future as they explain the present. Suggesting how the past got us here, these stories go on to erase all conclusions about the past and then make more and then erase those, too. As a writer Alexie is sometimes frustrating but most of the time intriguing, both of these effects due to the way he brings together ideas that have no logical or obvious connection. In this way Alexie is a master of the non sequiter. For example, in remembering a family vacation, one narrator thinks, “perhaps I had only stolen my memories, my images, from my father’s stories. In hearing his stories a thousand times over the years, had I unconsciously memorized them, had I colonized them and pretended they were mine? One theory: we can fool ourselves into believing any sermon if we repeat it enough times. Proof of theory: the number of times in his life the average human whispers Amen. What I know: I am a liar.” This is part free association and part unreliable narrator and part antagonism against faith. At its best, this technique has the effect of good poetry, bringing together ordinary things in new and extraordinary ways that freshen our perception of the ordinary.Alexie is also a provocateur. You may have caught the anti-religious antagonism in the example above. However, in the context of the whole collection, Alexie’s attitudes about religion seem ambivalent. He writes about miracles happening amongst the events of ordinary, everyday life with a grace that speaks of faith, poetry, and spiritual connection. But he never misses a chance to point out the worst parts of white people’s colonization of North America, from aggressive missionaries to the natives being forcibly removed to reservations. His characters always lump white people into a single category, and it almost never matters whether the whites are British or American, rich or poor, powerful or not. At times the Indian characters in his book envy the white people, at other times loathe them. These stories end up demonstrating how those emotions are really just two sides of the same coin.Another major theme of the stories is identity. Alexie is a master of dramatizing struggles over identity in a colonized group of people, whose self-conceptions are almost always formed in contrast to, or in conjunction with, the colonizers, the whites. The best of these stories reveal the pain and the humor of that conflict by making the conflict very personal, tying it to a specific character in a realistic set of complicated circumstances that readers of any race can identify with and relate to. However, one story is an outlier in this regard. I just don’t know what to do with the long story “The Sin Eaters,” which seems to appropriate the holocaust story of the Jews in Nazi Germany. It’s set in a dystopian alternate history, in which Native Americans are rounded up by the American military to be used for a mysterious health initiative. Depending on how far into the conceit readers are capable of injecting themselves, this story might seem paranoid or prophetic; it could be an extended metaphor for the Indians’ history of exploitation, or a lament by analogy of their troubled present, or a warning about their inevitable betrayal at the hands of the government. But I have to wonder about the wisdom of adopting the trappings of the holocaust for this story, which could look like a miscalculated appropriation an extremely sensitive story. Does the holocaust belong to the Jews? Is the warning embedded in its horrors theirs alone to repeat? I don’t know. But I understand that Sherman Alexie is a very controversial writer, and before I read this story I didn’t fully understand why. Now I kind of get it.A few words should be said about Alexie’s investigation of identity beyond race. Several of these stories also delve into questions of sexual identity, as well as gender identity. Heterosexual men sleep with men, and try to fall in love with men platonically, and commit other acts that radically defy mainstream notions of masculinity. These questions of sexual and gender identity do seem related to the book’s larger questions of racial identity, but their inclusion shows how Alexie is not focused solely upon deconstructing racial identity. He seems happy to strip away as many layers of our selves as we will part with, until what remains is souls trying to connect with one another and help one another and make peace with losing one another.I’m glad I read these stories. However, as a white man I also had to struggle against these stories’ almost constant, low-impact complaints about—and devaluations of—my racial identity. I know not to pick up another Sherman Alexie collection until I’m ready to read through that static again, though I’ll certainly pick up more of his work when the time comes.
It's hard to say anything about these stories, because they're so good. They're delightful in substance, style, and soul. Reading them made me feel that Alexie loves writing and loves intensely what he's writing about . . . I think those are the highest qualifications for a writer. My favorite line came in the last story, where the narrator is standing by the side of the road with his dying father."I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex."It seems kind of naked, that line, reprinted all alone like that, but when you get to it at the end of the story, it kind of makes you want to say Amen.
What do You think about The Toughest Indian In The World (2001)?
I really, really did not enjoy this collection. Almost every story features sex as some plot element. If this was supposed to be a themed collection, a subtitle on the cover or a mention in the flap would have been nice to deter those with no interest in the subject =\ as it was a lot of the stories in this felt pretty samey, like the same characters in slightly differently arranged situations. I found it almost impossible to connect with the characters and their struggles, maybe it's because I'm asexual and sex doesn't drive my life or personality or decisions in any way whatsoever... I'm sure other people could get a lot more out of it than me... I just couldn't relate.
—Cal
I've read, and enjoyed, most of Alexie's fiction. This collection, however, is probably my least favorite of his books. I was kind of surprised by the amount of graphic sex in the first four stories here. It didn't really fit the Alexie style. When I got to the fifth story, the middle of the book, "The Sin Eaters," I was shocked. Not by sex, this time, but because this story is science fiction. Perhaps an allegory, a metaphor, but it very much left the realm of realism far behind. The last half of the book redeemed it somewhat, though it was still pretty explicit. The final story here, "One Good Man," seemed so familiar to me, I'm pretty sure I read it before somewhere. I hope so, 'cause the alternative explanation would be that Alexie's themes and motifs are so familiar by being repetitive. It's not a bad collection -- far from it -- but it's different enough from what I was expecting that I couldn't quite overcome that expectation. If you haven't read Alexie, start with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, and then move on to Reservation Blues. Save this one for later.
—Daryl
I read Sherman Alexie’s book of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven some years ago and was expecting The Toughest Indian In the World to be comparable. The Lone Ranger had a simplicity about it that I found intriguing, and I felt like it captured some of the struggles of the modern American Indian. I felt the hopelessness and anger of the characters, and saw the stereotypes that they lived with day in and day out. Toughest Indian operated along much of the same lines, as a collection of short stories, each exemplifying something about the modern American Indian experience, but I was turned off by this book somewhat because of some of the more in-your-face graphicness (is that a word?) in this book. The stories came off as being more gritty and less dreamy than those in The Lone Ranger. It was kind of a tough read for me, but I felt like it was important for me to read this as Toughest Indian is known as being one of Alexie’s seminal volumes.
—Emily White
