Smoke Signals
Writer Sherman Alexie
Poet and novelist Sherman Alexie has added screenwriter to his impressive resume with Smoke Signals (1998), which he based on stories from his 1993 collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Part Spokane, part Coeur d'Alene Indian, the 31-year-old grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington. Alexie, a self-described over-achiever, was headed for a career in medicine when a gross anatomy lab changed his course.
After he attended Gonzaga University in Spokane and Washington State University, Alexie's first book of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992. Six other poetry volumes and two novels, Reservation Blues (1995) and Indian Killer (1996), followed. Alexie has adapted the controversial Indian Killer, an existential mystery about a killer who scalps his victims, for a film that he also plans to direct. The Seattle-based writer was recently in Detroit on a press tour for Smoke Signals. [Indian Killer never got made, but Alexie did make his directorial debut with 2002's adaptation of The Business of Fancydancing.]
THE CINEMA GIRL: You've written that pop culture was as important to you when you were growing up as books were. Is that still a big thing to you?
SHERMAN ALEXIE: It's not whether it's a big thing or a little thing, it's an unavoidable thing. We're fully realized participants of the twentieth century, that's just a part of who we are. So putting that onscreen, and putting it in my work, was simply a matter of accuracy. It's not adopting a pose. I try to write like I talk.
TCG: But a lot of people don't think of Indians as people living in the present.
SA: Oh, exactly. Because all the mass media images of Indians are stereotypical in one way or another and most of them are about pre-twentieth century. Mostly people see Indians, especially in their formative years, in loincloths. So if I show up looking like a Gap ad, I'm obviously not Indian.
TCG: Did you ever watch westerns on television when you were growing up?
SA: I rooted for the cowboys just like everybody else. When we played cowboys and Indians on the rez, only the unpopular kids played Indians.
TCG: When you were watching them, did you see yourself at all?
SA: Oh no, of course not. I was a twentieth century Indian, I was eating my Wheaties, my hot dogs, and playing basketball and watching The Brady Bunch and Leave It to Beaver. So I wasn't anything like those Indians. Also I was participating in very specific tribal ceremonies that had nothing to do with what you saw on TV.
TCG: In Smoke Signals, Victor Joseph teases Thomas Builds-the-Fire about watching Dances with Wolves over and over again to learn how to be a "real" Indian. You've also written that when you were young, you thought movies were actually real. Is that why it's so important to have an Indian-made movie about contemporary Indians out there?
SA: Yes, because kids are so impressionable. I mean, I love the idea of a 7-year-old, a 12-year-old seeing Smoke Signals and totally getting their idea of Indians completely subverted and changed. I mean changing a whole generation's opinion of Indians really makes me excited.
TCG: Is that part of why you've moved into making movies?
SA: Movies affect the world, books don't anymore. I'll keep writing books — I'm a writer — but I want to keep making movies, too. And not only to have a bigger audience in that storytelling form, but the more people that see the movie will turn back to the book. So in the end it's a circular way to get more readers.
TCG: With Indian Killer, did you get any feedback for the book's palpable sense of Indian anger?
SA: People dismissed it. Time magazine said the novel was "septic with Alexie's own unappeasable anger." It's condescending treatment of political rage or political anger. That same reviewer, with a novel by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, he wouldn't say that. Certain white critics and audience people's responses to the anger, it was depressing for me. They didn't examine the anger, they were merely afraid of it, and then dismissed it out of that fear.
TCG: What about Indian readers?
SA: They were into it. It was the first time somebody sort of put on paper the feelings we have. We've all at one point or another fantasized about killing white people. All of us. You talk to a black person, they'll say the same thing. Women probably have about killing men. We fantasize about it. It's only white guys that go through with it.
TCG: You've said that you would read books over and over again when you were young, do you have that same kind of ferocious repetition with movies?
SA: Oh, yeah. I've watched tapes into exhaustion. Like The Searchers, Midnight Cowboy or The Graduate, I've had probably four or five different copies of that, watching it a hundred times, two hundred times. I can do whole movies, dialogue, inflections, blocking.
TCG: Why The Searchers, John Ford's 1956 western?
SA: It's a great movie. The most anti-Indian movie ever made. Sort of the United States Triumph of the Will.
TCG: What's the difference between an Indian and a Native American?
SA: A check on the census form. Indians are who we are, Native Americans are who white people think we are.
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.