Reservation Blues

Reservation Blues

by Sherman Alexie

Reservation Blues is a story of three Spokane Native Americans creating a band. The reason the band was created was because the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire had this feeling that through music, they would be able to save what is left of their Spokane culture. The music calls Victor and Joseph to the band where the music and the instruments have a higher power. As the story progresses, two female Flathead Indians, Chess and Checker join the band. At the peak of making it big, the band goes to New York for recording when Victor's guitar acts out cutting his hand and ending the recording session. The band returns to the Spokane Reservation and is criticized for being unable to "make it". Shortly after the band falls apart and one member commits suicide. Eventually Thomas, Chess, and Checkers move off of the Spokane Reservation scared, but always having a place to go back to. 

"They would sing and sing, until Big Mom pulled out that flute 

built of the bones of the most beautiful horse who ever lived. 

She'd play a note, then two, three, then nine hundred. 

One for each of the dead horses. 

Then she'd keep playing, nine hundred, nine thousand, nine million, 

one note for each of the dead Indians." (Alexie 306)

This story showed the power of music deeply having an affect on the Spokane Native Americans. Some parts of the story prove trouble in understanding the deeper meaning, but it is there. When reading this I searched for things that the young adult audience could draw out of it in relation their life. In searching for if this text is culturally relevant I struggled in saying that this was a strong, culturally relevant text. It does provide great  insight to the Native American culture and struggles, but the connections that could be made are so deeply rooted into the story that they sometimes are missed. The main characters ages range around thirty so it would be difficult for a school aged child to identify with them. 

I also think by reading Sherman Alexie's other book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven first, I was able to enjoy this book more than someone blindly coming in and reading Reservation Blues. There are some of the same characters in both, but the books are not dependent on each other for understanding. I connected more with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven so that is why I think I did not dislike Reservation Blues, but also did not like or appreciate it as much as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

My Review of a Review

Scott Andrews makes some points that I did not consider proving that Reservation Blues may be more culturally relevant than I thought. How this particular novel is received hinges in large part on the young reader's socio-economic statuses. Andrews says about Alexie, "he  signals possibilities of a cross-cultural exchange between these two groups of Americans that offers hope for emotional and material improvements in their lives." Also Andrews emphasizes the connection to music which so many youth share a connection with. This review although lengthy points out many great points in the possibility of supporting Reservation Blues as a culturally relevant text.

His article itself provides education on the Native American's poor provided living conditions along with mentioning their poor treatment by the white race. Andrews is able to dissect Reservation Blues to provide a deeper understanding and connection with the deeper underlying meaning within the novel. If given the time, this lengthy article provides great insight to the reader of Reservation Blues and suggests some culturally relevant topics that I did not even find when reading this novel.

A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues

by Scott Andrews

WITH THE TITLE OF HIS FIRST NOVEL, Reservation Blues, and the presence of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson on the first page, Sherman Alexie quickly and clearly acknowledges similarities between the social and economic conditions of African Americans and American Indians. Concurrently, he signals the possibility of a cross-cultural exchange between these two groups of Americans that offers hope for emotional and material improvements in their lives. Early in the novel, its protagonist, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, says that blues music, combined with reservation stories, could offer his troubled community a "new road," a new way of seeing old problems and defeating them. However, despite the hopeful beginnings of Thomas's efforts to "save his little country" (16), the novel cuts short the possibilities of this "new road" and the music is silenced. Rather than exploring the exciting opportunities that cross-cultural exchanges can create for individuals and communities, the novel resorts to a puzzling sense of despair and settles for survival rather than imagining success for its protagonists. The novel bitingly and comically criticizes popular culture's consumption of American Indians and the influence these pop culture creations have on American Indians who use these images to build their identities. However, while Reservation Blues may criticize the "Vanishing race rhetoric" that permeates much pop culture productions, as James Cox has discussed (63), it also participates in that rhetoric when it silences Thomas's band and its message of hope. Alexie's novel depicts multiple, intriguing hybridities-mixed musical styles, mixed heritages, and mixed bloods-in ways that Douglas Ford says "makes the old equation of dominance and submission unsustainable" (204), but the failure of Thomas's band suggests that dominance and submission are still in place. This essay explores the possibilities of that cross-cultural exchange and the ambiguity of its failure.

If the living conditions of African Americans in the South helped generate the blues as a musical form, then that form could seem appropriate for those American Indians living with severely limited opportunities. Long after slavery's end, African Americans continued to be exploited-limited freedoms, governmental harassment, poverty, poor or nonexistent health care, etc. In Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture, William Barlow discusses the social and economic conditions that gave birth to the blues. He writes that the blues "have always been a collective expression of the ideology and character of black people situated at the bottom of the social order in America" (xii). The blues provided "critical assessment of the working conditions, living conditions, and the treatment of African Americans by the white-controlled criminal justice system in the South [that] helped to sharpen the contradictions between the black and white social orders" (Barlow 6). The blues artists were "the oracles of their generation, contrasting the promise of freedom with the reality of their harsh living conditions" (6).

Many of the living conditions and injustices that Barlow describes easily could apply to many American Indian communities in recent years. In The Turn to the Native, Arnold Krupat says it is tempting to label American Indian literature as post-colonial, since it frequently asserts its differences from the "imperial center," as do many of the accepted works of post-colonial literature. But Krupat points out that "there is not a 'post-' to the colonial status of Native Americans . . . . a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity" (30). He then cites the material effects of this condition:

Indians experience twelve times the U.S. national rate of malnutrition, nine times the rate of alcoholism, and seven times the rate of infant mortality; as of the early 19905, the life of reservation-based men was just over forty-four years, with reservation-based women enjoying, on average, a life-expectancy of just under forty-seven years. (30-31)

Given these conditions, the appeal of an "Indian blues artist" seems evident. Many Indians, it seems, have earned the right to sing the blues.

Blues music was born in the South from the mediation of poverty and plenitude. The black musician married his poverty and his dreams of a better life to a rich musical art form. In his book Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, Houston A. Baker Jr. says the first blues artists took as their musical inspiration the train, which promised movement-representing the freedoms of physical and social/economic movement. In the midst of his poverty, the blues singer could dream of the things the railroad seemed to promise. Baker states, "Even as they speak of paralyzing absence and ineradicable desires, their instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility" (8). Baker's description of the blues helps explain how Thomas might see the genre as "a new road" for his community.

Reservation Blues tells the story of Thomas Builds-the-Fire and his band, Coyote Springs. It is made up of Thomas, who writes the songs, Victor Joseph, who plays the guitar, and Junior Polatkin, on drums. They are joined by Chess and Checkers Warm Water, who sing and play the keyboards. Thomas forms the band after he is given a guitar by Robert Johnson, one of the fathers of the Delta Blues. All accounts of his life said he had died many years ago, but it turns out he has just been on the run from "The Gentleman." He had sold his soul to the Devil for his ability to play the guitar like no other. He winds up on the reservation, looking for a place to heal up and to get rid of his guitar, which seems to be possessed. Thomas gives the guitar to Victor and sets out to "save his little country" with the music that he has heard Robert Johnson play. After some initial successes, the band is invited to audition for a record contract in New York. But during the audition, the guitar refuses to cooperate with Victor and is finally destroyed-as are the band members' hopes for fame, fortune and the rescue of the Spokane Reservation.

When Thomas writes his first song, using Johnson's magical guitar, he is inspired by a disparity similar to the one Baker cites for the first blues artists: the gap between what society promises and what the artist has. But for Thomas the symbol of this disparity is not the railroad, as that would resonate with very different meanings for Indians of the American West. Thomas' symbol for this disparity is the television-and by association popular culture in general. Not long after the band's first performance, for which they play other artists' songs, Thomas goes to sleep and dreams about "television and hunger." In his dream, he sits "hungry and lonely," watching television "to watch white people live." The television "constantly reminded Thomas of all that he never owned" (70). He writes his first song, "Reservation Blues," after staring at his empty refrigerator-"his growling stomach provided the rhythm" (47). He tries to relieve that hunger by imitating popular culture, by writing a song similar to those that he has heard growing up on the poor yet media-saturated reservation.

In mixing musical styles and forms-that is, American Indian life with African American expression-Thomas is following the lead of Big Mom, the mystical, timeless mother figure who lives atop Wellpinit Mountain on the Spokane Indian Reservation and who is "a part of every tribe" (199). Thomas puts together a band, Coyote Springs, and Big Mom becomes their musical and spiritual counselor. Teaching them how to play rock 'n' roll, she plays on her own guitar, which is "made of a 1965 Malibu and the blood of a child killed at Wounded Knee in 1890" (206). Like Thomas's blend of native sentiment and African American musical styles, Big Mom's guitar is a blending of very different elements-the pleasure of a muscle car with the pain of genocide-into an exciting and invigorating invention.

Thomas and Big Mom each are a kind of "blues detective." According to Baker, the blues detective is a "creatively improvisational hero" who employs "whatever means come to hand" to solve the problem. Baker writes: "What is crucial to the work of the blues detective is his ability to break away from traditional concepts and to supply new and creative possibilities" (135). By depicting such a potentially exciting alliance between cultures, Alexie's novel echoes sentiments of Vine Deloria Jr., who in 1976 called for "a larger variety of cultural expression." In an interview, Deloria says, "I don't see why Indians can't be poets, engineers, songwriters, whatever. I don't see why we can't depart from traditional art forms and do new things" (Warrior 93). Nearly twenty years before the publication of Reservation Blues, Deloria seems to wish Thomas and his new blend of musical styles into being.

A condition necessary for the birth of the blues detective is his or her poverty or existence on the margins of society. It is that poverty or that lack of access to power that creates the need for the blue detective's improvisational abilities. Denied the tools for success available to the rest of society, the blues detective must fashion his or her own path to success or at least to survival. This same existence at the margins requires Big Mom to improvise her tools, as it does for Thomas. Big Mom's guitar is made up of the tools at hand for the American Indian made from the memory of military oppression, genocidal government policies, and from a material plenitude made possible in part by that conquest and the empire it created; her guitar is a memorial to a tragedy in American Indian history, but it is also a celebration of the symbol of the American Dream, of power, excess, and freedom: the muscle car. Like Big Mom, Thomas is an improvisational artist, blending the cultural forms he has inherited with those he finds-in this case, the music of Robert Johnson's guitar with the sadness and beauty of the reservation. Thomas hopes that adapting the African American blues form to an American Indian context can create a "new road" for his community to escape its poverty and hopelessness. In his effort to combine native situations and modern traditions-the Indian with the African American and the mainstream-Thomas is trying to create new answers to old problems. Like Baker's blue's detective, he is investigating "new and creative possibilities."

One of Thomas's improvisations, designed to gain acceptance of these new cultural forms among his people, is his claim that American Indians invented rock 'n' roll and the blues. During a radio interview, Thomas says, "But, hey, an Indian woman invented the blues a day before Columbus landed, and rock 'n' roll the next day" (157-58). The rock and blues that Coyote Springs performs are always-already Indian, he suggests and therefore not alien to the Spokane. However, Thomas's revisionist history is just another way in which he follows in the path of Big Mom; in this case, they are both participating in "retroactive prophecy." Jarold Ramsey defines retroactive prophecy as a tribal narrative "in which an event or deed in pre-Contact times is dramatized as being prophetic of some consequence of the coming of the whites." These narratives help native people "assert the traditional continuity of their disrupted and disordered lives" (153). These stories cannot undo the calamity, but they can restore a sense of continuity, as the calamity now is not an alien invasion of the tribe's world or understanding of that world; the calamity or its potential has always been present and makes sense within the tribe's culture. Big Mom can be seen as Alexie's attempt to create a continuity between pre-Contact traditions and modern traditions: buckskin dresses meet CNN. And although there is a constant sense of loss or pain about the events she witnesses or evokes-the murder of Indian horses, the bodies of children at Wounded Knee-not everything must be calamitous. She has participated in the creation of something wonderful and life-affirming: rock 'n' roll music.

Big Mom, we learn, has counseled, healed, and taught music to the biggest names of rock 'n' roll history, regardless of their ethnicity. Robert Johnson comes to Big Mom after dreaming of her, hoping she can fix the "bad deal" he made with the Devil. Elvis, Diana Ross and Chuck Berry hide thank-you's to Big Mom in their songs (200); she helps Les Paul with the designs for the original electric guitar; and she teaches the Andrews Sisters their dance steps (201). Big Mom's role reflects the apparent contradictions that inform the entire novel-the simultaneous resistance of and participation in mainstream American culture. She serves as critique and celebration of American culture; the sort of double-bind character that fills Alexie's fiction and poetry. Except in Big Mom's case, she not only participates in that mainstream culture, she is an originator of it, teaching the icons of popular culture the hallmarks of their fame: "She was the teacher of all those great musicians who shaped the twentieth century" (201).

If we return to a moment to Baker's source for the idea of the "blues detective," we will see that an interesting element not included in blues ideology. Baker drew his basic ideas of the "blues detective" from Albert Murray's book The Hero and the Blues, published in 1973 from a series of lectures at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Although Murray discusses the "blues idiom" throughout his lecture series, and although he discusses Louis Armstrong in particular, he also discusses at length the works of Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Mann as examples of improvisation and stylistic innovation. Drawing parallels between "high art" (Hemingway and Mann) and "folk art" (blues), Murray claims that both are equally products of conscious observations of form and tradition. The blues and other elements of African American artistic production had been praised by many for their ability to express "raw" emotion-and Murray brackets raw in ironic quotation marks. But all artists, Murray says, must capture the stuff of "real life" into stylized forms, whether those forms are music or prose. He writes:

What makes a blues idiom musician is not the ability to express raw emotion with primitive directness, as is so often implied, but rather the mastery of elements of esthetics peculiar to U.S. Negro music. (83)

In other words, the improvisation so important to African American musical forms, such as the blues or jazz, is not necessarily a sign of poverty-primitiveness being a poverty of civilization-but of wealth. Actual poverty may supply the content, but creative wealth supplies the style. Those expressions have a richness of form, methods, and techniques that the artist must master and arrange in ways peculiar to his or her own needs. In addition, other forms outside of those traditions are available. So we find elements of gospel music influencing the blues, and vice versa, according to Murray. So, when he quotes Hemingway asserting that the modern writer "robs and steals from everything he ever wrote or read or saw," Murray is emphasizing the wealth of material available to the artist and the artist's freedom-if not his obligation-to plunder that hoard (79).

Thomas follows this dictum when he boldly and bravely appropriates Robert Johnson's music for his own purposes, to "save his little country." Alexie signals his own boldness and bravery when, in the first pages of his novel, he tells us that Robert Johnson had not died so many years ago in the South, as history books had told us, but was alive, though not well, and walking through the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie quickly informs his reader that his novel will defy their expectations of the American Indian novel by robbing and stealing from what he has written, read, seen or heard: pop culture, Hollywood, Motown, etc. He will not limit his selection of material or forms from only that category recognized by others as the American Indian novel.

Seeing Alexie's novel through the perspective of Baker and Murray can help us see some of the parallels between the experiences and expressions of African Americans and American Indians. However, while Baker and Murray can help us see Reservation Blues more fully, they also help us detect some of its emptiness. One arena from which Alexie does not borrow, rob or steal from is Spokane traditional culture. Reservation Blues refers to an event from local history-the killing of hundreds of ponies by the U.S. Army-but there are few markers of indigenous song or narrative styles, family structures, mythology, etc. One cultural marker, though, is the novel itself. It fits into oral tradition by being part of an Alexie story cycle-characters and events return from previous short stories and poems, though they remain in many ways independent of each other; for instance, Thomas's adventures in the short stories do not directly influence his adventures in the novel, just as Coyote's exploits and lessons in one story do not influence his efforts and knowledge in the next. However, Big Mom, despite living at the heart of the reservation, has little to mark her as specifically Spokane. Instead, she is a pan-Indian mythical figure, "a part of every tribe." She and Thomas have rich cultural forms available to them, but they are nearly all the cultural forms of American popular culture in the twentieth century-Patsy Cline, Jimi Hendrix, Disneyland, Detroit muscle cars, etc. But their improvisational methods, unlike those described by Murray, are caused by their poverty. The seeming lack of tribal cultural forms available to Big Mom and Thomas requires that they build something to replace those missing forms from the materials they have at hand. In her discussion of Alexie's poetry and short prose, Jennifer Gillan has observed a similar lack of native cultural capital, which she characterizes as an anxiety about tradition and its accessibility. She suggests that "Alexie wonders whether his people ever had access to the authenticity all America seems to associate with Indians" (91).

When Thomas tries to create a new sense of Indian identity from the cultural tools at hand-his reservation life, his Hollywood-influenced imagination, African American blues traditions-he comes close to being what Gerald Vizenor calls the "postindian": "that sensation of a new tribal presence in the very ruins of the representation of the invented Indian" (3). When he attempts a new road, he comes close to joining what Vizenor calls the postindian warriors, "who bear the simulations of their time and counter the manifest manners of domination" and who create "the new stories of survivance over dominance" (4). With an Indian identity he has cobbled together from the remnants that surround him and from the images he has received from American popular culture, Thomas is working among those "very ruins," and in working to revive his community he is attempting to counter those "manifest manners of domination"-that is, the various consequences of colonization and conquest of the Spokane in the name of Manifest Destiny. In his discussion of American Indians and popular culture, Cox suggests a similar project for Alexie's fiction: Alexie "suggests that imagining alternatives to the dominant culture's narratives of conquest . . . is a powerful weapon" (58).

Here we can turn again usefully to Murray. He describes a dynamic, which he claims spans all cultures, in which the epic hero and his or her foe are engaged in "antagonistic cooperation." That is, the hero's obstacle forces him to grow in his abilities and strengths-through improvisation many times-until he can overcome the obstacle. In this sense, the dragon that must be slain contains the key to its own defeat by the fact that the dragon inspires the hero to defeat him. Murray says this is true for the detective-story hero as well. The hero's "knowledge of strategy and his skill with such tools and weapons as happen to be available . . . enable him to turn his misfortunes into . . . benefits. . . . He proceeds as if each setback were really a recoil action for a greater leap forward" (58). Baker, in his discussion of blues ideology in African American literature and music, sees a similar heroic optimism: Despite the poverty or suffering that surrounds the blues artist, his or her expressions are driven by an undercurrent of "unlimited and unending possibility" (8).

In Dangerous Crossroads, George Lipsitz describes something similar to these "new stories of survivance" and this "unlimited and unending possibility" when he discusses the cross-cultural musical exchanges made possible today through technology and the world-wide marketplace: "the rapid movement of ideas, images, and expressions across the globe have created new networks of identification and affiliation that render obsolete some traditional political practices and identities while creating complicated and complex new cultural fusions with profound political implications" (13). Through Johnson's songs and Thomas's adaptation of African American art forms to an American Indian context, Reservation Blues suggests just such "new networks of identification and affiliation," but none of these possibilities are realized in the novel.

Coyote Springs has an audition in New York for Cavalry Records, the modern embodiment of a foe Thomas's people have faced for more than a hundred years. But the audition ends in disaster when the guitar that Robert Johnson gave them refuses to be played. Until this point, playing the guitar had hurt Victor's hands, but the guitar had simultaneously seduced Victor. It created within him a need for the guitar, and so Victor "had mastered the pain" until "he could have placed his calloused hands into any fire and never felt the burning." But now, at the audition, the guitar acts differently: "The guitar bucked in [Victor's] hands, twisted away from his body. He felt a razor slice across his palm" (225). Finally, it breaks free from his body and falls to the floor in a "flurry of feedback" (226), and the audition ends when the record company executives storm out.

The band members are labeled losers by some on the reservation, are rejected as traitors by others for their apparent cooperation with forces off the reservation, and they are damned as sinners by those in the tribe opposed to the supposedly satanic influences of rock 'n' roll. Thomas's hopes to "save his little country" end in defeat. The band breaks up. One member kills himself. Another becomes a derelict drunk. Thomas and his backup singers depart the reservation for Spokane, where Chess has a job lined up as a telephone operator. Ultimately, Coyote Springs does not act very trickster-like, despite its namesake. It does not outfox the evil record company executives. It does not revive the reservation through mechanisms of the very forces that have driven the reservation into poverty and hopelessness. The "powerful weapon" that Cox describes turns out to be powerless. No "antagonistic cooperation" exists in the novel. There is survival, yes, as Alexie emphasizes with the novel's closing lines and throughout his poetry. But the suffering of his subjects does not bring greater strength and ultimately triumph-just, perhaps, the greater strength to survive some more, but to survive only and not to succeed.

The band's failure to revive the reservation could be an indictment, or at least a criticism, of conservative forces found on some reservations. Vine Deloria Jr. knew that these Indians existed when he conducted the interview cited earlier. When he discussed the need for new native artistic expressions, he knew some would resist, "horrified when they learn that an Indian is not following the rigid forms and styles of the old days" (Warrior 94). When the Spokane Reservation residents reject Thomas's new road, despite the lack of opportunities provided by their "old map," they enact what Vizenor calls "the terminal creed," static beliefs that, because of their unchanging nature, ensure the eventual emotional, cultural, or literal deaths of those who hold them. The people of Thomas's reservation expose such terminal creeds when they reject Thomas's attempt to redefine of Indian culture by mixing in rock 'n' roll and African American musical traditions. The traditionals are guilty of projecting their terminal creeds when they reject Thomas's music because it is not Indian enough or looks too much like cooperation with white America; the Christians reveal their terminal creed by rejecting this new music as sinful. When Coyote Springs departs for New York, the reservation is characterized as waiting for the band's failure, which could be added to a reservation stew of "failed dreams and predictable tears" (220).

Much of the novel is a criticism of the unbalanced power dynamics between marginalized people and the mainstream distributors of their artistic productions. However, the nature of the band's failure does not fully realize the potential of this criticism; it is not the result of the evil machinations of the Cavalry Records executives. Alexie offers plenty of criticism of mainstream media representations of Indians, but he does not make that media responsible for the failure of Coyote Springs. In fact, one could say that the band's failure saves it from exploitation by Cavalry Records, but this is not an easy conclusion to maintain since the band falls apart completely once it returns to the reservation. The band is saved from one type of doom in order to fall victim to another bleak fate.

It is the guitar's behavior during Coyote Springs' important audition that troubles the novel's impact. One possible explanation for the guitar's contradictory behavior is the presence of horses throughout the narrative. The spirits of the horses killed by the U.S. Army function like a Greek chorus, screaming at various moments, though unheard by the characters in the novel (Thomas thinks he hears them, but only in his dreams [47]). Their screams signal to the reader a commentary on the actions of Thomas and his friends or the forces that threaten them. For instance, when the record company executives celebrate their discovery of Coyote Springs, the narrative is interrupted by a single sentence, set off as its own paragraph: "The horses screamed" (193). The executives do not hear it, but reader is alerted to something bad happening. Likewise, the horses scream when Thomas admits that he wants to be famous for the wrong reasons, as a result of the guitar's seduction: "But I want all kinds of strangers to love me" (213). During the audition, as the band counts down the start of its first song, the horses again scream. It could be argued that the guitar's bucking is a sign that the horses are doing more than screaming, that they are instead trying to wrest the guitar away from Victor. The imagery could suggest they have inhabited the guitar, but the razor cut on Victor's hand, consistent with the guitar's behavior earlier in the novel, is unlike the horses. Furthermore, the spirit horses scream and comment on various events, but they do not influence the narrative directly; with this sole possible exception, they do not have any material, physical influence on characters or events. Perhaps Alexie does intend this scene to be a rescue; perhaps he is just guilty of inconsistency in the execution of his story. If the band members are rescued, that leaves us with the problem of the ultimate result of this intervention-they are not rescued to a better fate. They escape the evil record company executives only to fall apart back at the reservation.

The reason for the band's silencing is difficult to unpack. If Alexie intends to emphasize the uneven power of the marketplace for ethnic music, would it not be the executives who destroy Coyote Springs? The studio, after all, replaces Coyote Springs with a pair of white women who mimic New Age versions of American Indian music-just as Johnson and his colleagues were eventually appropriated by mainstream impersonators such as Elvis Presley. If the band was intended to discover that it was about to make the same bad deal that Johnson made-that is, about to sell its soul for material, mainstream success, which the screaming horses suggests-wouldn't the band back out of the bargain with the help of someone such as Big Mom? After all, she counsels them against going to New York for the audition. Helped by her, they would learn from the encounter. But this doesn't seem to be the case. My only conclusion is that novel itself is too conflicted about the implications of the band's potential success; the studio scene is the novel's moment of narrative crisis-the band's success seems unimaginable for Alexie. Although Thomas is trying to be a postindian warrior of survivance, the novel will not allow the transformation.

The novel continually points to the ways in which the Indian and mainstream America are inextricably mixed, but at the same time it depicts the same separatist discourse that frequently marks nationalist literature. Chess Warm Water introduces this separatist notion in the novel when she complains of Victor and Junior sleeping with white women and when she says it is best for Indians to marry Indians. In the language of national loyalty, she says that Victor and Junior are "betraying their DNA" with non-Indian lovers (82). Later, she describes the child born of such a union in fatalistic terms: "He's always going to be half Indian . . . and that will make him half crazy. Half of him will always want to tear the other half apart. It's war" (283). Such a child will always be at war with himself, she says. She can imagine no resolution, no peace. The solution, for Chess at least, is to produce fewer of these mixed-blood children. She suggests that she and Thomas get married and have many children: "Lets have lots of brown babies.... I want my babies to look up and see two brown faces. That's the best thing we can give them, enit? Two brown faces?" (283). It is easy to agree with the position that Chess professes; biological continuity promotes the continuity of a community and its culture. But to insist that the mixedblood person is forever fighting an internal war is to fail those millions of American Indians (and other ethnicities) who are mixed, biologically and culturally; do they face nothing but war every day, a war without ceasing because they will never be able to restructure their divided DNA? I doubt most view their lives with such little optimism.

In his discussion of cultural hybridity in the novel, Ford usefully reminds us to be leery of letting one character speak for the novel's politics. The mixed state of other elements in the novel (the characters themselves and the products of popular culture), undercuts Chess's exclusionary position; Ford states: "With his images, Alexie draws up an American identity where any claim to authenticity must contend with a continual process of miscegenation" (202). We must keep in mind, Ford continues, that Alexie's novel simulates Baker's "blues matrix," which is "a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses in productive transit" (Baker 3; Ford 203). However, if we consider Coyote Springs and its music one of those points on the "web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses," we may locate the novel's final position on hybridity, for the band's journey is not ultimately an example of the "productive transit" that Baker describes. Reservation Blues does not function as Murray's blues detective, turning its obstacles into opportunities, re-imagining that culture or biological mixture as a boon rather than a curse. It gestures toward such opportunities with Thomas's mix of musical styles, but it cannot or will not realize their potential.

To allow Coyote Springs genuine success would be to accept fully that mixedness and the admittedly uneven terms on which it is based-and to imagine a resolution for the anxieties and dilemmas that mixture creates. To do that would perhaps require the abandonment of those separatist, essentializing notions. How can one press for the mixed qualities (whether racially or culturally) of the contemporary American Indian and at the same time insist upon demonizing that with which he or she is mixed? The word "demonizing" comes to mind not because I wish to exaggerate any intentions or actions, but because the novel makes a significant alteration in Johnson's legend. On the night Johnson sells his soul, we are told the devil is a "handsome white man" (Alexie 264). Most versions of Johnson's legend do not racialize Satan, though one, associated with another blues artist, identifies the devil as a "big black man" (Guralnick 18). However, Alexie's Johnson strikes his bad deal with a white devil, just as Thomas and Coyote Springs strike their deal with another white devil of sorts: the representatives of Cavalry Records, gentlemen named Wright and Sheridan, who work for a yellow-haired man named Armstrong (why give this one executive Custer's middle name and not the infamous last name, as the other executives are given?). Granted, such an alteration in the Johnson legend is easy to imagine, given the long history of race relations in the United States and the uneven balance of power in creating and marketing "ethnic" artistic production. However, imagining that "white devil" as insurmountable is not ultimately productive; in such a situation, there is little chance for genuine or beneficial cultural exchange to occur.

My thoughts concerning Reservation Blues are similar to Stuart Christie's argument concerning another Alexie novel, Indian Killer (1996). Among the criticisms he makes, Christie notes that Alexie ends Indian Killer with the suicide of its central character, John Smith, who embodies the mixed-blood child forever at war with himself described by Chess Warm Water in Reservation Blues. In John Smith's case, the mixed-blood also becomes insane and homeless because of his antagonistic heritages. Indian Killer "thus renders paradigmatic what was the merely provisional (if equally despairing) mandate" of James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, a much earlier novel that also ends with the suicide of its protagonist. In Reservation Blues, we have the suicide of Junior, the lost loneliness of Victor, and the death of Coyote Springs and its music. Alexie's paradigmatic despair seems to have been in place before the publication of Indian Killer.

Ultimately, my remarks on Alexie's otherwise exciting, funny, and entertaining novel arise from a simple concern: How can I use this novel? Does it help me or others imagine solutions to real problems? Some of my readers might say that Alexie cannot be criticized for not catering to all of my needs. That is true, but Alexie himself has suggested that usefulness to the reader is a criterion by which a literary work can be judged. In Mixedblood Messages, Louis Owens quotes Alexie from a 1997 Internet exchange in which Alexie complains of his frustrations with Gerald Vizenor's writings: "Well, what would a twelve year old rez kid do with Vizenor's transgressive lit?" and, more importantly for my point, "And if a work of Nat Lit is unusable by a 12 year [sic] Indian kid living on the rez, then what's the purpose?" (Owens 79). What is the purpose for that twelve-year-old "rez kid" of seeing a mixed-blood identity that is conceived of only as internal and terminal war? What is the purpose of evoking Coyote's power but then resorting to stereotypically self-destructive Indians who absolve America of its guilt in their symbolic disappearance?

To conclude, let me turn to Kwame Anthony Appiah, whom Krupat uses to structure some of his comments on the nature of American Indian literature as either colonial or post-colonial. Appiah says that the postnationalist novels of Africa critique the Manichean logic of Africa vs. Europe, that the nationalist novels "fail to acknowledge the full significance of the fact that Africa is 'a multiple existence'" (155). I would like to think that the message of Reservation Blues is to point out the limitations of this Manichean logic (red vs. white) for American Indian literature. Appiah's description of a postnationalist novel could fit my sentiment: "If you postulate an either-or choice between [Indian] and [white], there is no place for you in the real world" (155). But the novel's apparent inability to imagine success for the mixed-blood in a world not dominated by either-or thinking makes it hard for me to rest easy with this conclusion. The novel ultimately re-enacts the colonial dynamics it otherwise exposes.

California State University-Northridge

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. Print.

Andrews, Scott. "A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues." The Arizona Quarterly 63.2 (2007): 137-53. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.