To help you perform well on the writing assessment and other activities related to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, we have provided some materials to guide your reading. We hope you will both enjoy and benefit from reading this book.
Introduction
The American literary and social critic Kenneth Burke wrote once that stories are “strategies for dealing with situations.” Human beings share both a need and a capacity for storytelling. We tell stories about ourselves, about the people we know, about the natural and social worlds of which we are a part, and about the ordinary experiences that make up a lifetime. We tell stories for many purposes—to craft a sense of self, to make sense of our experiences, to record history, to transmit cultural values and traditions, to teach, and to entertain ourselves. The stories contained in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven fulfill those purposes (and others not mentioned here).
First published in 1993, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of twenty-four short stories that depict life on and near the Spokane Indian Reservation. Each story provides a fictionalized—and not so fictionalized—glimpse into the trials and tribulations of reservation citizens. Alexie writes in the introduction that the stories are both true and not true (p. xxi); the stories are the “vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and just plain wrong” (p. xxi). How might this quote help you understand the process of storytelling?
The stories introduce many characters, some of whom are lively and engaging, and others of whom are troubled, downtrodden, and out-of-luck. For instance, you will meet Victor, who shares stories of formative childhood and youth experiences. You’ll read about his triumphs on the basketball court and his struggles to survive family strife, poverty, and heartbreak. You will also meet Thomas Builds-the Fire, whose character most starkly represents the oral storytelling traditions in Native American culture. His relationship to Victor is long-standing, complicated, and the source of much of the stories’ humorous sensibilities. You will see that Thomas’ stories often subvert negative stereotypes; his stories also transmit tribal history and the cultural values inscribed in tribal traditions. Of course, you will also meet other characters, each of whom offers her or his insights, stories, and perspectives.
Pay close attention to the narrator’s voice in each story. Most of the stories are written in the first person, and so you will want to spend time thinking about whose voice(s) is/are represented by the narrative “I” in each story. What is the narrator’s point of view? Which character appears to narrate each story? What relationship does the narrator bear to other characters in the story?
Notions of time and space always anchor stories of human life. Human understanding is also shaped by other factors, such as gender, nationality, age, ethnicity, and race. As you read the stories, what images of “the reservation” are evoked for you and by you? How does your own identity—gender, ethnic, national—and your own location in time and space shape your reading? What is your relationship to the book’s characters? What effect did the book have on you? To paraphrase Kenneth Burke, how might you use the book’s short stories as “equipment for living”?
How to Develop College-Level Reading Skills
Before we even open a book, we form assumptions that shape our reading. Expert readers recognize that books are judged to some degree by their covers. Use the following questions to help you think about your “pre-judgments.” The questions focus your attention on some important ideas raised by The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. They will give you practice in asking the kinds of questions you should ask of any text you read. Prepare written responses to all these questions: they are examples of topics that can emerge when one reads actively.
• What does the title suggest? What does it tell you about the book?
• How does the cover (the photo, the layout and design, the writing on front and back) affect your expectations for the book?
• Have you heard anything about this book, its author, or its subject before? In what context did you hear or read about the book? What did you hear? If you have heard or read anything about this book, author, or subject before, how does your prior knowledge affect your attitude toward the subject matter?
• What does the book’s formatting—its table of contents and introduction (xi-xxii), story titles, and reading group guide (following p. 242)—indicate about the text?
• Do any story titles invite you to read them first, rather than starting with the first story? Why?
• How does having the book assigned for critical study, rather than chosen for pleasure, affect your approach to reading?
• How might your expectations about the book’s purpose differ from the author’s view, the views of other audiences, or the views of the people who assigned the book?
• Given your answers to the questions above, how might your assumptions and “pre-judgments” influence and affect your reading experience? Do you start reading with an open mind?
• What do you already know about the history of Native Americans in the United States? How might this knowledge shape your reading of the text?
• What knowledge do you have of Spokane Indian history, culture, and traditions? How might this knowledge (or lack of knowledge) shape your reading of the short stories?
• If you identify as a Native American or American Indian citizen, what stories of your own do you have to share? How might your own experiences shape your reading of the text?
• How might ethnic and racial stereotypes about Native Americans influence your perceptions of the book and your reading of the text? How might your non-native identity influence your perceptions? If you are a member of a cultural, racial, or ethnic minority in the U.S., how do the stories of racist/ethnocentric treatment compare to your own life experiences? What do your stories have in common? How do they differ?
• What experience do you have in living with, working with, or relating to Native American citizens?
• What do you know about life on reservation land? What do you know about the Bureau of Indian Affairs? What knowledge do you have about the reservation “system” in the United States?
Reading Strategies
Critical readers are active readers: they enter into a dialogue with the book. As an active reader, underline and highlight key words and sentences, or write notes in the margins. Learn the meanings of unfamiliar words (like “fancydancing” or “reservation realism”) and write the meanings in your book for future reference. Take notes in a reading journal about what you’re thinking; mark and keep track of moments in which the writer or another character in the story raise a major point, question, or issue. Re-read stories or sections, as the significance of some issues will evolve through the course of the book. Develop questions about passages, issues, and motives to ask your classmates in the fall; keep evaluating and re-evaluating your sense of the book’s purpose (and your own purposes for reading). As you read, try to develop a more focused response to the text, but keep your mind (and possible responses) open. Keep track of recurring themes, and think about the ways in which the themes complement and contradict one another. Active readers move constantly between an open-ended exploration of the text and a more purposeful evaluation of what the text means.
• What parts of the book or stories did you like best? Why? What parts did you like least? Why?
• How do the stories challenge, reinforce, disrupt, or otherwise alter your perspectives on Native American history, culture, and traditions? How do the stories challenge, reinforce, disrupt or otherwise alter any stereotypes you (or others) may have of Native Americans?
• Which characters appear in more than one story? How are protagonists and antagonists characterized in each story?
• To which character do you relate the most: Thomas Builds-the Fire? Victor? Jimmy Many Horses?
• What are the various ways in which people’s lives on the reservation are depicted in each story? What themes do the stories have in common?
• In “Every Little Hurricane,” young Victor watches a hurricane (and his uncles fighting) outside his window. Alexie tells us, “Victor might have filmed it, but his memory was much more dependable” (p. 7). What does this mean? In what ways is Victor’s—or another character’s—memory dependable or problematic in these stories? Do dream and imagination complicate, or clarify, memory?
• On page 2, Victor’s uncles struck each other “with such force that they had to be in love.” In addition, on page 27, the narrator says his parents “fought each other with the kind of graceful anger that only love can create.” Do you agree—can love be angry and violent? What does this mean—to the characters in Alexie’s book, to Native Americans, and
to you?
• “When a glass sits on a table here, people don’t wonder if it’s half filled or half empty. They just hope it’s good beer” (p. 49). In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the reservation Indians wrestle with opposing impulses: to love and to hate, to survive and to destroy themselves, to assimilate into Western culture or to preserve their own. In what ways are these impulses contradictory? In what ways can they coexist?
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto ends as Junior and Lynn become parents. Junior is Native American and Lynn identifies herself as “Irish” (p. 238); their son, therefore, is part Native American and part Irish. Is this significant? What is Alexie’s final word on Native Americans and their relationship with white Americans? Where does he leave the two groups of people?
Active reading also involves writing to reflect on and to organize your ideas. Pause periodically to create a more formal record of what you are thinking to use later in discussions, on tests, or for essays. Keeping a reading journal is essential for retaining information and ideas.
As various ideas in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven capture your imagination, record both your personal and critical responses. Identify relevant pages that help you organize and define your sense of the book’s major issues. Copy down passages you find profound, puzzling, interesting, or beautiful—and write some reasons why those passages affect you in the ways that they do. Doing so will be especially helpful as you prepare your writing assessment essay at the semester’s beginning. Finally, you might ask general questions (suggested below) to begin meaningful, reflective writing in your journal:
• What parts of the text intrigue me, make me skeptical, or seem the most well written? Why?
• What would I like to know more about?
• What resonates with my own experience? In what ways?
• How does what I am reading relate to other books I have read, movies I have seen, etc.?
• What passages would I read to a friend? Why?
• What key passages would serve as effective evidence or ‘proof’ for my own interpretations—so I can support my ideas about the text in discussion and in writing, particularly for the writing assessment essay?
• What ideas or issues raised by the book would I like to discuss or debate further with friends or classmates in my First-Year Seminar this fall?
Additional works by Sherman Alexie
The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1992.
The Business of Fancydancing [film]. Written and directed by Sherman Alexie. FallsApart Productions, 2002. Also available on DVD (New York: Wellspring Media, 2003).
First Indian on the Moon. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1993.
Indian Killer. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.
The Man Who Loves Salmon. Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1998.
The Official Site of Sherman Alexie. www.fallsapart.com. N.d.; accessed 31 March 2005.
One Stick Song. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 2000.
Reservation Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
Smoke Signals [film]. Directed by Chris Eyre, with screenplay by Sherman Alexie. Burbank, Calif.: Miramax, 1998. Available on DVD and in video.
The Summer of Black Widows. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1996.
Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
Water Flowing Home: Poems. Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1996.
Additional Readings
Access Schitsu’umsh, The Discovered People: Official Site of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe. www.cdatribe-nsn.gov 15 February 2005; accessed 31 March 2005.
Ballenger, Bruce. “Methods of Memory: On Native American Storytelling.” College English 59:7 (November 1997): 789–800.
Barcott, Bruce, ed. Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1994.
Churchill, Ward. Indians Are Us: Culture and Genocide in Native North America. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994.
Churchill, Ward. Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002.
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story.” American Indian Quarterly 20:1 (Winter 1996): 57–76.
Coulombe, Joseph L. “The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” American Indian Quarterly 26:1 (Winter 2002): 94–115.
Davis, Mary B., ed. Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.
Evans, Stephen F. “‘Open Containers’: Sherman Alexie’s Drunken Indians.” American Indian Quarterly 25:1 (Winter 2001): 46–72.
Frazier, Ian. On the Rez. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
To find more materials yourself in a library catalog,
use the following Library of Congress subject headings:
Alexie, Sherman, 1966—Criticism and interpretation
American literature––Indian authors
Idaho––Social life and customs
Indians in literature
Indians in motion pictures
Indians of North America––Ethnic identity
Indians of North America––Literary collections
Indians of North America––Rocky Mountains Region
Indians of North America––Washington state
Spokane Indians––Drama
Spokane Indians––Fiction
Spokane Indians––Poetry
Professor Julie Thompson, Director, Writing Center, Tutoring & Academic Skills Program and Director , Writing & Oral Communication Programs; Librarian, Rebecca Ganzel Thompson, Bush Library; and CLA Writing Consultants, Andy and Patrick Hueller, contributed to the creation of this guide.
