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Queer Identities in Sherman Alexie's the Toughest Indian in the World

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Queer Identities in Sherman Alexie's the Toughest Indian in the World Studies in American Fiction is a journal of articles and reviews on the prose fiction of the United States. Founded by James Nagel and later edited by Mary Loeffelholz, SAF was published by the Department of English, Northeastern University, from 1973 through 2008. Studies in American Fiction is indexed in the MLA Bibliography and the American Humanities Index. Studies in American Fiction Volume 35 Autumn 2007 Number 2 Lisa Tatonetti, Sex and Salmon: Queer Identities in Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World Copyright © 2007 Northeastern University ISSN 0091-8083 SEX AND SALMON: QUEER IDENTITIES IN SHERMAN ALEXIE’S THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD Lisa Tatonetti Kansas State University Contemporary queer Native American writing emerged circa 1976 with the publication of two pieces by Mohawk author Maurice Kenny: an essay, “Tinseled Bucks: A Historical Study of Indian Homosexual- ity,” and a poem “Winkte.”1 This beginning was followed in 1981 by Laguna author Paula Gunn Allen’s essay, “Beloved Women: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures.” During that same year, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark anthology This Bridge Called My Back brought two more gay Native voices to print: Hunkpapa writer Bar- bara Cameron, cofounder of Gay American Indians, and Menominee poet, Chrystos. Two years later, in 1983, Mohawk poet and short fic- tion writer Beth Brant (Bay of Quinte Mohawk) published A Gather- ing of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women. The first Native-edited collection of American Indian and First Na- tion writing, Brant’s collection included pieces by eleven Native les- bians. It would be five more years until Will Roscoe’s Living the Spirit (1988), an anthology devoted entirely to the writing of gay Native people, appeared.2 While there has been a steady rise in the publica- tion of literary work by and about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual/ transgender, queer (GLBTQ), and Two-Spirit Native peoples since Roscoe’s 1988 collection, critical investigations of this important body of literature are just now finding representation in scholarly forums on American Indian literature.3 Paralleling the reticence of the larger critical community regard- ing queer Native voices has been the troubling inclusion of both im- plicit and explicit homophobia in the work of influential Native writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch. Both Silko’s 1991 Al- manac of the Dead and James Welch’s 2000 The Heartsong of Charg- ing Elk contain negative images of queer sexuality: in each text, gay male characters function as the site of seemingly unrelenting evil.4 Against such a backdrop, the 2000 release of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie’s collection of short stories, The Toughest In- dian in the World, represents one of the most positive and explicit depictions of queer sexuality offered in the work of the more canoni- cal contemporary American Indian fiction writers—Leslie Marmon 202 Lisa Tatonetti Silko, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Alexie.5 Alexie’s work in The Toughest Indian is representative of his outspo- ken championship of queer issues. An ally to the GLBTQ/Two-Spirit community, Alexie frequently addresses the problems of homophobia in both his public speaking engagements (which often resemble stand- up comedy routines) and his numerous interviews. Alexie’s 2002 in- dependent film, The Business of Fancydancing, focuses on the fictional (but semi-autobiographic) experiences of a gay Native poet, Seymour Polatkin, as he negotiates the sometimes-difficult relationship between his reservation history and his present urban reality.6 Given Alexie’s prominent position in contemporary anthologies, in current syllabi, and in the eye of the reading public in the United States—Alexie has laughingly called himself the “Indian du jour”—his representations of queer Native identity have the potential for considerable impact. My analysis here centers on the productive and markedly signifi- cant images of queer sexuality found in Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World (2000). While Alexie’s collection has at its heart the examination of human relationships in all their forms, two stories in particular bring queer identity to the fore: the title piece, “The Toughest Indian in the World,” which tells the enigmatic story of a Spokane journalist’s first sexual experience with a Lummi Indian man; and “In- dian Country,” which unravels the rambling tale of Low Man Smith’s unplanned reunion with his white college friend, Tracy Johnson, who rescues Low Man by getting him out of jail and bringing him to the tumultuous dinner at which she meets her Spokane girlfriend’s par- ents for the first time. In “The Toughest Indian in the World,” Alexie forwards what Two-Spirit author/activist Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee/ African/Irish/Lenape/Lumbee) has termed the “Sovereign Erotic” by using queerness as a potential foundation of Native cultural identifi- cation. Both “The Toughest Indian in the World” and “Indian Country” ground themselves in the safety of the heterosexual relationship be- fore they introduce queer characters and themes. The unnamed, first- person narrator of “The Toughest Indian” tells the story of his recent sexual relationship with his co-worker, Cindy, while “Indian Coun- try” opens when Low Man Smith steps off the plane in Missoula, Mon- tana, with the intention of asking Carlotta, a Navajo woman, to marry him. Although both Cindy and Carlotta appear only in flashback, their presences at the beginning of each narrative serve as a heteronormative safety net since each story’s subsequent exploration of queer desire and identity are, at least to some degree, mediated by the narrator and main character’s seemingly grounded heterosexual identity. This me- Studies in American Fiction 203 diation is upheld with vigor in a number of the reviews of Alexie’s book. While some reviewers fail to mention Alexie’s representations of queer relationships at all, others take the protagonist’s heterosexual- ity as a given. Polly Paddock Gossett, for example, while calling Alexie’s title story “masterful,” sums up its plot by saying that “the [story’s narrator], though straight, winds up sleeping with the hitchhiker. ‘I wanted him to save me,’ he explains.”7 Gossett’s caveat—“though straight”—and her use of the verb “explains” to describe the narrator’s depiction of his sexual encounter illustrate how the narrator’s sexual identity can be represented as unequivocally heterosexual rather than bisexual or gay despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the bulk of the story circles around what seems to be the narrator’s first gay sexual experience. Ken Foster, the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, reads the encounter in much the same way: “Over the course of the story, the narrator, who is straight, picks up a scarred Indian fighter, takes him to a hotel and ultimately has sex with him. What makes this so astonishing is that Alexie doesn’t feel the need to tack on any kind of sexual epiphany: At the end of the story, the narrator is no more gay than he was at the start.”8 Alexie himself points out the ironies of such reader response in a discussion of the title story’s reception: When I wrote it I honestly didn’t think about the reaction people would have to it. It’s funny—it really brings up the homophobia in people. When a straight guy like me writes about a homoerotic experience in the first person with a narrator who is very similar to me—I could see people dying to ask me if it was autobiographi- cal. They always ask in regard to everything else, but no one’s asked me about that story. In the Seattle paper here, the critic called it a “graphic act of homosexuality” and I thought “graphic?” There’s nothing graphic about it at all. It was three sentences. He talked about me being a “literary rabble-rouser” again.9 In each of these cases, Alexie’s story, or, more specifically, Alexie’s inclusion of queer sex, provokes strong response among reviewers. On the most basic level, such responses reflect current dominant atti- tudes toward sexuality, in which heterosexuality is still compulsory and sexuality continues to be framed as a system of binaries. In such equations, the narrator is either straight (preferably) or gay (possi- bly), but not bi, nor queer, nor Two-Spirit. The choices are limited and both the categories and responses remain rigid. Such limited choices evoke Qwo-Li Driskill’s commentary on co- 204 Lisa Tatonetti lonialism and sexuality. Driskill points out that “[a] colonized sexual- ity is one in which [indigenous people] have internalized the sexual values of dominant culture. The invaders continue to enforce the idea that sexuality and non-dichotomous genders are a sin, recreating sexu- ality as illicit, shocking, shameful, and removed from any positive spiri- tual context. Queer sexualities and genders are degraded, ignored, condemned, and destroyed.”10 Driskill focuses specifically on indig- enous sexualities here, addressing the sometimes-virulent homopho- bia that has been part of the assimilation process in many indigenous communities. Hir argument, however, extends beyond the boundaries of indigenous communities: Driskill suggests that heterosexist and/or homophobic responses (like those in reaction to Alexie’s investigation of the range of human sexualities) tie directly to ideologies of colo- nialism. Furthermore, Driskill points out that these attitudes are part of the colonial project of erasure, which silences non-dominant histories such as, in this case, the fact that many indigenous cultures traditionally included multiple gender categories and alternate constructions of sexu- ality. As Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang note, “Cross-cultural comparative studies have shown that genders and sexu- alities are not always fixed into only two marked categories.
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