The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Somebody Kept Saying Powwow Summary & Analysis

Junior Polatkin describes his friendship with Norma, noting that he knew her long before she knew her husband James. He knew Norma, he says, “back when there was good fry bread to be eaten at the powwow, before the old women died. Sometimes,” Junior says, “it feels like our tribe is dying a piece of bread at a time. But Norma was always trying to save it.” Norma, though young, was at that time nicknamed “grandmother” by her friends and other members of the tribe.

At a powwow, Norma and Junior sit and talk; everyone, he notes, wants to spend time with Norma. Norma, he says, believes that “everything matters,” and that “Indians are the most sensitive people on the planet.” She teaches Junior that “watching automatically makes the watcher part of the happening,” and she lives her life, Junior says, “like we all should do.” She does not drink or smoke, and she is a joyous dancer. After the powwow, Norma drops Junior off at home, and he has a dream about her. He dreams of her “a hundred years ago,” riding bareback and shouting something Junior can’t understand.

Junior tells Norma about his dream, and they talk about horses. Norma, Junior says, is a “rodeo queen.” She hangs out with cowboys and sometimes sleeps with them, and they sing songs in her honor. Most nights, though, Junior notes that Norma goes “home alone and [sings] herself to sleep.” Junior always thought that Norma would settle down with Victor, “since she was so good at saving people and Victor needed more saving than most anybody,” but he says that Norma and Victor never got along. Victor was a bully as a youth, and Junior doubts Norma ever forgave him.

Norma, Junior says, used to be the sports reporter for the tribal newspaper. He saved a clipping of a story she wrote about a winning basketball game he played in high school, and keeps it tucked in his wallet to this day. In the article, Norma describes Junior’s victory and implies that “for just a second [Junior] was Crazy Horse.”

Norma lives her whole life on the reservation, but when Junior returns from college, she wants to know what the world “out there” is like. Junior describes it as “a bad dream you never wake up from.”

Norma asks Junior what the “worst thing [he] ever did” was, and he describes a college basketball game during which he chanted hateful things at a player from another team who’d at one time been incarcerated. After Junior tells her this story, he notes that “she treat[s] him differently.” After a while, things go back to normal. Norma nicknames Junior Pete Rose, because “after all that greatness, he’s only remembered for the bad stuff, [and it] ain’t right.”