Memory, Bearing Witness, Storytelling, and Imagination Theme Analysis

In the face of a ravaged cultural landscape, Alexie stresses in nearly each story the importance of four vital acts to the Native American community of his youth: remembering, witnessing, telling stories, and imagining the future. Many stories take place within characters’ memories, and are constructed so that the characters the reader encounters are not actually present within the action of the narrative but only as memories or distant figures. The tension between action and memory demonstrates the erosion of Native American culture, and the idea that the gatekeepers of so much of that culture exist now only in memory. Memories are kept close, and their presence is often a difficult one; one character keeps the memory of a violent car crash “so close that she [has] nightmares for a year.” In “Flight,” Alexie’s narrator refers to memory as “a coin trick, dropping out of sight, then out of existence” and “an abandoned car, rusting and forgotten though it sits in plain view for decades.” Memory is vital in this community, but its importance is a double-edged sword; though important to the preservation of cultural life and the learning of lessons, most memories experienced by Alexie’s characters are rife with pain and trauma.

Bearing witness is one of the text’s most potent themes not only on a narrative level, but also on a meta-narrative level. Alexie’s work as a writer is centered around making visible both a cultural perspective and a world that are often deliberately made invisible through oppression, shame, or neglect. In “Every Little Hurricane,” as Victor’s uncles beat one another, the narrator refers to the party guests as “Witnesses…Witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale. This little kind of hurricane was generic. It didn’t even deserve a name.” During Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s trial, he serves as his own witness, and ultimately indicts himself through his grand storytelling, which references events hundreds of years gone by; events that may or may not have actually happened. In “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” an unnamed 13-year-old narrator—possibly Victor—accompanies his father to a Spokane police station after he’s called upon to provide information about a disappearance that took place ten years ago. Though the narrator’s father tells the officer that he’s been questioned several times and cannot remember any new details, his position as a witness—whether he is a reliable one or not—is a synecdoche (a part of a thing that stands in for its larger whole) for the larger problem of being a “witness and nothing more” that Alexie explores throughout these stories.

“Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace,” the narrator commands the reader in the final lines of “Imagining the Reservation.” We’re asked to imagine a world in which storytelling—such a crucial aspect of Native life—is enough. “I know the story because every Indian knows the story,” Victor’s father tells him on the way to the Spokane police station in “Witnesses, Secret and Not.” Storytelling is another theme that works as a meta-narrative device—Alexie himself is telling several stories that are delivered to the reader out of order, and require a readjustment with each new tale. Many of his characters, similarly though in a more exaggerated way, are almost possessed by the stories they have to tell, and use stories alternately as currency, as punishment, and as a kind of salve.

In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Victor, Thomas, and their friend Junior drive out to a nearby lake in order to take drugs. “It’ll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?” Victor tells Thomas in order to convince him to come along. The boys “all want to have their vision,” and, after they take the drugs, they do. The experience is a rite of passage, but one that the boys have claimed for themselves in a way very different from their ancestors.

In “Distances,” Alexie creates a vision of the future inspired by a quote—or a vision—from Wovoka, the Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah. Wovoka was the leader of a religious movement which began in the late 1800s and which predicts a time when the Great Spirit will arrive to bring back “game of every kind” and “all [the] dead Indians.” Visions of the future—and of the past—are vital to Alexie’s characters; they press on in the face of dire circumstances powered by their hopes for a better life for themselves and for future generations.