The Reluctant Spokesman

Sherman Alexie is ready to play cards with Satan.

The 30-year-old author is hunkered down at the Beverly Prescott, in town to discuss the film rights to his latest novel, “Indian Killer” (Atlantic Monthly Press), a slyly subversive potboiler about a serial murderer whose actions spark a modern battle of cowboys and Indians in Seattle. It may seem like perfect big-screen fodder, but Alexie, a Spokane Coeur d’Alene, harbors no illusions and is prepared for the inevitable raw deal from Hollywood.

“The real problem is that there’s no white hero in my book,” he says. “They want loincloths. They want sweat lodges and vision quests. They want ‘Dances With Wolves,’ and I don’t write that.”

If producers aren’t sensitive to the particulars of the late 20th century American Indian, at least no one’s mentioned Lou Diamond Phillips.

“I think he’s done with the Indian thing,” Alexie says with a grin. “He’s done four or five of them, and they all flopped. Hopefully, he hasn’t read the book and won’t be interested.”

While they’re busy keeping Diamond Phillips off casting lists, Hollywood types also would be wise to avoid calling Alexie a “Native American.” The author dismisses the term as meaningless, a product of liberal white guilt.

“I’m an Indian,” he says. “I’ll only use ‘Native American’ in mixed company.”

“Indian Killer” is Alexie’s second novel; the first was “Reservation Blues.” (He’s also written an acclaimed book of short stories, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and several volumes of poetry.)

It’s a multilayered work. While it satisfied Alexie’s desire to explore the mystery genre, it also highlights the tenuous thread of civility that exists between white and American Indian cultures, how we are only a flash point away from igniting a racial powder keg--even in progressive Seattle, where Alexie lives with his wife, Diane.

“If you look at the history of the U.S. and chart what’s happening, we are brewing a revolutionary stew,” he says, comparing the present disparity among classes and races to France just before the French Revolution. “There’s a tremendous level of anger out there, and the anger in the Indian community has not really been talked about. There’s a huge open wound.”

Healing would require apologies and reparations from the U.S. government, but Alexie isn’t holding his breath. “It would change the whole myth of America, the rugged individual, the courageous pioneer, this whole American dream,” he says. The government “would have to admit that there were terrible evils committed here, comparable to any evils ever.”

Alexie has done his share of myth debunking. His earlier work, especially “Lone Ranger and Tonto,” is notable for its honest and humorous character studies of modern tribal life. His stories are candid snapshots of a culture that has long been ignored.

In “Indian Killer,” he leaves the reservation to examine the plight of the urban Indian, like himself, displaced from the tribe. He notes that 60% of the Indians in this country live in urban areas. But that presented new challenges, as Alexie struggled to develop some of the characters, especially white characters, whose life experiences are foreign to him.

“I grew up in a culture where you are taught that songs and stories have specific owners and you can’t tell them without permission,” he explains. “Growing up with those cultural constructs, the whole idea of the artist as the individual is totally outside my concept of who I am. I’m always operating with some sort of tribal responsibility, so here I am writing about people way outside my tribe, and it got uncomfortable.”

While Alexie has enlightened the world at large about the contemporary American Indian experience, his tribe has essentially shunned him. Back at the Spokane Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash., people have strong, often unfavorable opinions about the author who, as a child, often whiled away his days alone in his room playing Dungeons & Dragons or Nerf basketball.

“I was a divisive presence on the reservation when I was 7,” he recalls. “I was a weird, eccentric, very arrogant little boy. The writing doesn’t change anybody’s opinion of me. If anything, it’s intensified it.”

Alexie says one tribal elder resents him not for anything he’s written, but because he was a “ball hog” on the tribe’s basketball team.

Part of the animosity stems from Alexie’s decision to leave his tribal school and transfer to Reardan High, a virtually all-white school 20 miles from his home.

Alexie was terrified when he arrived at Reardan--he was the school’s first and only Indian until his twin sisters joined him after a year. To assimilate, he had to abandon certain characteristics, including his reservation accent and some of his hair, which fell far below his shoulders.

“People think it’s a trivial thing, and it’s not,” he says. “The physical act of cutting parts of yourself off to fit in, that’s what it is.”

Ultimately, though, Alexie succeeded at Reardan for the same reasons he was outcast by his tribe--his “insane ambition.”

He drew on his experiences at the school when developing John Smith, a central character in “Indian Killer.” Unlike Alexie, however, Smith was tormented by his lack of tribal identification: He was adopted by a white couple and never knew his heritage.

“Indian children adopted by non-Indian families have tremendous social problems,” Alexie says.

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Although ostracized by his tribe, Alexie has been embraced by many other American Indians, judging by the number of events and commencements he’s asked to speak at.

He jokes that his “little books about one little reservation in Washington state” have come to represent all Indians everywhere. As such, he’s not allowed to merely write books. He has had to become a poster boy.

“It’s very interesting. Nobody ever asked Raymond Carver to speak for every white guy,” Alexie says. “I end up having to be a spokesperson for Indian people. I’ve become a politician and a sociologist and psychologist and cultural critic, and all these jobs I have to fulfill simply based on the fact that I am an Indian writer getting a lot of attention.”

Being selected as one of Granta magazine’s “20 best American novelists under 40” has added to the author’s laundry list of accolades, although he takes this sort of recognition with a grain of salt.

“There are hints I got on there because of some affirmative action policy,” he says. “How many spots are reserved in the literary world for Indian people? None. If I was on there because of some newly invented Indian quota in the literary world, great. I hope we get lots more quotas.”

While he doesn’t shun his profile-building extracurricular responsibilities, Alexie prefers the solitude of his craft. “Writers and artists are by and large selfish bastards. It’s isolated, individualistic. In that sense, it was a job I was perfectly suited for.”

In this way, Alexie identifies with “Indian Killer’s” Marie Polatkin, an angry, righteous Indian who will grant no quarter to the white intellectuals who think they understand the Native American experience.

But sharing his writing with the world has had a profound effect on this self-proclaimed selfish bastard. “I had no idea about the very quiet ways in which art works,” he says, explaining the letters of support he receives from all over the country.

“I was in the Seattle airport, and this 10-year-old Indian boy came up to me and he said, ‘I like your poem,’ and he told me which poem he liked,” Alexie says. “And at that moment, all the wonder and magic of what art is supposed to be about is contained there. For just a few moments, you forget about slogging through airport after airport. It sounds cliched and romantic and sentimental, and it is, but it’s great. It’s those little moments that save you.”

*

As the day turns dark, and Hollywood’s bright lights wink seductively at Alexie from his 11th-floor view at the Beverly Prescott, his thoughts suddenly turn from idyllic to pragmatic. Nothing, it seems, can save him from the dread of the meetings with the movie people. He’ll hear about how his writing can be sliced and diced and marketed and compromised in the name of mass-market entertainment.

It’s times like these that he wraps himself in the security of what he considers his true calling: poetry. (His latest book of poems, “The Summer of Black Widows” [Hang Loose Press] was published in September.)

“There is no possible way to sell your soul because nobody’s offering,” he says with a laugh. “The devil doesn’t care about poetry. No one wants to make a movie out of a poem.”