The Business of Fancydancing

Sherman Alexie. The Business of Fancydancing. Hanging Loose Press,

Perhaps as much as direct warfare, as much as devastating diseases like smallpox and influenza, it was European trade goods that destroyed the Indigenous Nations of the Eastern Woodlands. Easy availability of European cloth, tools, and jewelry caused the Woodland peoples to forget their traditional crafts and to give up their sharing ways. Desire for trade goods caused them to give up their subsistence practices of taking only enough from the land. Desire for trade goods set off the “Beaver Wars” that set nation against nation. Desire for trade goods caused them, in competition with white commercial hunters like Boone, to kill off the abundant game found west of the Appalachian range.

In Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Meredith Mason Brown quotes one native American who told a Jesuit priest:

The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.

And so, the Eastern Woodlands peoples, the Iroquois Federation, the Algonquian speakers (including the Shawnee), the Southeastern Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, moved ever westward, along with Boone and his ilk, in search of fresh hunting territory. Until the forests were no more. Until Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in May, 1830, and a way of life was destroyed forever.

The worst of all the trade goods was alcohol.

So why do I write all this as preface to talking about The Business of Fancydancing? What do the Woodland nations have to do with Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane from the far northwest?

Because this sort of thing was repeated over and over as Manifest Destiny took its toll.

Am I committing the sin of lumping all Native Americans together as one culture. Probably. But I think they are one culture in that they were all given the choice by advancing European settles: assimilate or die. Live on a reservation or die. The Business of Fancydancing is all about what life is like among a people that you might say we’ve kept in a detention camp for a couple of centuries.

It is a portrait of amazing resilience and great degradation.

I’ve seen the collection called “heartbreaking” but that would imply pity and I don’t think Alexie is asking pity for his people.

The humor is caustic. Take “Reservation Love Song”

I can pay your rent
on HUD house get you free
food from the BIA
get your teeth fixed at IHS

I can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all

The Business of Fancydancing is Alexie’s first book, a mixed bag of stories and poems, though the stories are more like prose poems than Alexie’s later fiction. And the poems are often narratives, tiny stories. So one might say this collection is working at the edge where the difference between poem and short story blurs.

Alexie works with a recurring group of characters: Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who holds the law at bay with the idea of a gun, Lester FallsApart, Seymour, Father. Buffalo Bill makes a couple of appearances:

Evolution

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation
right across the border from the liquor store

Crazy Horse is all over the place, especially in the section called “Crazy Horse Dreams”

War All the Time

Crazy Horse comes back from Vietnam
straight into the Breakaway Bar,
sits down at the same table
he was sitting at two years earlier
when he received his draft notice.

The whimsey of these poems, their magic realism, makes me laugh with delight at the same time that I feel great pain and anger and the prick of the satiric point that the dominant culture reduces all indigenous peoples to a few iconic movie Indians.

The tension between tradition and the temptations of European/American culture remain, and fancydancing has become just another way to hustle cash for alcohol:

The Business of Fancydancing

. . . Money
is an Indian boy who can fancydance
from powwow to powwow. We
got our boy, Vernon Wildshoe, to fill our empty

wallets and stomachs, to fill our empty
cooler. Vernon is like some promise
to pay the light bill, a credit card we
Indians get to use.

Sherman Alexie wrote and directed a film also entitled The Business of Fancydancing, which addresses the same themes. Film and print are, however, too very different art forms and seeing the movie is no substitute for reading the book, especially in this case when the “plots” are totally different.

Possibly related posts:

Colonialism and the missonary position

The badges of poverty

No business

Beaver Wars

Wine builds strong bones

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.