Criticizing everyone

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” characterizes the restlessness of modern day American Indians and their quest to find a positive identity. This story is a critique of the popular image of American Indians as a defeated lot of alcoholics, criminals, and failures. Author Sherman Alexie criticizes white Americans for creating this popular image and for their history of killing, swindling, and controlling American Indians. He also criticizes American Indians for perpetuating this image by creating a narrator who goes into situations with preconceived notions about white Americans.

Alexie criticizes the history of white American oppression toward American Indians through the narrator’s description of a dream where a white man kills him for fucking his wife. His tribe attacks “whites all across the reservation.” The battle grows to include other tribes and the United States Cavalry. The narrator describes, “Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head,” as the most vivid image of that dream. The narrator thought the image was a product of his anger and frustration before reading several accounts of similar occurrences in the old West. By considering the image as a product of his “anger and frustration” he’s showing how this history of killing haunts American Indians today. He also compares a 7-11 clerk’s question, “Will this be all?” to adding a clause to a treaty. He offers readers a hypothetical example, written in italics, of the type of clause he’s referring to that reads, “We’ll take Washington and Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-new Chrysler Cordoba.” This is an example of how the narrator feels white Americans have swindled American Indians out of their land. With a clause like the hypothetical one described white American not only got the better end of the deal from the treaty, but also managed to control how much land American Indians had.

Alexie includes current injustices by white Americans toward American Indians in the form of the narrator’s recollection of a traffic stop where a police officer tells him he, “should be more careful where he drives,” because he’s, “making people nervous,” and doesn’t, “fit the profile of the neighborhood.” This is a modern day instance where white Americans are trying to control American Indians even though no laws have been broken. It is clear based on quotes from the officer that the traffic stop was based solely on the fact that the narrator is an American Indian.

As a final thought, thanks to Professor Cruz telling our class that she’s had students who misinterpreted the title of this story because they had no knowledge of the history of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, I keep reading “Tonto Fistfight” as a person’s name.