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Interpenetrations: Re-encoding the Queer Indian in Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing

In a 1997 interview with John Purdy, Sherman Alexie asserts that the problem with Native American literature is that it has been stymied for the past few decades around a fixed idea of traditionalism. Moreover, this fixation on tradition entails a representation of the modern Indian that focuses on what Alexie calls “the expected idea” (8)—an academic project in which Native American literature (and its criticism) becomes tautological, exerting violence on the lived experience of the Indian by limiting it to “traditional” themes such as the Native American’s intimate relation to the landscape and an emphasis on ceremonial spirituality. This phenomenon plays itself out not only in the sphere of literary production but also in criticism when academic readings of Native texts, perhaps following the cues of the literature itself, largely focus on the familiar themes of the mixed-blood Indian and his fragmented identity, alcoholism, and the return to the reservation, all infused with a healthy dose of ceremonial songs and a spiritual love for the land. Alexie is interested in unfixing such representations, which give way all too easily to rigid stereotypes of Native people. He sees promise, in fact, in a new generation of writers who are turning away from these more traditional representations and are beginning to write against the expectations of the reading public in an attempt to represent the full, f luid, and complex realities of their own experiences as American Indians. In his own words: