Sherman Alexie’s Indigenous Blues

The blues speak histories that, from the conventional perspective, originate in the experiences of Africans in America. But invariably the blues exceed distinct, rigid cultural boundaries. Ralph Ellison's famous definition of the blues suggests an expansive vista, one limited only by the speaker's capacity to "lyrically" express his or her "autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe" (78). As an idiom, the blues record histories, yet Ellison's definition privileges the "personal" and leaves uncertain the place of our national histories, the stories that speak our collective experiences. Locating the collective histories in the personal--and vice versa--has proven a pivotal problem in literary inscriptions of the blues from Ellison's own fiction to works by Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones. (1) However, in Sherman Alexie's 1995 novel, Reservation Blues, the issues become more problematic. Here, the blues speak not just an African American history and identity, but instead seem to generate from a Native American point of reference. More than simply transcribing a blues idiom to "fit" the experiences of his Spokane characters, Alexie looks deeper, teasing out traces of an indigenous American culture in an expressive medium generally thought to begin with the Atlantic slave trade. Aboriginality consequently becomes an ever-changing state for Alexie since contact with cultures of other continents constantly transforms one's means of representing that aboriginality. Nobody remains untransformed by this contact, not displaced Native Americans, not enslaved Africans, and not even the apparent conquerors, the European colonists. In Alexie's novel, the blues constitute more than an expression of catastrophe rooted in African American experience; they also act as a trope for an entire process in which rhetorical forms shape and inform one another. The appearance of Robert Johnson, the near-mythical Mississippi-Delta blues singer, on the Spokane Indian Reservation helps clarify this process. He bridges two different American experiences, African and Indian, and, in so doing, also helps bridge discourses. Alexie underscores the slavery metaphors in the bluesman's story, depicting how Johnson trades his "freedom" to a white stranger at the crossroads in exchange for his unearthly musical ability (264). (2) A prominent blues image, the crossroads maintains a constant presence in Alexie's novel, providing a distinct bluestone, but also serving to facilitate the cultural intersection for which the blues serve as trope. The novel ultimately presents a series of crossroads, signifying a constant process of miscegenation and cultural intersection. This kind of intersection first occurs when Robert Johnson passes on his guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire, enabling the formation of the Spokane Indian blues band, Coyote Springs. In the process, Alexie sensitizes us to expressive possibilities that developed when Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans began sharing, if not peacefully, the same continent. In its very form, Alexie's novel inscribes a crossroads similar to those in the blues, a juncture where we can see an indigenous Native American oral tradition still at work, but now in a hybrid form, informed by the other discursive forms that have crossed its path. He does so with Spokane Indian characters whose personal histories still offer the personal catastrophes that Ellison finds in traditional blues material. Chess and Checkers must live with the memory of their younger brother's death, a needless occurrence owing to the inadequate medical care often found on Indian reservations. Chess describes the kind of destitution that led to this tragedy: there "weren't no white doctors around. There weren't no Indian doctors at all yet. The traditional medicine women all died years before. Dad just walked into the storm like he was praying or something" (64). …