Smoke Signals
(Source: Timothy Egan, "An Indian Without Reservations," The New York Times, January 18, 1998. With permission.)
"Smoke Signals," directed by Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne-Arapaho film maker who
lives in New York, calls to mind Spike Lee's breakthrough hit, "She's Gotta
Have It," or a Bernard Malamud short story. It presents a niche of American
life never seen on film.
Alexie's characters are not John Ford's Monument Valley warriors or Ted Turner's doomed eco-perfect natives. They don't talk about politics or land disputes. In general, they are not victims. They tell jokes, fight, do stupid things and loving things, and eat bad food. What's more, the cast is Indian. "No Italians with long hair," Alexie says.
The two lead male characters, an odd couple in their early 20s, travel by bus from Idaho to Arizona in order to retrieve the ashes of one man's father. In one scene, a Western is playing on TV inside a trailer. "The only thing more pathetic than an Indian on TV, says Thomas Builds-the-Fire, "is an Indian watching an Indian on TV."
The scenes of reservations life are without the usual brooding skies, stoic visages and poverty-beaten Indians. Thomas, much like Alexie himself when he grew up on the Spokane reservation, is a storyteller ignored by the rest of the tribe. He wears Government-issue glasses, eats commodity cheese and prattles on interminably about such things as his grandmothers' fry bread. "It's a good day to be indigenous," says a deejay on the reservation's radio station. Cars drive backward, or don't start. Alcoholism, a scourge in almost all Alexie's stories, proves fatal, and sobriety brings nobility. Basketball helps. So do books. People try to rescue themselves with narratives to live by. "More than anything he wanted a story to heal the wounds," Alexie wrote of Thomas. "But he knew that his stories never healed anything."
"Smoke Signals" is available at Wright Library.
