Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Author Sherman Alexie addressed several hundred people on the Rocky Mountain College campus Thursday night.
It’s a safe bet that the Skyview High parent who did not want her child to read Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” would not have wanted her child to attend Alexie’s speech in Billings Thursday night.
The wildly popular author delivered a 65-minute talk and then spent 48 minutes answering, more or less, just three questions from the audience in the gymnasium of Rocky Mountain College’s Fortin Education Center.
The talk itself was a discursive, relentlessly funny, often profane excursion into all manner of provocative subjects, including masturbation, gay marriage, racism, genocide, politics, education and the power of literature.
In his opening remarks Alexie advised people not to ask him his opinion about having Indian mascots for sports teams. He said it was a racist, archaic tradition defended only by idiots.
Given the genocidal policies of the United States, he said, “It’s the equivalent of Germans having Jewish sports mascots.”
But there is progress, he said: “The racist idiots look more like racist idiots” all the time.
One of the most interesting interludes of the evening was when Alexie engaged a small group of Indian students who came up from Little Big Horn College with their teacher, Luella Brien, a fiction writer herself and formerly a reporter for the Billings Gazette.
Alexie turned again and again to one student in particular, Leo Goes Ahead, who reminded Alexie of his own brother. He alternately complimented, teased and encouraged Goes Ahead, until the college sophomore was nearly swallowed by his own smile.
“You know how many more books I would have sold if my name was Sherman Takes Enemy?” he asked.
He’s done all right under his given name. He has published 24 books of fiction and poetry, won a string of prestigious awards and had “The Absolutely True Diary” translated into 72 languages.
“It’s published in countries I had to look up,” he said.
Steve Germic, an associate professor of English at Rocky who introduced Alexie, said “his body of work, I submit to you, is the Great American Novel.”
Germic was the organizer of the second annual Common Read Program at Rocky, in which nearly all freshmen and many upperclassmen read the same book and discussed it in various classes and disciplines.
Alexie’s most famous novel was chosen for the Common Read early this year, not long after the Skyview parent objected to having the “The Absolutely True Diary” on the school’s required reading list. The District 2 School Board ultimately voted to retain the book, which has been the subject of bans and attempted bans almost continuously since it was published in 2007.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
During a book-signing after his speech, Alexie posed for a photo with Leo Goes Ahead, a student at Little Big Horn College whom Alexie singled out during his talk.
Alexie clearly reveled in the controversy, and he made no attempt to draw in his talons during his speech. He said he suspected that Tea Party Republicans were among the small group of human beings who really did not masturbate. He said protestors ought to attend Tea Party rallies and chant “Masturbate! Masturbate!” at them.
Then, as if addressing those Tea Partiers, he added, “I’m not saying it’s going to change your politics, but you’ll be a lot more relaxed.”
He said parents object to his book for the same reason they can’t relate to their children, because “we as parents completely disconnect from who we were as teenagers.” What is worse, he said, adults fail to acknowledge that their befuddlement over romance does not end with their teenage years.
“I’ve been married for 20 years and every once in awhile I look over at my wife and say, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
That set him off, seemingly spontaneously, on an extended story about “alarm sex,” which he said parents with children are forced to fall back on. But when the alarm goes off at 2 a.m., he said, the couple will try in vain to wake up, hitting the snooze button several times before one spouse turns to the other and says, “Can we just hold hands?”
Which prompted a further observation: “You people who don’t want gay people to have sex? Let them get married.”
At the core of his many-layered speech was his recounting of a story from his freshman year at Reardan High School, the same off-reservation school in Washington state attended by Junior, the Spokane Indian narrator of the “The Absolutely True Diary.” It was a long story, one that was not included in the book, centering on his attempt to court Laurie, a white senior at Reardan High.
Close to the climax of the story, Alexie offers Laurie a stuffed Eastern bunny with a patch of Pendleton fabric on its belly. He described himself as “an Indian boy reaching across hundreds of years of racial, cultural and political divide.”
“We are so loving and forgiving,” he said, “that we have forgiven your criminal white asses. It’s like, ‘Fuck you, Custer. I am not going to judge all white people by your genocidal impulses.’”
That line and many like it elicited all sorts of laughter, from nervous titters and guffaws to what, at one point, Alexie referred to “some loud rez laughter over there.”
Trying to summarize a Sherman Alexie story is like trying to do the same with an improv session by the late Robin Williams, but in his closing remarks Alexie said the eternal struggle is group identity vs. self identity.
“Who are you going to be?” he asked his audience. “You’re going to be happier if it’s your decision.”
Odds and Ends
And because Alexie said so many things worth recording Thursday night, here is a random selection:
♦ How do we improve schools, on and off the reservation? “You want amazing teachers? You pay them huge fucking amounts of money.”
♦ How does he know that? “I grew up poor and now I’m really rich. And money has solved almost all my problems.”
♦ On looking around the gymnasium at Rocky: “I don’t think I’ve read in a venue that had Taco Bell advertising.”
♦ In big cities, he said, “people generally think I’m half of whatever they are,” and all taxi drivers think he’s from their native country.
♦ On walking around Billings Thursday morning: “I’d forgotten about that special joy of having white people watching you because you’re Indian.”
♦ When he was young, he said, he was “young-Indian-boy pretty. When I looked in the mirror I’d go, ‘Damn, I’m going to masturbate to me.’”
♦ Most white people are so clueless about their European ancestry, he said, that there should be “European cultural awareness” telethons for them, run by Crow Indians.
♦ In places like Montana, he said, everybody is a minority, or at least treated like one by outside interests. “If you live in Montana, you’re a rez Indian. Now they’re fracking your ass. You’re going to have an indigenous fracking tumor on your neck and it’s going to sing powwow songs to you.”
