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WEB EXCLUSIVE FULL INTERVIEW
Over the past two decades, Sherman Alexie has established
himself as a major literary voice through his poetry,
novels and short stories, and movies. This week, Alexie
begins a new book tour to launch Flight (Black Cat /
Grove Atlantic, $13), his first novel since 1996’s
Indian Killer. Flight’s anti-hero is a 16-year-old
foster kid named Zits, who, like Billy Pilgrim of Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, has come unmoored
in time and space.
Alexie dropped in on us at Real Change to discuss
his new book, class and race in America, and the trouble
with white liberals.
RC: Kurt Vonnegut?
ALEXIE: Died today! And you know,
in the year since I wrote the book I’ve spent
so much more time thinking and talking about it in the
last year and then and in the last couple of weeks really
thinking and talking about it. So, in fact yesterday
I was talking to Morgan Entrekan, my editor, who was
his editor and is a close friend and who’s been
quoted in the obituaries and I mean, Morgan my editor
edited Slaughterhouse-Five. Just yesterday, Morgan and
I were talking about Vonnegut and Morgan was trying
to console me you know trying to give me a pep talk
because of some of the reviews I’m getting for
the book and then he led me on the internet to a bunch
of reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five. And, you know, my
book is nowhere near as good but they are saying the
same things about Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five that
they are saying about me and Flight now.
I woke up this morning and walked downstairs, and
my wife looked at me and had this look on her face,
and I was scared 'cuz I’m a reservation Native
American and your wife gets that face and you’re
like “oh shit my brother, my sister, my mother
who? My cousin died?” And she says Kurt Vonnegut
died, which was just devastating you know so…
RC: Yeah. No one saw that coming,
ALEXIE: So, you know, the weird way
of coincidence and magic and…so… now I’m
going to spend even more time talking and thinking about
it because…
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Photo by Rob Casey |
RC: Yeah, well, he was a big influence
on all writers of our generation, and clearly an influence
for you …
ALEXIE: Yeah, the direct influence
on this book in particular. But, also on my whole career.
The notion of being funny in the most extreme of circumstances.
Being funny about Nazis, being funny about the bombing,
being funny about genocide. The notion that you could
be hilarious and at the same time approach the books
with a clear moral vision, a very specific moral plan
with something that really influenced me and this book
in particular.
Now I’m getting punished for it in some quarters,
which is interesting, you know, ‘cuz even the
good reviews aren’t necessarily understanding
that.
RC: Well, it’s a little bit
of a risk, you know? You’re right up front about
it. The book is homage to Slaughterhouse-Five. You know,
I mean I read it and I was like “holy crap he
wrote the sequel” You know? And you have the “Po-tee-weet”
quote in the front. You’re sort of drawing a map
there for folks, but in some ways it’s kind of
risky. You’re kind of setting yourself up to be
compared to fucking Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-
Five.
ALEXIE: I was worried about that
comparison, but nobody’s done it at all! It’s
weird. In fact, the people who even recognize the book
as being as a sci-fi fantasy disparage it for being
that. That the time travel is a “skeletal,”
or “goofy,” or…or “hackneyed.”
They have all sorts of terms to describe …
RC: Wow. That is weird. I got it
right away. The hero is this sort of loser outsider
and he’s slipping around in time. He’s kind
of a universal character in that, and you were building
on that framework. You know? Hello?
ALEXIE: Well the only thing that
I can think is that it is so linear. Slaughterhouse-Five
jumped all over all the time. It is so unpredictable.
So the only thing that I can think of is if perhaps
if I made it more unpredictable when would jump in and
out, or if I jumped back and forth? I don’t know.
Could I have made it any more obvious what its influence
was and what I was talking about?
What I was talking about with my wife this morning,
she was asking about what Vonnegut meant to me and I
said, “Well, the thing that he did in all of his
books was point out the madness on both sides of any
war.” Which, in terms in Native American history,
I was trying to point out, which nobody’s really
even talked about. I mean, it’s sort of a sacred
cow I puncture. The idea of a Native American focusing
on the atrocities committed by the Indians at the battle
of Little Big Horn.” I mean…
RC: That’s one of the things
I was struck by is that you have a sort of an equal
opportunity assholes approach. I mean, you know, people
are people, and people are assholes and people also
have the capacity to rise above and transcend and do
extraordinary things at the same time. And that happens
with people in your book sort of regardless of race
and class and…
ALEXIE: Yeah. And then you get that
whole insecurity, you know. “I blew it. I screwed
up.” And I wonder should I have been so focused
on a specific moral vision of the universe, and then
it’s, “Yeah, that’s who I am. That’s
my job.”
Before we started the tape we were laughing around
about Oprah having her own magazine and her picture
on the cover, and me making my fictional magazine, “Sherm!”
But you have mentioned that I have used my celebrity
well, so you know, I have a platform and an audience.
So the notion of trying to espouse a specific moral
vision … I think I should.
RC: Around the time Ten Little Indians
came out you were talking a lot about how in post-9/11
world, you were making a point of not having a tribe,
and taking a more universal approach. How’s that
been going for you?
ALEXIE: (Laughing) You know who it
really offends more than anybody is liberals. You know,
conservatives love to hear me talk this way ‘cuz
in some sense part of what I’m saying is conservative.
The notion of being tribeless, the notion of trying
to get past all that stuff. It is really more of a conservative
thing. You know, I listen to all sorts of media, so,
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh this morning and if
you divorce a lot of what you knew about him and you
just listened to segments, like a ten-minute segment?
Today he was talking about, you know, the problem of
Imus and, you know, Imus is getting fired and then he
launched into, “well if we are going to go after
Imus for saying, you now, what did he say, ‘nappy-headed
hos’ you know, if we are going to kick him off
the radio for that then we should be kicking off pretty
much you know two-thirds of the rappers, you know, we
should be kicking out Chris Rock we should be kicking
off…” and he went on and on and you listen
to him for about ten minutes you think well yeah that
makes sense. (Laugh) you know your sittin’ there
in the car going “Rush Limbaugh making sense?
What the hell’s wrong with me?” But it doesn’t
last long because then he launches into you know, you
know, some you know some crazy diatribe you know, like,
“there is no racism problem in the United States
and if there is it is only people like Jesse Jackson
and Al Sharpton who cause it” and then he launches
into some craziness, but, the notion of advancing forward
and advocating for the multiplicity of tribes inside
any person is scary for people.
I’m not sure why… I mean so much of my
career being identified as being one thing. I still
am, and I have no problem with that. But in what I support
and what I talk about, I want that to be as broad as
possible and my major focus is about class. I’ve
been screaming about that for five years now. That we
brown folks especially have to stop talking about race.
We have to stop. That is not to say racism isn’t
and will not be a problem, but the fact is that our
rhetoric alienates the people whose minds we need to
change. We make it about class, we automatically bring
in this huge group of people who we’ve alienated:
poor and working class white folks. And we need them,
and they need us so…
RC: And there is so little discussion
about class, which is the big elephant in the room in
America, and it’s invisible. We’ve really
been duped on that score, which makes it all that much
more important to talk about.
ALEXIE: It’s that invisibility
that makes, you know, poor white folks or middle class
white folks identify with the rich white folks. They
think they’re in it together. You know, I’m
friends with a wide group of people, and I was having
lunch with a couple of conservative guys and they didn’t
now Rush Limbaugh has his own jet! They were talking
about some …
RC: (Laughing) What? They think he
is a working class guy?
ALEXIE: Yeah! And you know, they
didn’t know what to do with that information!
That Rush Limbaugh has his own jet! You know, cause,
I forget what we were talking about something about
the elite, the Hollywood elite, and I said, “Well
yeah, they are the Hollywood elite, but Rush Limbaugh
has his own jet. You know? He’s a whole different
kind of media elite.” So, you know, listening
to him today I was just thinking, all these poor folks
listening to him today identify so strongly with him,
and he’s so good at that… at sounding and
pretending to be something that he is not, and we fight
the battle on the wrong fronts.
RC: I’m curious about your
own journey and negotiation of class. Around the time
you were working on Ten Little Indians, again, you were
being much more conscious as a writer about having one
foot in your past and the other in your present, writing
about the reality of people who are educated professionals.
And it’s been this process for you, I imagine,
of negotiating identity, and I’m wondering if
that’s something you feel like you’ve figured
out, or whether that’s a moving target?
ALEXIE: Who knows if you figure it
out? My survivor’s guilt is pretty much gone.
The notion of “How did I make it?” The guilt
about that. No, that’s all gone. I don’t
feel much of that anymore. But you know, I’m constantly
self-reminded of it all the time.
Chris Offutt is writer from Appalachia, and, you know,
he has a good career, he’s at a college now. You
know, we were on the phone the other day talking, and
I said something, and he later called me back and said,
“you know when you said it didn’t really
strike me, and then I thought about it, and it’s
true.” I said, “In the literary world now,
where I’m at in my career, I rarely meet people
who grew up poor.” So, as my status has risen,
my group of new acquaintances has changed dramatically.”
And he was really bothered by that. I guess the thing
is, when you rise through classes, the natural reflex,
I think, is to stay in your new class rather than continue
to be a person who was a part of all those classes,
and in some way continues to be. Just the fact that
I’m not poor now does not mean I’m not that
person who was. And still guided and directed by those
same fears and terrifying moments, and also those simpler
moments. I don’t romanticize poverty. But there’s
the simpler decisions, you know? ‘Do you I eat
that can of soup or that other can of soup?’ You
know, there is something to be said for that. (Laughs).
You know, much rather than ‘how much money to
I put in my SEP IRA?” (Laugh) The stress does
rise accordingly to income, and I’m dealing with
that. So, in answer to your question, I don’t
know.
You know, I’m working on a family memoir and
this kind of stuff is a big part of the discussion of
how different I am than my father and my grandfather.
How different my children are from me. I mean, that’s
the real thing when I think about class and then the
rise, you know, it started very early when, you know,
when I was playing with my oldest son, my youngest hadn’t
been born yet and I think my oldest was like four and
he wanted to play ‘room service.’ (Laughs)
The concept, you know, the concept I had no idea about
till I was like 23 years old. So, they have frequent
flyer cards. You know, they’ve been to Paris,
France; London, England; Sydney, Australia; Auckland,
New Zealand. They’ve been in thirty states
RC: It’s a privileged life.
ALEXIE: Very privileged. So, you
can talk about is the monetary privilege, which they
hugely have, but also they have never seen an Indian
take a drink of alcohol. So, in a lot of ways they are
like circus freaks you know: “Come see the Indian
children who have never seen an Indian take a drink
of alcohol. You won’t believe you eyes!”
(Laughs). So they have me as a father, their mother
who has a Master’s degree, an education, is sober,
who’s sober, highly educated parents. You know,
they are brand new Indians so, but I think what does
it mean to them, and they know they’re Indian.
They are not assimilated to that degree, but it’s
so less important to them.
RC: Well, it will certainly hold
them back to a much smaller degree than it would many
…
ALEXIE: Yeah, but, you know, will
that hold them back at all? You know, I’ve been
getting in arguments about this. You know, I stayed
away from casino gigs for awhile ‘cuz I was iffy
about casinos, but I’ve taken a couple lately
and I was in one in Michigan, the Soaring Eagle Casino
in Michigan, and I’m standing in the lobby checking
in, and Jay Leno walks through ‘cuz he’s
performing that night, and I stood there looking and
he never stopped moving, he was signing autographs,
but kept moving, and as I watched him walk through and
the big hubbahub and I thought “if we Indians
aren’t completely mainstream now, you know, all
this whining! You know, Jay Leno just walked through
a Indian casino. I don’t think we have much room
to whine anymore about dispossessed.
And also, my 20th year high school reunion…
When I went to high school at the white high school
I went to, I was the only Indian. There was all sorts
of racism, all sorts of problems. I mean I ended up
being really popular with a certain segment but there
is always the old guard who had issues with me. So,
there was tension between the two communities, big time,
between Reardon, the white town, and Wellpinit, my reservation
town. Well, we had my 20th year high school reunion
and guess where we had it…at the Kalispell Indian
Casino. Where a lot of my cousins work. Where my brother
was working at the time, you know, we are not Kalispell,
but the casino. You know, I walk into an Indian casino,
to have a 20th year reunion with all my white high school
classmates, and as I walk in I’m seeing all sorts
of members of the white community in there interacting
with all my friends and cousins who work there in a
way that they never did before. And the fact that I
had left the reservation to go a white high school was
a hugely traitorous move, was an epic Shakespearean
tale of betrayal, and now there was no distinction in
that building and it was at that point I thought “Jesus,
I’ve never even thought about the Indian casino
as a social force.” I only saw them in terms of
money but I never even saw it as a community hall. You
know, “white and red, united in vice.” I
thought, “you know, wow, who knew?” It never
had even occurred to me. And then when I saw Jay Leno
walking through the other casino I thought “Oh,
Jesus, you know, we are talking about old problems,
and we have to stop.”
Now the question is “what the hell do we do
with our money? And what the hell the do the tribes
with money do to help the tribes who don’t have
a casino located on a major interstate freeway? “So,
we have to stop talking about all our oppression, and
start talking about our social responsibilities. So,
its that kind of stuff. I can’t see us as an oppressed
group anymore, I can’t. Not when we have this
hard fought, and hard won, special status. We are sovereign
nations, and we want to be treated as such, and we have
to start acting as such. I mean diplomacy. Good works.
Foreign aid.
RC: It comes back to class and all
those invisible structures that maintain that system.
You’re one of those exceptions to the rule that
people point to. It’s “Look at Sherman.
He was on the reservation, and now he’s a successful
professional and therefore anybody can do it. Class
barriers can be broken, that kind of thing. That must
be kind of a hard thing for you to negotiate, because
it’s like, “Yeah, that’s true, but
at the same time it’s not true for everyone. There
are the individual exceptions and then there are the
systems that keep everybody down. How do you…?
ALEXIE: Well, first of all, I mean
you have to talk about in a number of ways. First of
all, it does point to one of the greatnesses of the
United States is that you know in reality tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people have
broken through class barriers, so it is possible. Also,
the structures are set up to make it extremely difficult,
but who its possible for…
RC: but then you look at the actual
data, and class mobility has actually gone down,
ALEXIE: Yeah. The United States is
a meritocracy for the wildly talented. So, you know,
that sounds arrogant, but I am wildly talented and so
…
RC: Oh, I would have used the word
genius, but you know …
ALEXIE: I won’t go that far.
RC: (laughs) Wildly talented is as
far as you’ll go.
ALEXIE: That’s as far as I
go with my self-involvement. That’s as narcissistic
as I will get. So, that’s true, you look around.
Especially in those fields where there are absolute
meritocracies, like the arts, professional athletics,
you known, are dominated by poor people.
RC: Because it’s one of the
few avenues they have to really smash through.
ALEXIE: And you can’t judge
somebody’s jumpshot.
RC: And the odds are maybe a bit
better that winning the lottery, but it’s still
the fucking lottery.
ALEXIE: So, it’s a meritocracy
for the wildly talented, but the thing is, once you
start moving out of that group, the wildly talented,
you start getting to the average folks, that’s
when it becomes huge issue, because that’s where
money and class really plays a part. I teach college
classes. Trust me. There are all sorts of upper class
and middle class mediocrities doing really well in college.
Who get in there only because of their privileges. So,
the issue is, how do we help? You can’t judge
an entire system by one group of people. It’s
not a meritocracy because this group of people have
found a way to succeed. But the reverse of that also
shows the degree that there is some wonderful stuff
here, because a group of people does succeed, so we
have to broaden our idea of who we help. For me it comes
down again to class-based affirmative action, not race-based.
Class-based affirmative action.
RC: How come I’ve never heard
that phrase before? I mean, that’s sort of obvious,
once you think of it, isn’t it?.
ALEXIE: To some people. You know
who believes in class-based affirmative action?
RC: Rush Limbaugh?
ALEXIE: Bill O’Reilly. So I
agree with Bill O’Reilly! Omigod! What’s
wrong with me? For me the argument becomes autobiographical.
My children, my Native American children, whose parents,
you know, wife with a Masters’, and me. We are
in the top 5 to 10% of income in the United States.
I’m in the upper tax bracket in the United States.
If there is anybody out there who thinks my children
will have more problems getting into college than sons
the children of Boeing swing-shift worker, they’re
idiots and they’re racists. A white farm town
kid, a white kid from Selkirk or Republic, white kid
from Blain, a white kid from Anacortes or Aberdeen…
RC: Yeah, in terms of opportunity
class trumps race.
ALEXIE: Yeah, you know, and class-based
would cover all those victims of race as well. And then
we eliminate the discussion of race as the primary tactic.
I mean, I paraphrase MLK Jr. “I measure people’s
chances not by the contents of their character but by
the contents of their refrigerators. How much food is
in the fucking house? That determines it.
RC: Coming back to Flight …
(Sherman laughs) Yeah. That was a really great jag.
ALEXIE: I’m not known for that.
RC: (Laughs) Yeah. Well. I really
liked the book; I don’t know what the reviewers’
problem was.
ALEXIE: Sherman shrugged, transcriber,
an ambiguous shrug. We’re not sure what it meant.
RC: You have this character slipping
around in timeline and gaining these different perspectives.
And he gets insight into his own issues by seeing it
though different eyes. I sort of read into that the
Buddhist idea of individuality being an illusion, and
I’m wondering if that’s just something I’m
bringing to it or if you had that idea as well?
ALEXIE: Wow…Buddhism. I mean,
it’s not exclusively a Buddhist concept, but yeah,
the notion of there being multiple sides of a story.
You know this book started off, the original impulse
was a watching a 9/11 documentary a couple years back.
And there was one that focused on one of the flight
instructors and as I was watching it I was stunned by
the fact that either they’ve remained silent,
which I think is probably the case, because how do you
even talk about it? Or was it that nobody has ever even
thought about talking to them. And this guy was being
interviewed and he was very emotional. And I remember.
And I don’t think I invented this part, but I
think he was a German immigrant. I think he was first
or second generation. He still had a heavy German accent.
I don’t know if I invented that or not. He was
sitting there talking about you know about the two guys
he taught. “They were friends…and he would
come to my apartment, and we would drink and talk and
tell stories and talk about hopes and dreams and sometimes
he’d be too drunk to drive home so he would sleep
on my couch.” That is a personal betrayal and
an epic crime. It just devastated me, so I thought I’d
want to do a fictional version of a pilot who ended
up teaching a terrorist how to use a plan as a weapon.
And I wrote and then I looked at it, and it was strong
enough. And then I thought, well what other parts of
stories, of familiar stories haven’t been told,
what other characters have been missing inside the narratives,
and at the same time, I reread Slaughterhouse-Five.
So, put it in a blender. And then I started writing
other arrows. It always bothered me, for instance, with
the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier
case. I reflexively supported Leonard Peltier until
very recently. Just because, you know, I am fully aware
of what the FBI is capable of in this country, and has
always been capable of in this country. But then I actually
looked at what happened that day on the Pine Ridge Res.
Two FBI agents holed up, at the compound. I have no
problem believing they shot first. Whatever happened,
there was a gunfight. The FBI agents were mortally wounded,
defenseless, and one, two or three — depending
on the stories — people, walked down the hill
100 yards, went around the cars, stood over the FBI
agents, and shot them in the face. By any definition
of the term, that is a crime.
RC: It’s an execution.
ALEXIE: If you believe that was happening
at Pine Ridge was a war, and therefore both sides were
protecting something. If you even believe AIM was practicing
self-defense that day, in the context of war, still,
it couldn’t be self-defense. Because the FBI agents
were no longer capable of harming anybody. It was war,
the FBI agents were no longer able to fight. So there
was no self-defense anymore, and they were defenseless
enemy combatants. So it was a war crime. So one of those
moments when you realize, oh shit, I have been supporting
a war criminal.
RC: Well, it’s a great example
of a morally ambiguous situation, where the whole issue
of being of a tribe or not affects your ability to see
what’s really going on. I mean, you’re right.
On the one side was GOON, which was horrible, but on
the other side, AIM certainly had its totally thuggish
aspects as well, which I thought certainly came across
in the way that you set it up in the book.
ALEXIE: Which was the fictionalized
version of seventies activism where the so called good
guys, what do I call it in the book? IRON, Indigenous
Rights Now. Two activists work with the FBI to kill
another Indian. So two IRON guys are acting as double
agents, which happened. There is evidence, anecdotal
and otherwise of AIM members cooperating with the FBI.
It happened with the Black Panthers. It happened with
Chicano movements. Because certain members of AIM, not
all of them, a lot of them did a lot of great stuff,
but because certain more violent members of AIM and
I share the same ethnicity, I automatically reflexively
assume that we shared the same moral system. And we
don’t. I have an entirely different moral system
than Leonard Peltier. Russell Means. Dennis Banks. I
have a different moral system. And if you push and look,
I would say that most of the people, and it’s
white liberals, almost all of the white liberals who
support the Free Leonard Peltier thing, if they really
examined it, would realize how different their moral
system, about violence and guns, is from the people
they are trying to support.
RC: So, I assume then that you don’t
regard the Matthiasson book then as the definitive account?
ALEXIE: No.
RC: Is there a source then, that
…
ALEXIE: No. It’s a combination
of reading this side’s version and that side’s
version. One of the facts you can’t get around
is that the FBI agents were shot in the face when they
were defenseless. That’s a pretty hard fact.
RC: That’s a tough one to get
around isn’t it?
ALEXIE: Yeah, so where do you go
from there? After that, it’s all politics, and
its all moral relativism. But I’m going to take
the firm moral stance here that it was wrong. Regardless
of why the FBI was there, what happened was that two
defenseless human beings were shot in the face. And
I get in trouble for it.
Q; I’ll bet you do.
ALEXIE: I’ve had people yell
out, “Fuck you, Sherman!” at readings and
performances, which is fun. And lately too, that same
relativism is extended. In Flight I write about terrorism
and the idea of terror. I don’t really go into
it, but I’m really disturbed by the left’s
reaction to fundamental Islam. I’m disturbed that
they’d rather spend more time calling George Bush,
a democratically elected President, who is gone in a
couple of years, than …
RC: Do you think that tribalism is
hardwired into us? Because it seems so natural and inevitable
that we resort to these simple formulations that the
enemy of my enemy is my friend?
ALEXIE: Yeah, and it’s so crazy
simple. And I get grief for it. I got grief the other
morning on KUOW with Steve Scher, and it colors my reviews
and my interviews, and I think it’s because I’ve
assaulted a sort of a lefty sacred cow. People call
bush Hitler and say that he’s a great evil, and
I think, “Really? I’ve yet to see him decapitating
anybody on the Internet. Or advocating soldier suicide
bombing. I’ve yet to see him advocating for the
capital punishment of gay teenagers as they do in Iran.
Or burke wearing, and the stoning of adulterers. It
kills me that we spend so much energy in this country
fighting against minor league versions of the hatreds
that are major league in other countries. We can’t
admit that there are serious problems within Muslim
countries right now that are causing world problems.
RC: It seems that one of the reasons
we make so little progress as a movement is that we
are always so distracted. We have a very tough time
focusing our energies. I’m curious what you think.
If progressives were to focus like a laser on three
things that actually mattered, they would be?
ALEXIE: Number one would be a massive
pay raise for elementary school teachers.
RC: Ok. You just made a lot of friends.
ALEXIE: Yeah, because by the time
sixth grade rolls around, everything is pretty much
determined. Second thing would probably be affirmative
action as a class-based system. That would be a major
philosophy change. One of the jokes I make is about
liberals marching for themselves. It’s almost
always the case. So let’s start marching for people
unlike ourselves. And the fact that we’re no supporting
the dreams of a small-town Republican poor kid seems
pretty shocking. The joke I have is that we have this
liberal cause giving tree, and you have to pull one
down once a year, and you have to fight for that cause,
no matter what you pull down. But it can’t be
your own or have anything to do with your political
beliefs. So you’d have like, black transsexuals
marching for Iowa corn farmers. And gay marriage advocates
marching for ethanol.
The third one would be, probably … there’s
all sorts of things swirling through my head but what
would it be? The thing I really like, and it has been
successful but it’s small, is Americorp. So a
bipartisan Americorp. I think it would be easy to pull
Republicans into that sort of thing because it falls
into all of those notions of the Christian missionary.
So, mandatory national service, after high school, for
two years. Whether it’s military, or social work.
RC: It’s interesting, because
each of those things that you have named are universal,
in that they would help everybody, and, they would also
each help to undermine the rigidity of the class system.
I’ve always said that the way to attack class
difference is to stop tying school funding to the tax
base of the neighborhood the school is in.
ALEXIE: One of the things I hate
is the argument against the Sonics, because I want the
Sonics to stay, and the argument is that there are “more
important things.” And that pretends that the
money that the Sonics use is the money that would be
used for education, which is not true, but it also pretends
that the politicians are interested in funding education.
RC: They’ve figured that one
out haven’t they?
ALEXIE: Yeah. The schools are under
funded now. I mean, Washington State is down in to 40s,
for funding for students. We’re ahead, I think,
of Mississippi and Arkansas. But the notion that Democrats
or Republicans are somehow vitally interested in education
… which they are not because it’s not politically
lucrative. Helping out schools and teachers gives them
no political capital, or power, or influence.
RC: Why?
ALEXIE: There’s no fundraising
base. There’s no mass movement of teachers to
fund political campaigns. They don’t have any
money. There’s no CEOs, no corporate honchos involved
in schools that help politicians raise money, and with
charter schools, public schools, private schools, it’s
so divided, the notion of what schools should be, there’s
no organized constituency. There’s nothing lucrative
in it for any politician to fight for education. It’s
all lip service. Even my kids. They live in a nice neighborhood,
and they go away to school in an even nicer neighborhood,
and that school, in an upper middle class predominately
white neighborhood, we have to have fundraisers to address
unmet needs. We have overcrowded classrooms.
RC: Speaking of kids, I found the
whole foster kid narrative in Flight very moving, and
I’m wondering where your experience in this is.
How is this an issue that you are close to?
ALEXIE: My parents were a foster
family on the res. So we raised, at various points,
a number of various cousins and tribal members. During
my first 18 years on the planet we had seven or eight
different kids living with us. And because our house
was pretty much the safest sanest one around, we had
plenty of kids around all the time no matter what.
RC: Were the foster kids’ shoes
as good as yours?
ALEXIE: (laughs) We all had shit
shoes. That’s what gets me mad about the negative
reviews. They don’t know the world I guess. That’s
a brilliant friggin observation, that can only come
with experience. In flight the kid says that. You can
always know what kind of foster home you’re in
by who has what kind of shoes. That’s big. No.
We all had Kmart shit shoes with the sizes on the toes.
My nickname, I think, in 3rd grade was 6 1/2, because
my shoe size was right on my shoes (laughs).
RC: Is there anything in particular
that you’ve been either inspired or appalled by
lately?
ALEXIE: The big thing I’ve
been appalled by is the pessimism of white liberals,
and I constantly remind them that they are the most
privileged, educated, powerful group of human beings
that have ever existed.
RC: Yeah. Pessimism really is a luxury
we can’t afford.
ALEXIE: Yes. And their romanticism
is also dangerous. It’s a significant portion
of that group of people who thought Ralph Nader should
be President. I don’t blame Republicans for voting
for Bush. I blame the far left for voting for Nader.
If that romantic bullshit had never happened, George
Bush would not be President. We wouldn’t be in
Iraq. We wouldn’t be dealing with these numerous
and debilitating blows to social programs Alito and
John Roberts wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court.
And yet there’s still a significant percentage
of them out there, and they come to my readings, and
expect the Indian boy to pat them on the back, who think
that Al Gore and George W. Bush are the same guy. Their
privilege makes them stupid. So I guess I’m always
appalled by the stupidity of the privileged.
RC: I’m wondering about something
I’ve noticed about your books. Not to give the
ending of Flight away, but it’s sort of an upbeat
ending to a very dark book. I see that in a lot of your
work. It’s not like you’re at all oblivious
to the horrors that are out there, but at the same time,
there is a kind of fundamental optimism that often comes
through. Why do you think it is that you are built that
way?
ALEXIE: Part of it has to do with
the combination of Christian and native faith. Jesus
and my grandma. So, it’s that partnership. Everyday
I see dozens of amazing moments. Dozens of amazing interactions.
Last night, I was shopping. I’m an insomniac,
so I went grocery shopping late. I was in a 24-hour
store. There was this old black guy. I didn’t
see him and he didn’t see me, and we both reached
for the same loaf of French bread. We laughed. And he
has this raspy voice (imitates) “I love this French
bread, ‘cuz even when I make just a baloney sandwich
it makes me feel special.” So, first, just the
luxury of being in a grocery store at 2 in the morning,
I never discount that, and the beautiful interaction
with a stranger over a loaf of French bread, how could
you not have hope for humanity?
Contact Tim Harris: rchange@speakeasy.net
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