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Native American poet, novelist, and short story writer Sherman Alexie is perhaps best known as the screenwriter for the popular motion picture Smoke Signals (1998). Alexie’s first work of literature was The Business of Fancy Dancing: Stories and Poems (1992). His fiction includes First Indian on the Moon (1993), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), Reservation Blues (1995), and Indian Killer (1996). His volumes of poetry include Old Shirts and New Skins (1993), The Summer of Black Widows (1996), and Water Flowing Home: Poems (1996). Alexie’s screenplay for Smoke Signals was based on stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Freelance writer and film critic Tom Keogh interviewed Alexie in March 1999 for Encarta Encyclopedia.
Keogh: Let's talk about your life, where you come from.
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Alexie: I come from the 'rez'—the Spokane Indian Reservation [around Wellpinit, Washington]. I grew up there, and lived there until I was 18. I lived on and off the reservation for the next six or seven years, during college. [Alexie attended Gonzaga University in Spokane and Washington State University in Pullman.] I lived in Spokane after I graduated from college, working at a high school exchange program. I thought I'd do that kind of job to support my writing, day jobs that require no emotional investment beyond eight hours a day, where I wouldn't need to bring work home. I didn't want to be part of management. I didn't want to be anybody important at a job. I wanted to be completely replaceable. That's what I thought I would be doing for most of my life, and writing. Then I got an NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grant, and my first book got a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review. I quit my job and haven't had a real one since.
Keogh: When did writing enter your life?
Alexie: Books have always been in my life. My dad loved books and most of what he read was pulp: Westerns, The Punisher, Executioner, spy novels, mysteries. I grew up loving books, emulating my father's love for books. But nobody ever showed me a book written by an Indian, not even one piece of a poem, nothing. It didn't even exist for me as a possibility. I remember my oldest sister, Mary, who loved books as well, suggesting to me that I be a writer. I was eight or nine. I just laughed because I didn't know anybody [who was a writer]. I was going to be a pediatrician. I loved math and science. I got to college, couldn't handle human anatomy, and was looking around for options and took a poetry-writing class for fun. I thought it would be an easy grade.
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Keogh: Poetry was your way in?
Alexie: Yes, that's where I started. I took the class, and honestly, I just thought it would be an easy grade. I've always been able to write papers, and I’ve always had a talent for writing love letters. I thought I would be writing love poems that I could give to my girlfriend at the time and impress her. I completely underestimated poetry and what it would do to me, and the realm of possibility for it. I took the class and I was hooked about ten minutes after reading my first contemporary poem. I'd never seen a contemporary poem. I'd probably never read a poem written past T. S. Eliot.
Keogh: Do you remember what the poem was?
Alexie: Adrian C. Lewis—he's a Paiute poet. The first line is, 'Oh, Uncle Adrian, I'm in the reservation of my mind.' That line comes to me every day, because I am, I still am, in all the good and bad ways.
Keogh: Who were the other poets who influenced you?
Alexie: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, James Wright, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg. The reason contemporary poetry exists in the way it does is because of Howl.
Keogh: When did prose enter the picture?
Alexie: I took a story-writing class in college and didn't enjoy it that much. In the poetry-writing classes, people were pretty dedicated to poetry, some of them terrible writers. I think poets are obsessed with poetry, regardless of the quality of their work. Everyone wrote poems, and had a notebook stuffed in their back pocket probably, and they do it and do it and do it. What I found in the fiction-writing class in college were people who thought about doing it for the money. It's all toward some goal, which nobody thinks about in poetry.
Keogh: Nobody was thinking about getting a poetry agent.
Alexie: Exactly. I remember that class. I like genre work, but it was all a bunch of genre writers, science fiction writers. Essentially it was 12 nerdy guys trying to rewrite The Hobbit. Here I was trying to write what I write now, stories about Indian guys struggling to find their identity, and it didn't quite fit in. I got into massive arguments with everybody in the class because they couldn't even admit the idea of a realist fiction. They had never read it; they didn't understand it. I hated fiction—I didn't think I would ever want to write fiction. I had a few stories that ended up in my first book, so people assumed that I wrote fiction. When I got the front-page review, editors and agents asked me if I wrote short stories and said they could get me a deal if I wrote fiction, so I said yes. I wrote most of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in about a month and a half.
Keogh: Did it just come out as a burst?
Alexie: One after the other. A few of the stories, aside from fixing typos and some grammar, are exactly what I wrote.
Keogh: Did you rewrite?
Alexie: No. In some stories you can tell, and others you can't. “Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” which was a long, sort of surreal story, is a first draft, straight out of the computer. It's one of my favorite works of mine, and I read it and think, 'Damn, I don't think I’d ever better do that again!' When I turned that book in, they asked me if I ever wrote novels, and I said yes. I signed a two-book deal with a book of short stories and a novel to be named later without even knowing how the hell I was going to write a novel. I got pushed into it by economics.
Keogh: Did you ever have a good prose fiction teacher?
Alexie: Nobody set me on fire in college for short stories. It wasn't until I started writing them that I started reading more and more. I read Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and I started seeing the possibilities of the form. Then I fell in love with it.
Keogh: At what point can you send a manuscript out, if you are still not happy with it?
Alexie: I would hang onto something forever. My goal is to retire at age 50 or so and rewrite and republish the first book and then quit—just go off and coach high school basketball.
Keogh: Is there a finite amount that any one person has to say?
Alexie: Yes. I think if you look at most careers, you'll see that most people wrote those five books in a decade, maybe, and anything before or after that time period is awful.
Keogh: Do these books tend to be written at a younger age?
Alexie: Yes, in one’s 20s and 30s.
Keogh: Why do you think that is?
Alexie: I got into trouble during some lectures when I said this—everybody started booing and hissing—but art is a young person's game. It requires so much energy and so much gall. I think we tend to get more conservative as we get older, and safer. And the second you get safe or conservative, it's all done.
Keogh: You are currently considering taking on the role of director, in addition to that of screenwriter. Does one affect the other?
Alexie: Well, it's going to buy me time to work. That's the whole struggle for any writer, any artist. I'm a poet and short-story writer who writes novels so I can make a living. Now I'm a poet and short-story writer who's writing novels and screenplays to make a living. I can imagine giving up novels quite easily.
Keogh: How do you have the time to work on all your projects?
Alexie: I don't sleep. I have been working completely on screenplays and various projects for almost two years now. I [recently] returned to my short stories. I had forgotten just how much I love knowing that exactly what I write will end up in the book, and 100 years from now those words will be exactly the same. There's no such thing in movies, which is a complete collaboration.
Keogh: Do you work mostly at night?
Alexie: Yes, I sleep four hours a night. I don't have a real job, so that's the good thing—I just write. The big adjustment has been with the new child. Before, my spouse and I were very independent people. I had a lot of time during the course of a day to work. Now with a child, my time has been cut by 80 percent.
Keogh: Do you spend a great deal of time with your child?
Alexie: Yes, and I want to. That's not the problem. The problem now is wanting to go to the computer.
Keogh: What was your formative period?
Alexie: The 1970s and early 1980s. The Brady Bunch through REO Speedwagon. [Alexie was born in 1966.]
Keogh: What is the breadth of the pop culture that you have absorbed? Are you influenced by pop culture from the 1950s or previously?
Alexie: I suppose it spans my lifetime. Mid-’60s, middle-era Beatles is really where my obsessions start. For the ’50s I could only tell you the stereotypes; I couldn't tell you anything really specific about it. The earliest TV shows were probably The Fugitive or The Prisoner. Those kind of TV shows from the late ’60s or early ’70s are where I began.
Keogh: Did that create a mulch for you, something you could draw from?
Alexie: I am constantly making references to pop culture minutiae. It's not only American pop culture, but also traditional stories. Mike Lookinland [the actor who played Bobby on The Brady Bunch] and Coyote [a mythical trickster in Native American religions] are in my database. Eve Plumb [the actress who played Jan on The Brady Bunch] and Stephen King—I can quote huge passages by memory. As well as having a Catholic education—it's a complicated mix. That's what colonialism does to an indigenous person. To succeed in the white world, I had to be better at their culture than they are. I grabbed it, held on to it, and absorbed it with all of my heart, because I knew that was the way I would survive.
Keogh: What did you consider survival to be?
Alexie: Having a job, eating, living to age 60 at least. I had low goals. I was an Indian, and a reservation Indian at that. The life expectancy of a Native American male just went past 50 years of age. Half the people I knew growing up are dead or dying. Having a job was a huge thing. Dreaming about getting into college was a huge thing. There have been seven Spokane Indians in the 20th century who graduated from college. My dreams compared to everybody else were pretty small, but on the reservation they were enormous.
Keogh: Did people on the reservation understand what you wanted?
Alexie: I don't fit in quite anywhere, let alone on the rez. I know how to play the game. I know how to make small talk at parties no matter who the company is. But to the extent of feeling like I belong or am trying to belong? No. Certainly in a tribal situation like a reservation, an individualistic eccentric is viewed with disdain, if not outright hostility, by a lot of people. Striving toward success would be viewed as striving toward being white. But the great irony of that is that I could never be white no matter how successful I got. Even if I pretended to be white.
Keogh: Do you think that sort of insulation on a reservation works against the community's greater good?
Alexie: Well, it works against those who are not traditional. Those who lead traditional lives and practice traditional ceremonies thrive in a reservation setting, where they are protected from the rest of the world. Those who don't practice those traditional religions and ceremonies are the ones who really suffer in the reservation setting.
Keogh: Do you go back for family reasons?
Alexie: I visit home quite a bit.
Keogh: Do you go back to revisit touchstones—things that matter to you about having lived there?
Alexie: At certain times, but it's mostly my family I go home to see. I go home and sit in the house for three or four days at a time and just hang out, talk, and watch TV. That's what my family does: watch TV together and play board games. That's the family culture.
Keogh: Let's talk about movies. Do you remember your first significant movie experience?
Alexie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Keogh: Where did you see it?
Alexie: At the Y Drive-In in Spokane with my mom and dad. They were sitting on either side of me, I was in the middle, we were sharing a big tub of popcorn.
Keogh: What was that like?
Alexie: I was terrified, of course, but I loved it, being scared. I remember thinking, 'White people are crazy.' That always fascinated me, the things white people did to each other. You never hear about Indians taking chainsaws after each other, eating each other. I remember being fascinated by that, sort of anthropologically, even as a seven–year-old. That was my first conscious thought about a movie. I didn't sit there as a seven–year-old and think, 'Wow, the power of cinema!' but I was amazed that something could make me feel that strongly. I was growing up in a pretty rocky environment—I mean, a rez, and my parents were both drinkers. There was a lot of partying. For a seven–year-old to be in the midst of that, it was a pretty crazy life. To protect yourself from that, you become numb. You try not to feel anything, so you really cut yourself off from your emotions. But Texas Chainsaw Massacre did not allow me to remain numb.
Keogh: Did that experience begin a pattern of that kind of relationship with movies?
Alexie: I think it did. It pushed me outside of my world, it pushed me away from being numb. Books did the same thing, but movies are much more visceral. Movies became my drug, in a way.
Keogh: What were the other important movies that you saw when you were young?
Alexie: Westerns in general. I loved Westerns. Little Big Man in particular, The Searchers in particular. Both of those at a very early age. They are really opposite sides of the same coin: a very liberal, progressive view of the West, and a right-wing, fascist view of the West—and both of them accurate. I began to place my politics, even at that early age, realizing I was way more on the side of lefty than righty—especially [compared with people] on my reservation. You'd think that Indians would align themselves with Democrats or liberals, but that's not the case at all. Indians are very conservative. I started seeing, even at a very early age, where my politics and world view were taking me. One way I was removing myself from the rez was by becoming this seven-year-old Communist. Like The Grapes of Wrath, the movie and the book, which I experienced [at about] the same time. I started to see how it wasn't just Indians who had been oppressed and objectified by rich people. Movies taught me about class issues.
Keogh: What were your thoughts about John Wayne's character in The Searchers?
Alexie: He reminded me of every BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] white guy who came to the rez.
Keogh: Is that right? They were angry?
Alexie: Angry and bitter at being there. Teachers as well, Indian health service workers as well. Many of them—not all of them—were only there because they had to be. Their anger and frustration played itself out in all sorts of ways. Dentists would torture people. I always thought Ethan Edwards [Wayne's character in The Searchers] was a dentist—that outright hatred and racism. Growing up on the reservation and in the border communities, and playing games and getting yelled at and getting pennies thrown at you while you play…I knew many Ethan Edwards. Getting to see him on-screen and heroic was really interesting. Through my Indian view I saw him as a despicable character, but the movie was still enjoyable. I still see the movie that way. I think he's a sociopath who falls apart by the end of the film, who has completely lost all connection with human beings. I think that would be Martin Scorsese's read on the film as well, after making Taxi Driver, which is an urban remake of The Searchers.
Keogh: Do you think white America can maintain Western mythology as part of its identity and still grow and get past racism?
Alexie: What I think is happening is a sort of cultural apartheid. I think most white people are going to accept the fact that the true nature of this country is colonialism. There is always going to be a hard-core cultural elite, left-wingers and right-wingers alike, who refuse to accept it. It's happening now: Harold Bloom [literary critic at Yale University] and his ilk. The Ivy Leaguers are circling the wagons against the multiculturalist savages, and I think that's going to happen increasingly. I think that just as white South Africa is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the world, academics are going to become increasingly irrelevant. Demographically speaking, we're going to breed whites out of existence. The country is getting browner and browner. In 20 years, 30 years, more than half the country will speak Spanish as a first language. In 50 years, white Americans will be a distinct minority. I think that a hundred years from now, 80 percent of the country will be brown.
Keogh: What happens then? Will we have an integrated society by default?
Alexie: There will be no option. It's hard to be racist, actively racist and horrible when you are related to those you've been racist toward. You can't objectify those people who surround you when you actually start loving them. I think that's what happens. The Ghost Dance is about sex. It was Wovoka's prophecy in the late 19th century that if all Indians did this dance, all white people would disappear. [Wovoka was a Native American prophet who predicted that the West could be reclaimed through ritual dance.] It wasn't really a dance, it was sex. That's my interpretation.
Keogh: Do you think that it is inevitable that more people who are living on reservations will move off of reservations?
Alexie: About 60 percent now live in urban areas. It was probably half and half 20 years ago. Reservations aren't going to cease to exist. I think it's always going to be around 60, 70 percent. And there's much movement back and forth. I'd say that one-third of Indians are always moving back and forth…
Keogh: How do you make your characters come alive?
Alexie: It's through dialogue, the way they talk. I think people always distinguish themselves that way in real life. I'm not a big fan of interior states. In that way, I think my writing has always been cinematic. I'm not trying to interpret people's behavior as much as saying here's what they did, and then, let's hear them talk.
Keogh: Mystery writer Elmore Leonard says he likes to give each of his characters a sound. Do you try to do that, too?
Alexie: A song. I build soundtracks for every character, the songs I think they would love. I don't know how that finds its way into the work other than subconsciously, because I don't really mention it. But I have tapes for every character in every book, different ones. Before I start writing a book, I make a soundtrack that feels right.
Keogh: A soundtrack for each character?
Alexie: For the book in general and then for each character. As the book comes along, generally I build the soundtrack for each character.
Keogh: Let’s talk about the road that led to making Smoke Signals.
Alexie: After Lone Ranger came out, I got movie interest from various people, real and not real, huge and small, and I didn't like any of them.
Keogh: Did you have a lot of meetings about the film?
Alexie: About 10 to 20 meetings. I went to L.A. a couple of times, talked on the phone with people, and didn't like anybody. It's amazing [what they'd say]: 'I got a great new idea, let's have this Indian have a vision! Let's have an Indian go up on a mountain. A great new idea!' I wasn't interested in any of it. I figured I would wait for an Indian director. There are a few out there who are semiestablished, mostly in the documentary field, but none of them called me. The Indian movie people were making loincloth movie after loincloth movie, and why none of them have ever tried to make a film with Indian writers, I don't know. They never contacted me.
Keogh: When did the film's director, Chris Eyre, come aboard?
Alexie: Chris finally called me from NYU [New York University]. Lots of people call me and tell me they're Indian. Then Eyre said he was adopted out and raised by a white family. I heard that and thought, 'He's going to be some blond guy, one sixty-fourth Cherokee, raised by his adopted family in Oregon.' But I happened to be going to New York the next week, so we met for lunch and he was 45 minutes late for this big, important lunch. I thought, 'Well, he might be Indian.' He showed up, and I don't know if you've seen him, but I knew he was Indian when he walked in the door. We started talking and he was a nice guy. I saw a couple of his short films, which were good. I hired him on and we created a partnership. Separately, the Sundance Institute had been interested in both of us, him as a director and me as a writer, so as soon as they heard we were working together, they opened up a place for us to come the next summer and work on the project. We went there, and he wrote about five pages based on one of my stories and grafted that on to 80 pages of an Indian rodeo screenplay he'd written years before, and we went with that. He improvised scenes, he handed people the short stories, and he and the people would improvise scenes. Nothing that we did there in terms of writing or scenes was in the movie, but it got us working together. I came home after Sundance and finished the screenplay, and we went through a couple of sets of producers where things didn't work out. We finally ended up with Shadowcatcher here. [Shadowcatcher Entertainment is a film production company based in Seattle.] Actually, the very first meeting I had regarding movies ever was with Shadowcatcher. They were interested in Lone Ranger and Tonto—a month after it was published, I had a meeting with them. Four years later it ended up working out.
Keogh: Smoke Signals got picked up by Miramax?
Alexie: We made it, filmed it independently, and Miramax bought it. We shot it in May of 1997, and worked and edited all of that summer and the beginning of fall. We played it in October for distributors in New York and L.A., and a few came up and wanted it. It's great to see, though, the ones who were insulting. It's great to see them now, with the movies that they did buy flopping. Miramax wanted it bad, so they stepped up and bought it. And as we all know, it did well.
Keogh: It played at the Sundance Film Festival.
Alexie: Yes, it was in competition [at Sundance], and it won the Filmmaker's Trophy and the Audience Award.
Keogh: Were you pleased overall with the experience?
Alexie: At the beginning, no, because I had to adjust to a collaborative atmosphere. As soon as I adjusted and treated the project like the whole thing was a team effort, I was very into it. I played basketball for many years competitively and I loved it, so I just thought of this as a basketball team. We had arguments and fights, just like teammates do, and it ended up being really fun. I'm amazed at how little the people who review movies—even the most esoteric film journals in this country—actually know about the filmmaking process. They always want to attribute everything to a director. Chris did a great job and I'm proud of him. But there were moments when he couldn't think of what to do. And I stepped in, or a producer, or an actor, or an editor, or a director of photography. There were moments when he willingly handed it over for somebody else's interpretation, or we gave it back to him. I haven't been on other film sets, but I can't imagine it's any different. Especially when you get to larger films, where the people around the director get more and more experienced and have these huge careers and talents of their own.
Keogh: A new director versus someone on the crew with 20 years’ experience.
Alexie: Exactly. The thing that really gets me is you get a first-time director on these movies paired with a director of photography who's made 50 movies. Who do you think shot the movie? That's not to disparage the directors. It's probably the toughest job on the set. It's the job with the most stress, I think. I would be doing interviews with journalists and thinking, “You don’t have any idea how films are made.” It’s a series of accidents, wonderful and bad things. There is no way of knowing at any particular moment who’s responsible for something in a film. If you were going to do real film scholarship, you’d have to talk to at least eight people. It’s not sexy to talk to a film editor. It’s even less sexy to talk to a producer or set designer. But there are always at least eight people working individually to create something. That’s what amazed me. The credits on a film don’t reflect how films are made. I’m trying to buck the unions to get the credits on a film I direct to reflect how films are made. I want to go back to the old style, where everybody shares a card: director, director of photography, producer, writer, editor, composer, set designer, and costume designer. They’re the people most responsible for making a film. Actors should get their own card. They’re the ones taking all the emotional chances. Everybody else gets to hide.
Keogh: That will never happen.
Alexie: I’m working on an essay about this right now. We think of everyone in Hollywood as being overwhelmingly liberal and progressive in their politics. Yet they allow the credits to be totalitarian and dictatorial in nature.
Keogh: So much of it is about power.
Alexie: And huge egos. That’s not to say I don’t have an ego. I have a tremendous ego. But I’m certainly willing to recognize and applaud the efforts of everybody. In basketball, you look just as great during a pass—a beautiful behind-the-back pass on a fast break—as you do on the dunk to finish it.
Keogh: What was it like for you adapting Smoke Signals from your prose fiction?
Alexie: I can say this now since the film is out. I was very crass in writing [the script]. I knew I made it work as a mainstream comedy. We, as Indian filmmakers, did not have the luxury of being obscure.
Keogh: You needed a hit.
Alexie: We needed a hit, or we would never get another chance. We needed to appeal to mainstream interests, and I wrote it that way.
Keogh: Did you feel the burden of underappreciated Indian filmmakers on your back?
Alexie: Well, Indians—period. It’s a decent film, a good film, an entertaining film. But its importance in the history of cinema goes way beyond the quality of the film. This is the first film. It's literally our Great Train Robbery [groundbreaking silent motion picture made in 1903]. It’s the beginning. We proved it can be done. The real effect is that in ten years, the idea of an Indian filmmaker isn’t going to be strange. There will be three or four of them a year, maybe. You’ll be interviewing somebody and asking them what their first, formative experience was. And they’ll say, Smoke Signals. Hopefully.
Appears in
Westerns; Native American Literature; American Literature: Poetry; Motion Pictures, History of; Alexie, Sherman; American Literature: Prose; Native Americans of North America
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