Final Paper NAL
Dan Feuerbach
English 245B
4-21-06
Paper Two
Corruption of Native Culture by Whites as Evidenced by the Guitar
Every culture has its own music. From the didgeridoos of Australia to the drums of Africa it can not be denied that music is a vital part of any thriving population. However, in America the guitar symbolizes the ideal musical instrument. Millions of people across the United States own and play this instrument In Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie the guitar that is passed from Robert Johnson to Thomas Builds-the-Fire to Victor Joseph represents the corrupting influence of white culture on Native Americans.
Musicians like Lead Belly, BB King, and Tommy Johnson were the innovators of guitar playing. Without their influence rock music would not be what it is today. While these men were amazing with their instruments, they receive little, if any, recognition by mainstream media. The white counterparts they influenced, however, made millions of dollars and changed the course of music.
For years Robert Plant, Slash, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and Kurt Cobain (to name a few) have been regarded as some of the greatest guitar players of all time; creating riffs that have inspired millions. All these men were white. These white musicians greatest influence began with the old bluesmen.
It must be noted that there are also many minority guitar players who went down the same path. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Know (The Bad Brains) have entered the white-man’s world of mainstream rock and done a successful job of making a name for themselves. It’s not that minority members haven’t become immortal and rich through the music industry, just the majority are white.
In Reservation Blues the “white man’s rock world” is idealized and frowned upon by several characters in the novel. For example, at one point in the novel after the Warm Water sisters join the band, Checkers and Father Arnold are having a conversation. They discuss Junior and Victor’s involvement with the white groupies, Betty and Veronica.
“It’s just that everywhere I look these days, I see white women. We caught Junior and Victor having sex with some white women. They’re always having sex with white women. It makes me hate them” (Alexie 181).
From the first moment the guitar enters the novel, there is foreshadowing that the instrument is a tool of corruption. In the very beginning of the book Robert Johnson, the mythical blues guitarist who allegedly sold his soul to the devil, arrives with the guitar and a heavy heart. As the mystery of Johnson’s dark past become known, a pivotal scene in the novel reveals how the guitar became evil to begin with. After playing the guitar poorly for early bluesman Son House, Johnson wanders to the crossroads where he strikes a legendary bargain. On page one-hundred and sixty-four Johnson meets the Gentleman.
The corruption of blues by whites is symbolized in this passage. To start with, the novel makes a point of mentioning that the Gentleman is “A handsome white man” with “lupine” (wolf-like) eyes. This man isn’t going to lead Johnson anywhere pleasant. After a conversation about what the Gentleman gains from granting Johnson his wish to be the best guitar player, Johnson makes a profound statement about what he loves most in life.
Johnson felt the whip split open the skin on his grandfather’s backs…”Freedom,” Johnson said, “I love freedom…I’ll give you all I got” (Alexie 264).
This is a particularly poignant scene because Johnson gives up what blacks have dreamed of since they arrived in the New World. Just six decades after his people achieve freedom from the white man, he sells his most prized possession to a white man. He regrets this very shortly afterwards. From this point on he is hounded by the guitar, a slave to the white man’s instrument.
The guitar doesn’t just represent loss of freedom. It represents addiction, another classic motif in the rock lifestyle. Many a musician who fell under the spell of the guitar shed his or her mortal coil because of the lifestyle that came along with it. Cobain shot himself, Hendrix overdosed and Richards is a legendary drug abuser. These themes are also present in the language attached to the guitar.
Characters in the novel develop deep feelings toward the guitar that are normally reserved for people. From the start of the book when Thomas first receives the guitar, to its transfer to Victor, the guitar haunts everyone who takes it. Almost everyone who comes in contact with it is haunted by it. After the guitar is smashed in the beginning by Victor Joseph, Thomas begins to cry, which is considered “the worst thing an Indian could do, if he was sober.” When it is transferred to Victor, he immediately falls for it:
He already gave is a name and heard it whisper… (Thomas) saw it snuggle closer to Victor’s body (Alexie 29).
None of the characters know the addictive capabilities of the guitar. Although Johnson manages to dump the guitar off on someone else, it is still is his mind. While he sits on Big Mom’s mountain, trying to figure out what to do next, he feels the pains of withdrawal. He is free again, but the guitar still has a hold of him.
But Johnson was still not comfortable in his safety. He dreamed of that guitar he had left in Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s blue van… (Alexie 174).
The guitar looms over the heads of each character that possesses it. Only when Junior dies does Victor let it go. Until then, Victor still holds onto hope of the guitar returning him to the white man rock lifestyle. Right before the return to the reservation, Victor spies a guitar case and tries to rally the band to try again.
“It’s my guitar, goddamn it. We can start over. We can get the band going again. We don’t need those fucking guys in New York City. We can do it ourselves” (Alexie 259).
Once Junior dies and the guitar is gone, the dream is dead. The characters begin to form plans to move on with their lives. In the wake of his withdrawal, Victor is a shadow of his former self. He wanders around friendless, followed by three dogs. The guitar is gone and so is he.
The key draw of the music industry is the classic trio of sex, drugs and fame. The guitar, in Victor’s hands, symbolizes all of these. At the beginning of the book he is the on who wants to get drunk. Junior goes along, but can control it, as evidenced by babysitting drunken Victor in New York. He is the most excited about the money they can make, and above all else, he is ready to have sex with white women. He views the guitar as the means to these ends.
Junior, Victor’s best friend, describes Victor as a mystery. He thinks Victor doesn’t want anything besides money. He reiterates this with a statement about how money is all Victor talked about. Once the trio decides to create Coyote Springs, the first thought related to being in the band for Victor is being on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Victor wanted money so bad that he always spent it too quick, as if the few dollars in his wallet somehow prevented him from getting more. Money. That’s all Victor talked about (Alexie 18-19).
As the band takes off, two groupies, Betty and Veronica show up. They run a book store called Doppelgangers in Seattle. As soon as Victor gets a chance to hook up with them he takes it. However, he doesn’t fool around with the white women in a gentle manner. While Victor is in bed with Veronica and he tries to convince her to perform oral sex on him. She refuses to, but offers him a hand job instead. Without the guitar he never would have gotten her. In the words of Veronica:
“You’re the best. I mean, you’re an Indian and a guitar player. How much better could you be?” (Alexie 43).
The guitar doesn’t just harm its victims emotionally, it harms them physically. Every time a character plays the guitar some kind of physical harm comes to the character’s hands. Sometimes it is small, mild cuts and it grows in power, starting fires and leaving scars. This is a physical manifestation of what the guitar does to the soul. One of many examples:
Victor wore gloves when he played Robert Johnson’s guitar but still suffered little burns and scratches (Alexie 33).
In the brief transition period between Johnson and Victor, even Thomas gets injured. He receives minor cuts. Despite the small amount of damage, it is very detailed. The cuts are described as being similar to delicate slices from a sharp razor. Within the first seventeen pages of the novel two people are wounded from the guitar, but it is Victor, again, who ends up taking the powers of the guitar too far.
During the initial practices in Irene’s Grocery Store, as previously stated, Victor wears gloves to play. Even with protection the guitar hurts him. Later on in the same chapter the guitar knocks the fillings out of the people who try to protest the guitar. Before leaving for New York, Victor plays the guitar and it gets super intense and sets property on fire. Ultimately, the guitar betrays him.
While recording, the guitar hurts Victor both emotionally and physically at the same time. The band is recording the song that brought them far from home. While everything goes fine at first, the guitar decides to let everyone down. It bucks and twists, then cuts Victor across his palms, going deep enough to draw so much blood that Victor has to wipe his hands on his pants.
The resulting chaos leaves the band broke, hopeless and broken. The rage the guitar instilled in Victor over the course of the novel erupts in a violent outburst in which he throws his guitar at the record company executives. He proceeds to tear the studio apart, grab Junior and go on a drinking binge in a new city.
There is a sharp contrast between Johnson and Victor that needs to be discussed. Both men entered into a similar situation and handled it completely different. The key difference is the reason why each man chose the guitar, and the reason why Johnson was able to break free of the guitar and Victor was consumed by it.
Johnson chose the guitar because he loved music. He wanted to play good because he felt loved on stage. He chose guitar because it was sexier, but ultimately he realizes what matters. In the end of the novel he gets a harmonica from Big Mom and he continues to make music for the sake of making music. He broke free because he was doing what was important to him.
Victor got into music because he wanted to be white. He was selfish in his intention and he chose the promise of the guitar to make him white. The guitar just wanted to use him, which he allowed to happen. He never totally gets it out of his system and ends up broken. He never cared for the music; he just wanted to be something else because of his situation.
Reservation Blues is an interesting book about the search for identity of almost every character in the book trying to fit into the white world of music. Alexie addresses searching for identity in several other books in several other areas of Native life. Particularly who decides how Indian someone is and post Vietnam struggles for identity.
In Alexie’s collection of poems The Business of Fancydancing there is a poem entitled 13/16. This poem is about how the government decides who gets what food and how it the compromise of how Indians get poor food and white people get their mines, dams and culture for museums.
It is done by blood, reservation mathematics, fractions: father (full-blood) + mother (5/8) = son (13/16)./It is done by enrollment number… (Alexie 16).
The cultural friction between Native and white is by no means a new phenomenon. In the book Between Indian and White Worlds (Szasz) the idea of culture juggling as a necessity is addressed. Szasz points to Scotland-England, Australia-England, and Germany-Poland as example of cultural friction. It also says sometimes people within the border cultures have no choice but to balance the two for survival and that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
…these borders have become pathways that link peoples rather than barriers that separate them (Szasz 1).
The book also discusses the fact that not everybody can cross these borders and not everyone should have to. It emphasizes the injustice of forcing people to balance cultures and the unfairness and difficulties faced by people who try to balance. It points to famous in-between Indians who have even come close to death trying to balance the white-Indian worlds, like Tlingit Sarah Dickinson who was forced to choose between the worlds. If she became Christian her people would shun her, if she went back to her people she’d be executed for witchcraft. She chose Christianity to keep her life.
This ties into Reservation Blues because the characters are faced with a similar choice. Thomas, Checkers, Chess, Victor, and Junior become inter-cultural mediators after they win the contest in Seattle. They have impressed the white people and can make money. They chose to move from the reservation to make money. The tribe clamors for them not to come back.
Do we really want people to think the Spokanes are a crazy story teller, a couple of irresponsible drunks, a pair of Flathead Indians, and two white women? I don’t think so (Alexie 176).
One interesting aspect of the guitar is how sweet it seems to people at first, but ultimately it’s using them for its own purposes, much like white people did to Indians. As the following examples will indicate, the guitar treats Victor as white men treated his people since the beginning of colonization.
When white people came to America, they were greeted with open arms. Indians taught them how to survive in the new land, where things were and how they lived. White people initially acted appreciative, sharing with Indians as much as they could. Indians embraced the new citizens of their continent and looked forward to improving both people’s standards of living.
When Victor first got the guitar he was promised covers of Rolling Stone, white women, and money. He would be able to leave behind his past of drunken abuse and embrace a whole new world of his own. He thought the guitar offered of a new, better way of life.
As more white people came seeking fortune, things got worse for the Indians. They tried to be accommodating, but ended up giving too much. It started slowly with a treaty here and a treaty there. Before the American Indians knew it they were forced onto reservations and scraping out a meager living on the most desolate lands in the country.
Victor falls deep into the fortune promised by the white lifestyle. He was beginning to see fruition. Things seemed to be looking good. He was getting the things he wanted. However, when the time came to grab what he wanted, the guitar stabbed him in the back. During his audition for the record company, the guitar refused play. It bucked and kicked and flew away from Victor. The record company executives weren’t impressed and the five characters in the novel return home.
The book The Indian: Assimilation, Integration, Separation? (Bowles) provides a list of the three options Indians have when dealing with cultural friction. They can either join the dominant culture (assimilate), balance the two and become intermediaries (integrate) or cut themselves off from the entire dominant culture (separate).
The friction between cultures has been around for centuries. The book says it began during first contact and has persisted through today. It began with the sharp contrast between Indian value of land and white. Indians wanted to use the land in a way that gave back to it, balancing their needs with the environments. White people on the other hand wanted to exploit the land, get the resources and move on like locusts. This original clash hasn’t changed much today.
…the Indian and white cultures were not merely divergent, they were thoroughly opposed (Bowles 180).
The assimilation/integration/separation routes are explored by several characters in the novel. Each of these three routes is taken. Betty and Veronica (though not Indian, want to be, and consider themselves Indian) chose to assimilate. Thomas, Checkers, and Chess chose to integrate. Victor and Junior separate.
Throughout the novel Betty and Veronica pretend to be Indian. They wear unholy amounts of Native jewelry, hang around Victor and Junior and spend the novel trying to become what they aren’t. Sheridan explains to them they are ‘Indian enough’ before they are offered a choice to sell out and join the main culture by making a record, they accept.
The Bowles book discusses the positives and negatives of assimilation. The positive is everyone is part of the majority, and there for entitled to a share of the resources. The negative side is the culture is bred out and Indian becomes just another blood strain.
Thomas, Chess, and Checkers decide to move to Spokane and start all over again. Chess gets a job as a phone operator and they all intend to get jobs and live away from the reservation. The chose the mostly white town of Spokane to start over again, feeling like there is nothing left for them on the reservation. However, they refuse to also give up their cultural heritage.
“…what better gift could we do for our child then to give it two brown faces to look up at?” (Alexie 207).
Victor and Junior separate from both cultures, technically. Junior kills himself, effectively separating himself from all cultures. Victor tries to immerse himself in the culture by taking over Junior’s old job. When he fails to get it he joins the underground reservation-culture of drunken homeless men.
He just wandered around the reservation with his three dogs. He hadn’t taken a shower in a week. Everybody figured he’d be drinking Sterno in a week (Alexie 296).
In conclusion, the guitar is a representation of many things. It is a symbol of white oppression because it keeps Robert Johnson from being free. It is a mirroring of white treatment of Natives because it makes promises but betrays the owner. It is a symbol of usurpation because even though blacks invented rock, white people profited. It is a symbol of many different things that adds another layer of intrigue to an amazing novel.
Bibliography
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues.
New York: Warner Books, 1995.
Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing.
New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1992.
Bowles, Richard P., et al. The Indian: Assimilation, Integration, Seperation? Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall of Canada, Ltd., 1972.
Szasz, Margaret Connell. Between Indian and White Worlds.
Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
English 245B
4-21-06
Paper Two
Corruption of Native Culture by Whites as Evidenced by the Guitar
Every culture has its own music. From the didgeridoos of Australia to the drums of Africa it can not be denied that music is a vital part of any thriving population. However, in America the guitar symbolizes the ideal musical instrument. Millions of people across the United States own and play this instrument In Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie the guitar that is passed from Robert Johnson to Thomas Builds-the-Fire to Victor Joseph represents the corrupting influence of white culture on Native Americans.
Musicians like Lead Belly, BB King, and Tommy Johnson were the innovators of guitar playing. Without their influence rock music would not be what it is today. While these men were amazing with their instruments, they receive little, if any, recognition by mainstream media. The white counterparts they influenced, however, made millions of dollars and changed the course of music.
For years Robert Plant, Slash, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and Kurt Cobain (to name a few) have been regarded as some of the greatest guitar players of all time; creating riffs that have inspired millions. All these men were white. These white musicians greatest influence began with the old bluesmen.
It must be noted that there are also many minority guitar players who went down the same path. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Know (The Bad Brains) have entered the white-man’s world of mainstream rock and done a successful job of making a name for themselves. It’s not that minority members haven’t become immortal and rich through the music industry, just the majority are white.
In Reservation Blues the “white man’s rock world” is idealized and frowned upon by several characters in the novel. For example, at one point in the novel after the Warm Water sisters join the band, Checkers and Father Arnold are having a conversation. They discuss Junior and Victor’s involvement with the white groupies, Betty and Veronica.
“It’s just that everywhere I look these days, I see white women. We caught Junior and Victor having sex with some white women. They’re always having sex with white women. It makes me hate them” (Alexie 181).
From the first moment the guitar enters the novel, there is foreshadowing that the instrument is a tool of corruption. In the very beginning of the book Robert Johnson, the mythical blues guitarist who allegedly sold his soul to the devil, arrives with the guitar and a heavy heart. As the mystery of Johnson’s dark past become known, a pivotal scene in the novel reveals how the guitar became evil to begin with. After playing the guitar poorly for early bluesman Son House, Johnson wanders to the crossroads where he strikes a legendary bargain. On page one-hundred and sixty-four Johnson meets the Gentleman.
The corruption of blues by whites is symbolized in this passage. To start with, the novel makes a point of mentioning that the Gentleman is “A handsome white man” with “lupine” (wolf-like) eyes. This man isn’t going to lead Johnson anywhere pleasant. After a conversation about what the Gentleman gains from granting Johnson his wish to be the best guitar player, Johnson makes a profound statement about what he loves most in life.
Johnson felt the whip split open the skin on his grandfather’s backs…”Freedom,” Johnson said, “I love freedom…I’ll give you all I got” (Alexie 264).
This is a particularly poignant scene because Johnson gives up what blacks have dreamed of since they arrived in the New World. Just six decades after his people achieve freedom from the white man, he sells his most prized possession to a white man. He regrets this very shortly afterwards. From this point on he is hounded by the guitar, a slave to the white man’s instrument.
The guitar doesn’t just represent loss of freedom. It represents addiction, another classic motif in the rock lifestyle. Many a musician who fell under the spell of the guitar shed his or her mortal coil because of the lifestyle that came along with it. Cobain shot himself, Hendrix overdosed and Richards is a legendary drug abuser. These themes are also present in the language attached to the guitar.
Characters in the novel develop deep feelings toward the guitar that are normally reserved for people. From the start of the book when Thomas first receives the guitar, to its transfer to Victor, the guitar haunts everyone who takes it. Almost everyone who comes in contact with it is haunted by it. After the guitar is smashed in the beginning by Victor Joseph, Thomas begins to cry, which is considered “the worst thing an Indian could do, if he was sober.” When it is transferred to Victor, he immediately falls for it:
He already gave is a name and heard it whisper… (Thomas) saw it snuggle closer to Victor’s body (Alexie 29).
None of the characters know the addictive capabilities of the guitar. Although Johnson manages to dump the guitar off on someone else, it is still is his mind. While he sits on Big Mom’s mountain, trying to figure out what to do next, he feels the pains of withdrawal. He is free again, but the guitar still has a hold of him.
But Johnson was still not comfortable in his safety. He dreamed of that guitar he had left in Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s blue van… (Alexie 174).
The guitar looms over the heads of each character that possesses it. Only when Junior dies does Victor let it go. Until then, Victor still holds onto hope of the guitar returning him to the white man rock lifestyle. Right before the return to the reservation, Victor spies a guitar case and tries to rally the band to try again.
“It’s my guitar, goddamn it. We can start over. We can get the band going again. We don’t need those fucking guys in New York City. We can do it ourselves” (Alexie 259).
Once Junior dies and the guitar is gone, the dream is dead. The characters begin to form plans to move on with their lives. In the wake of his withdrawal, Victor is a shadow of his former self. He wanders around friendless, followed by three dogs. The guitar is gone and so is he.
The key draw of the music industry is the classic trio of sex, drugs and fame. The guitar, in Victor’s hands, symbolizes all of these. At the beginning of the book he is the on who wants to get drunk. Junior goes along, but can control it, as evidenced by babysitting drunken Victor in New York. He is the most excited about the money they can make, and above all else, he is ready to have sex with white women. He views the guitar as the means to these ends.
Junior, Victor’s best friend, describes Victor as a mystery. He thinks Victor doesn’t want anything besides money. He reiterates this with a statement about how money is all Victor talked about. Once the trio decides to create Coyote Springs, the first thought related to being in the band for Victor is being on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Victor wanted money so bad that he always spent it too quick, as if the few dollars in his wallet somehow prevented him from getting more. Money. That’s all Victor talked about (Alexie 18-19).
As the band takes off, two groupies, Betty and Veronica show up. They run a book store called Doppelgangers in Seattle. As soon as Victor gets a chance to hook up with them he takes it. However, he doesn’t fool around with the white women in a gentle manner. While Victor is in bed with Veronica and he tries to convince her to perform oral sex on him. She refuses to, but offers him a hand job instead. Without the guitar he never would have gotten her. In the words of Veronica:
“You’re the best. I mean, you’re an Indian and a guitar player. How much better could you be?” (Alexie 43).
The guitar doesn’t just harm its victims emotionally, it harms them physically. Every time a character plays the guitar some kind of physical harm comes to the character’s hands. Sometimes it is small, mild cuts and it grows in power, starting fires and leaving scars. This is a physical manifestation of what the guitar does to the soul. One of many examples:
Victor wore gloves when he played Robert Johnson’s guitar but still suffered little burns and scratches (Alexie 33).
In the brief transition period between Johnson and Victor, even Thomas gets injured. He receives minor cuts. Despite the small amount of damage, it is very detailed. The cuts are described as being similar to delicate slices from a sharp razor. Within the first seventeen pages of the novel two people are wounded from the guitar, but it is Victor, again, who ends up taking the powers of the guitar too far.
During the initial practices in Irene’s Grocery Store, as previously stated, Victor wears gloves to play. Even with protection the guitar hurts him. Later on in the same chapter the guitar knocks the fillings out of the people who try to protest the guitar. Before leaving for New York, Victor plays the guitar and it gets super intense and sets property on fire. Ultimately, the guitar betrays him.
While recording, the guitar hurts Victor both emotionally and physically at the same time. The band is recording the song that brought them far from home. While everything goes fine at first, the guitar decides to let everyone down. It bucks and twists, then cuts Victor across his palms, going deep enough to draw so much blood that Victor has to wipe his hands on his pants.
The resulting chaos leaves the band broke, hopeless and broken. The rage the guitar instilled in Victor over the course of the novel erupts in a violent outburst in which he throws his guitar at the record company executives. He proceeds to tear the studio apart, grab Junior and go on a drinking binge in a new city.
There is a sharp contrast between Johnson and Victor that needs to be discussed. Both men entered into a similar situation and handled it completely different. The key difference is the reason why each man chose the guitar, and the reason why Johnson was able to break free of the guitar and Victor was consumed by it.
Johnson chose the guitar because he loved music. He wanted to play good because he felt loved on stage. He chose guitar because it was sexier, but ultimately he realizes what matters. In the end of the novel he gets a harmonica from Big Mom and he continues to make music for the sake of making music. He broke free because he was doing what was important to him.
Victor got into music because he wanted to be white. He was selfish in his intention and he chose the promise of the guitar to make him white. The guitar just wanted to use him, which he allowed to happen. He never totally gets it out of his system and ends up broken. He never cared for the music; he just wanted to be something else because of his situation.
Reservation Blues is an interesting book about the search for identity of almost every character in the book trying to fit into the white world of music. Alexie addresses searching for identity in several other books in several other areas of Native life. Particularly who decides how Indian someone is and post Vietnam struggles for identity.
In Alexie’s collection of poems The Business of Fancydancing there is a poem entitled 13/16. This poem is about how the government decides who gets what food and how it the compromise of how Indians get poor food and white people get their mines, dams and culture for museums.
It is done by blood, reservation mathematics, fractions: father (full-blood) + mother (5/8) = son (13/16)./It is done by enrollment number… (Alexie 16).
The cultural friction between Native and white is by no means a new phenomenon. In the book Between Indian and White Worlds (Szasz) the idea of culture juggling as a necessity is addressed. Szasz points to Scotland-England, Australia-England, and Germany-Poland as example of cultural friction. It also says sometimes people within the border cultures have no choice but to balance the two for survival and that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
…these borders have become pathways that link peoples rather than barriers that separate them (Szasz 1).
The book also discusses the fact that not everybody can cross these borders and not everyone should have to. It emphasizes the injustice of forcing people to balance cultures and the unfairness and difficulties faced by people who try to balance. It points to famous in-between Indians who have even come close to death trying to balance the white-Indian worlds, like Tlingit Sarah Dickinson who was forced to choose between the worlds. If she became Christian her people would shun her, if she went back to her people she’d be executed for witchcraft. She chose Christianity to keep her life.
This ties into Reservation Blues because the characters are faced with a similar choice. Thomas, Checkers, Chess, Victor, and Junior become inter-cultural mediators after they win the contest in Seattle. They have impressed the white people and can make money. They chose to move from the reservation to make money. The tribe clamors for them not to come back.
Do we really want people to think the Spokanes are a crazy story teller, a couple of irresponsible drunks, a pair of Flathead Indians, and two white women? I don’t think so (Alexie 176).
One interesting aspect of the guitar is how sweet it seems to people at first, but ultimately it’s using them for its own purposes, much like white people did to Indians. As the following examples will indicate, the guitar treats Victor as white men treated his people since the beginning of colonization.
When white people came to America, they were greeted with open arms. Indians taught them how to survive in the new land, where things were and how they lived. White people initially acted appreciative, sharing with Indians as much as they could. Indians embraced the new citizens of their continent and looked forward to improving both people’s standards of living.
When Victor first got the guitar he was promised covers of Rolling Stone, white women, and money. He would be able to leave behind his past of drunken abuse and embrace a whole new world of his own. He thought the guitar offered of a new, better way of life.
As more white people came seeking fortune, things got worse for the Indians. They tried to be accommodating, but ended up giving too much. It started slowly with a treaty here and a treaty there. Before the American Indians knew it they were forced onto reservations and scraping out a meager living on the most desolate lands in the country.
Victor falls deep into the fortune promised by the white lifestyle. He was beginning to see fruition. Things seemed to be looking good. He was getting the things he wanted. However, when the time came to grab what he wanted, the guitar stabbed him in the back. During his audition for the record company, the guitar refused play. It bucked and kicked and flew away from Victor. The record company executives weren’t impressed and the five characters in the novel return home.
The book The Indian: Assimilation, Integration, Separation? (Bowles) provides a list of the three options Indians have when dealing with cultural friction. They can either join the dominant culture (assimilate), balance the two and become intermediaries (integrate) or cut themselves off from the entire dominant culture (separate).
The friction between cultures has been around for centuries. The book says it began during first contact and has persisted through today. It began with the sharp contrast between Indian value of land and white. Indians wanted to use the land in a way that gave back to it, balancing their needs with the environments. White people on the other hand wanted to exploit the land, get the resources and move on like locusts. This original clash hasn’t changed much today.
…the Indian and white cultures were not merely divergent, they were thoroughly opposed (Bowles 180).
The assimilation/integration/separation routes are explored by several characters in the novel. Each of these three routes is taken. Betty and Veronica (though not Indian, want to be, and consider themselves Indian) chose to assimilate. Thomas, Checkers, and Chess chose to integrate. Victor and Junior separate.
Throughout the novel Betty and Veronica pretend to be Indian. They wear unholy amounts of Native jewelry, hang around Victor and Junior and spend the novel trying to become what they aren’t. Sheridan explains to them they are ‘Indian enough’ before they are offered a choice to sell out and join the main culture by making a record, they accept.
The Bowles book discusses the positives and negatives of assimilation. The positive is everyone is part of the majority, and there for entitled to a share of the resources. The negative side is the culture is bred out and Indian becomes just another blood strain.
Thomas, Chess, and Checkers decide to move to Spokane and start all over again. Chess gets a job as a phone operator and they all intend to get jobs and live away from the reservation. The chose the mostly white town of Spokane to start over again, feeling like there is nothing left for them on the reservation. However, they refuse to also give up their cultural heritage.
“…what better gift could we do for our child then to give it two brown faces to look up at?” (Alexie 207).
Victor and Junior separate from both cultures, technically. Junior kills himself, effectively separating himself from all cultures. Victor tries to immerse himself in the culture by taking over Junior’s old job. When he fails to get it he joins the underground reservation-culture of drunken homeless men.
He just wandered around the reservation with his three dogs. He hadn’t taken a shower in a week. Everybody figured he’d be drinking Sterno in a week (Alexie 296).
In conclusion, the guitar is a representation of many things. It is a symbol of white oppression because it keeps Robert Johnson from being free. It is a mirroring of white treatment of Natives because it makes promises but betrays the owner. It is a symbol of usurpation because even though blacks invented rock, white people profited. It is a symbol of many different things that adds another layer of intrigue to an amazing novel.
Bibliography
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues.
New York: Warner Books, 1995.
Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing.
New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1992.
Bowles, Richard P., et al. The Indian: Assimilation, Integration, Seperation? Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall of Canada, Ltd., 1972.
Szasz, Margaret Connell. Between Indian and White Worlds.
Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
posted by Dan at 12:38 AM
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