“The Triumph of the Ordinary”: Mental Reservation, Racial Profiling and Construction of a Human Social Community in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians

Abstract

In Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie presents nine poignant and emotionally resonant stories about Native Americans’ struggle with alienation and stereotypes. Instead of focusing merely on the ethnic identity of American Indians, Alexie writes about a particular group of people sharing similar circumstances and addresses their common humanity, namely their search for love and respect in urban spaces. Alexie questions the authenticity of Indian identity and asserts that a “mental reservation” exists in the minds of Indian people which significantly influences their perceptions of self and community. Race, as a medium of seeing “the other” permeates U.S. society, especially in the wake of terrorist attacks. However, racial profiling has proven to be an ineffective means of detecting criminals and criminal activities, and has obstructed social relationships, bringing emotions of fear, loneliness and grief to urban Indians. In response to the modernity crisis, Alexie explores the American Indian cosmopolitanism in Ten Little Indians, and envisions a human social community based on reciprocity and mutual respect. His concerns regarding ordinary people’s life experiences and their ways of forming healthy relationships exhibit his considerable hope for “the triumph of the ordinary”.

1. Introduction

Among contemporary Native American writers, Sherman Alexie (1966–) stands out as one of the few whose stories, novels, poems and movie scripts address the lives of both reservation Indians and urban Indians, with a significant focus on the triumph of ordinary people. A member of the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribe, Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, and now resides in Seattle, Washington. His writing is very personal and autobiographical. In his National Book Award-winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Alexie tells the story of a Native American boy who leaves his reservation to attend a white school and eventually gains the recognition of White people. The protagonist goes through a journey very similar to the one that Alexie made, a young Indian who leaves his reservation life to seek success in the outside world. It encourages Native Americans to cross reservation boundaries and integrate into mainstream society, reflecting Alexie’s hope for the survival of the nations.

Ten Little Indians (2003) seems to be a continuation and follow-up of these reservation Indians from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, depicting the life challenges faced by their descendants who have settled in Seattle. The collection consist of nine stories, but was entitled Ten Little Indians which is also the name of an American nursery rhyme. The lyrics, starting with “Ten little Indian boys went out to dine” and ending by “One little Indian boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none”, serves as a way of mental conditioning. As Jennings notes, “The coded historical narratives, found in many children’s nursery rhymes, was to circulate an ideology that followed generations, intended to define Indians as ‘inferior’ and ‘backward’” (Jennings 2018). Alexie uses the title of “Ten Little Indians” to fight against those stereotypes and combat the myth of a “vanishing race”. In Ten Little Indians, many of Alexie’s new characters are middle-class Indians who have moved away from the reservation and achieved success in White society. Despite that, Alexie asserts that “Even if they can be successful, the idea of borders goes beyond their ethnicity and into their personal decisions, and they limit themselves in other ways” (Nygren 2005, p. 167). They are trapped by the Pauite poet Adrian Louis’s concept of “the reservation of my mind” and carry such mental reservations as stereotypes into their new lives, preventing them from building positive relationships and being humanely integrated into the United States.

While negotiating Indian identity in the urban space, Alexie highlights the impacts of racial profiling on Brown people in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and examines urban Indians’ emotions of fear, loneliness and grief. It should be noted that the history of the racialized policing of Indigenous people is long standing, beginning with colonial expansion and continuing through the present day. Native Americans were subjected to forced relocation and cultural genocide, going through the Indian Removal Act (1830), the reservation system (mid-1800s to 1900s) and the boarding school era (late 1800s to 1950s). What makes the impacts of the September eleventh attacks distinctive from other previous ones is that they did not intend to target Native Americans, yet resulted in their victimization, especially for urban Indians. Like many of the other immigrants into the United States, urban Indians who leave their reservation for the cities have often been seen as immigrants, experiencing racial bias and structural racism. This discrimination has progressively evolved and intensified, manifesting as animosity in the wake of 9/11.

Alexie addresses the racial violence perpetrated against Indigenous people in the United States. Meanwhile, his writing transcends nationalism and celebrates the triumph of ordinary people. In an interview with Äse Nygren, Alexie contends that “I’m no longer a reservation Indian, I don’t want to be extraordinary anymore, or exotic. I want to be the triumph of the ordinary” (Nygren 2005, p. 168). In Ten Little Indians, he draws attention to Native Americans’ interactions with strangers in the urban space, emphasizing the importance of shared humanity in bringing people together. Alexie articulates his vision of “the triumph of the ordinary” by constructing a human social community, namely forming social relationships with mutual respect and exhibiting care towards strangers. His post 9/11 writing reflects on the idea that American Indian cosmopolitanism is not inherently incompatible with nationalism. It not only serves as a tool for reconstructing cultural heritage, but also acts as a means for survival.

2. “I’m in the Reservation of My Mind”: Questioning Tribalism and Negotiating Indian Identity in the Urban Space

The first story, “the Search Engine”, introduces Corliss to us, a young woman who is trying to find her identity in a world that constantly tries to define her. As a demographically and biologically Spokane Indian, Corliss does not feel a sense of belonging within her tribe and family as her father and uncles are traditionalists who embrace tribalism while she prefers to be alone and makes life decisions by herself. A nineteen-year-old college sophomore, Corliss is expected to study science, math, law and politics, move back to her reservation and save the tribe after graduation. But she knows that “she was destined for something larger”, and that her aspirational objectives are centered on composing poetry intended to enlighten her tribe like “a white Jesuit Priest” (Alexie 2003, p. 15). Questioning the usefulness of tribalism, Corliss tries to negotiate her way through a colonial maze and construct her Indian identity in the urban space.

Tribalism provides its members with love and support but not necessarily comfort due to its tendency to make a homogenous entity. Corliss acknowledged that her family and tribe were helping her through college, but she still did not belong with them because of their “being clueless about her real dreams and ambitions” (Alexie 2003, p. 16). Corliss loved reading poems, yet it had come with years of shame. She had always tried to hide her interest in poetry from her family because for them, poetry was a white thing. Corliss’s father and uncles identified the white poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, with white people who were killing Indians in the nineteenth century. While Corliss regarded Hopkins as a Jesuit priest, her father assumed him to be the same as the Catholics who whipped Corliss’s grandmother in boarding school and asserted to Corliss that “You shouldn’t be reading that stuff. It will pollute your heart” (Alexie 2003, p. 14). Her father and uncles’ negative attitudes towards the white thing could be attributed to the historical trauma from boarding school experiences, which resulted in “their individual fears and collective lack of ambition” (Alexie 2003, p. 13). They worked blue-collar construction jobs because some teacher or guidance counselor once told them that they could only work blue-collar jobs. They valued material success and relied on women for accomplishments, rather than being warriors themselves. Having accustomed themselves to the warmth of tribalism, they were terrified of being lonely, which prevented them from embracing the changes in life. Despite that Corliss had been “taught” to hate white people, she cultivated her mind by reading books and knew that white vanity, white rage and white ignorance represented the worst of whiteness, and there was much to learn from white compassion, white genius and white poetry (Alexie 2003, p. 14). As a non-conformist who dreamed of solitude and was determined to empower the tribe for positive changes, Corliss did not feel connected to her family, and their disparity of beliefs in tribalism turned her father into “a stranger” (Alexie 2003, p. 16).

Alexie explores the contradiction between self identification and community identification for Native Americans, and how internalized colonization and oppression relate to identity. While distancing herself from her family on the reservation, Corliss was drawn to Harlan Atwater, an urban Indian who wrote the book of poems In the Reservation of My Mind. Attracted by his ironic writing of “the essential sadness of being Indian” (Alexie 2003, p. 7), Corliss felt a connection with Harlan. Regarding Harlan as “her ethereal guide through the material world” (Alexie 2003, p. 27), Corliss went on an eighteen-hour trip to Seattle to meet him in search of meaning and definition. In the bookstore where they engaged in conversation, Corliss knew about Harlan’s story. Harlan was biologically a Spokane Indian, but raised by a white family in Seattle. Wondering what an Indian is supposed to be and longing for the connection to his tribe, Harlan turned to writing poems to feel like he belonged. He faked his identity and pretended to be a reservation Indian, “imagining what it feels like to grow up on the reservation” (Alexie 2003, p. 41). He tried to write the most authentic Indian poems to fight against stereotypes. Despite that, Harlan failed to be recognized as an Indian due to Indians’ obsession with authenticity. The authenticity of Indian identity is a complex and often debated concept, rooted in historical, cultural, political and personal dimensions. It generally refers to the ways in which individuals or groups identify themselves as Native American, and how society recognizes or challenges that identity. Contemporary authenticity markers include blood quantum, phenotype, cultural performance, tribal citizenship, etc. It also involves self identification, community identification and external identification. As Weaver notes, “Identity is a combination of self-identification and the perceptions of others” (Weaver 2001, p. 243). Harlan Atwater identified himself as an Indian, but owing to not growing up on the reservation, he constructed his identity on the basis of tribal recognition, relying on his authentic writing to win the recognition of his people. While performing his poems to the drunken Indians at the bar, Harlan was told that “his poems sounded exactly like Indian poems were supposed to sound” (Alexie 2003, p. 47), and thereby he was the best Indian they had ever known. Yet it turned out that those drunken Indians abandoned his self-printed and free-distributed poetry books on the streets. Failing to be recognized as an Indian or a writer who writes good Indian poems, Harlan quit writing poems and worked as a forklift driver for his whole life.

Harlan’s fundamental view about Indian identity mirrors that there exists a reservation in the mind of Indian people. In an Atlantic interview with Joe Fassler, Alexie spoke about the single line of poetry that inspired him to become a poet. The line, which is the opening of “Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile”, a poem by Paiute Indian Adrian C. Louis to which Alexie was exposed in a poetry workshop at Washington State University in 1987, reads: “Oh, Uncle Adrian, I’m in the reservation of my mind”. “The line captured that sense of being tribal, being from a reservation—and the fact that you could never leave” (Alexie 2013, The Atlantic). In other words, the reservation system not only confined Indians to a physically sealed place, but fed them with an imposed worldview that controls their mental space. These realizations spurred Alexie not only to move beyond his own mental reservation in the writing process, but to view both the physical place and mental space as prisons from which he could and should encourage other Indians to escape. Alexie asserts that the concept of the authentic Indian has prevailed and dominated in the ideological spheres of many Native Americans. “Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians formed their identities by questioning the identities of other Indians” (Alexie 2003, p. 40), the underlying reason for which is that Indians have accepted stereotypes as much as non-Indians have. “One of the real dangers is that other Indians have taken many stereotypes as a reality, as a way to measure each other and ourselves” (Nygren 2005, p. 158). Both Corliss and Harlan have internalized these misleading stereotypes. They not only questioned their Indian identity, but also were influenced by others’ opinions in terms of writing poems. Corliss confessed that she was afraid of writing poems. “No matter what I write, a bunch of other Indians will hate it because it isn’t Indian enough, and a bunch of white people will like it because it’s Indian” (Alexie 2003, p. 41). The same circumstances occurred to Harlan. While Indians pretended to enjoy his poems because he bought them drinks, white people loved him when he acted like the kind of Indians in his poems. Accordingly, Alexie tries to point out that Indians are “ambiguous and transitory” (Alexie 2003, p. 52). By “ambiguous”, he indicates that the so-called authenticity has been a nostalgia for the past, while the hybridity of the Indian identity is the reality with which Indians have to come to terms with. Urban Indians try to create an Indian sense of self and community, and they fail to recognize that the authenticity that they pursue may be based on “invented representations” (Andrews 2010, p. 50). By “transitory”, Alexie suggests that identity is not a fixed entity, but constantly evolves in a dynamic way. American Indian identities and communities are constantly changing and evolving, “responding to external threats and challenges as well as incentives and opportunities” (Nagel 1996, p. 12). There is no definite answer to what an Indian is supposed to be. As Durczak notes, “there are many ways to be Indian, none of them more genuine than the other, and that these ways are evolving all the time” (Durczak 2008, p. 107). Alexie suggests writing against ideas of what one was supposed to be writing (Nygren 2005, p. 152), and writing to set Indians free from their physical reservation as well as mental reservation. His writing aims to help Indians realize that “it is a kind of fundamentalism about Indian identity, what ‘Indian’ can be and mean, that damages Indians” (Nelson 2010, p. 40) and call attention to the shared humanity among Indians and non-Indians instead of focusing merely on their ethnic identities.

This bookstore ceremony performed by Harlan and Corliss helped heal their respective traumatic experiences. It is believed that Corliss had reduced her fear of writing poems and been more faithful in starting her writing career. Meanwhile, Harlan obtained understanding and comfort from Corliss about what had happened to him, and he could stop struggling with his identity issue. At the end of the story, Corliss left Harlan Atwater’s book at the used-book store, and “placed it with its front cover facing outward for all the world to see” (Alexie 2003, p. 52) in order to encourage other Indians to move beyond the mental reservation and reclaim their identities through re-imagining these reservation spaces.

3. “A Limited Range of Motion?”: Urban Indians’ Fear, Loneliness and Grief

In the story, “Lawyer’s League”, Richard, a half-Indian, half-African American character who grew up in Seattle and planned to be the first half-Black half-Indian United States senator, poses a human question—“Do you understand I have a limited range of motion?” (Alexie 2003, p. 68). The story is centered around Richard’s interpersonal relationships in political discourse. At an invitation to a bipartisan lobbyist dinner, Richard encountered a white woman called Teresa who was “unusually smart and funny and tender” (Alexie 2003, p. 60) and made him think about marriage. But knowing that he would lose thousands of votes and never achieve his full potential as a public servant if he married a white woman, he gave up on that thought. It was a contradiction between personal choice and political decision. Personally speaking, Teresa was considered as a wonderful life partner, while politically speaking, Richard had no choice (Alexie 2003, p. 61). Another invitation came from the lawyer’s league. Despite not being a lawyer, Richard was invited to play basketball with them. The conflicts occurred when Big Bill, a racist prosecutor, first announced the house rule of no dunking which was part of Richard’s game, then called foul and shouted “No basket”, ending with the racist statement that “We don’t play that kind of ball here” (Alexie 2003, p. 65). The kind of ball that Big Bill was talking about was a synonym for “nigger”, which made Richard infuriated and punch him in the face. While Bill’s nose was broken, Richard also hurt himself and could barely make a fist. These two incidents which happened to the protagonist made him feel painful, alone and lonely and reflected how racism and stereotypes erode interpersonal relationships and interfere with one’s upward mobility. As Ladino concludes, “Richard’s story reminds us that spatial, political, and interpersonal mobility are limited by persistent racism, economic disadvantages, and lingering stereotypes about Indianness and other identity categories” (Ladino 2009, p. 52). Published in 2003, two years since the September eleventh attacks happened, Ten Little Indians draws readers’ attention not only to urban Indians’ loneliness and grief, but also to their fear in the city of dangers, mirroring how racial profiling sets traps and limits their range of motion.

In “Flight Patterns”, Alexie examines a nation of fear that emerged in the wake of the terrorist attacks. It begins with a depiction of the protagonist William’s long-term insomnia without clearly stated reasons. As “an obsessive-compulsive workaholic” (Alexie 2003, p. 103) who declined sleeping pill prescriptions, William suffered from sleepless nights and constant daytime fatigue. As the story unfolds, his wife Marie and daughter Grace were introduced to us. Despite living in a decent house in the city of Seattle, they constantly felt a sense of insecurity, worrying about hijack attacks when William traveled back and forth. Grace once “sketched a man in a suit crashing an airplane into the bright yellow sun” (Alexie 2003, p. 107), and quizzed William on his responses to terrorist attacks. In addition to the fear of hijackings, they were also faced with the animosity of the white people. A few days after the attacks happened, William encountered the verbal assault from an anonymous truck driver who yelled at him, “Go back to your own country” (Alexie 2003, p. 117). The tragic events of 11 September 2001 marked a sharp redirection in U.S. immigration attitudes. Instead of viewing immigration through a lens of economics, the United States came to view it mostly through a lens of security and risk. As one of the cultural legacies of 9/11, the public viewed immigrants, particularly rown people with suspicions. White people such as the truck driver perceived William who did not share the same skin color with them, as an immigrant and thereby an object of the hate crime. Alexie contended that it was more of a crime of irony than a hate crime which could be seen from William’s words “You first!” (Alexie 2003, p. 117).

The hatred towards brown people not only manifests itself through William’s interactions with strangers, but also is captured by Alexie’s depiction of the discomforting security checks. The USA Patriot Act, a law passed following 9/11 in 2001, expanded the surveillance capabilities of U.S. law enforcement agencies to detect and deter terrorism, such as enhancing airport security checks. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was established to conduct more extensive checks of passengers, their carry-on luggage and their identification. While white people endured random security checks, William, a brown-skinned man with dark hair and eyes, “had been pulled over for pat-down searches about 75 percent of the time” (Alexie 2003, p. 112). The practice of targeting William suggests that race is not merely a social construction, but “a critical component of social reality” (Mitchell 2012, p. 24). As a salesman who traveled back and forth, William was terrified of flying, and thereby “always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism” (Alexie 2003, p. 107). Racial profiling has profound social ramifications. It engenders feelings of fear, mistrust and alienation within the affected communities. Through portraying the contradiction of William’s racially profiling others and meanwhile being racially profiled, Alexie reveals urban Indians’ “limited range of motion” in the aftermath of 9/11.

Racial profiling, which is based on unjustified racial and ethnic assumptions and generalizations, has been ineffective at detecting criminal activity. “Flight Patterns” depicts an encounter between William and a migrant taxi driver, Fekadu. William initially profiled the taxi driver as “a black man with a violent history” (Alexie 2003, p. 114). Yet according to his personal narrative, he is not a black American, but an Ethiopian Muslim who used to fly in wars and dropped bombs on his own people. To a large extent, he could be regarded as a terrorist or at least a dangerous person from his confession. The taxi driver also tried to identify William’s racial identity through his dark skin color, asking whether he was Jewish or not. “Because they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had often asked William if he was Jewish” (Alexie 2003, p. 114). The tragic terror acts of 11 September 2001, released a wave of anti-Muslim hatred and “religious violence” (Salaita 2010, p. 35) in the United States, making it difficult for Muslim Americans to maintain a sense of community or belonging. As Muslims and Jews are both victims of the hate crimes, the taxi driver ’s inquiry reflects his desperate need to be connected with someone who can understand his pain and share enormous “collective grief” (Peterson 2010, p. 74). People think that he is a black American and treat him as an addict on welfare, which protects him from being targeted as a terrorist yet obstructs his social relationships. The consensus that they have reached that “[they] are all trapped by other people’s ideas” (Alexie 2003, p. 117) gravitates the taxi driver towards William, and he begins to introduce himself and share his personal histories. Fekadu expressed his pain and loneliness of being a jet pilot who flew away from the war that he was supposed to fight in and left behind his beloved family. William was moved by Fekadu’s stories and said “I want to believe you” (Alexie 2003, p. 123). Fekadu’s storytelling acts as a ceremony for William, making him realize that his roots and route are fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, he cares much about his wife and daughter; on the other hand, his family life has been so devastated that “he was dying, a flawed mortal dying day by day” (Alexie 2003, p. 123), and he could no longer endure this alienation.

Let a luggage porter think his bags were dangerous! Let a security guard x-ray the bags and find mysterious shapes! Let a bomb-squad cowboy explode the bags as precaution! Let an airport manager shut down the airport and search every possible traveler! Let the FFA president order every airplane to land! Let the American skies be empty of everything with wings! Let the birds stop flying! Let the very air go still and cold!

(Alexie 2003, p. 123)

William ran through the terminal, searching for an available pay phone, and dialed his home number to be connected to his family. The ceremony not only helps William relieve his pain and loneliness, but also provides an outlook to manage his fear while approaching strangers. From the beginning of treating Fekadu as a dangerous stranger to eventually developing a brotherhood relationship, William changes his attitude towards strangers and embraces a community that transcends the stereotypes and concentrates on the shared humanity.

4. “Do You Know How Many Good Men Live in This World?”: Building a Community of Strangers

Urban Indians’ interaction with strangers is an important motif in Ten Little Indians. Alexie portrays strangers as ordinary people who share the same humanity with urban Indians regardless of their ethnic, national or religious differences. Instead of focusing merely on the Indian identity, Alexie turns his attention to ordinary people in his post 9/11 writing. Scholars and critics have noted this shift as well. In her preface to an interview with Alexie, Äse Nygren notes that Alexie’s texts have changed in emphasis “from angry protests to evocations of love and empathy” (Nygren 2005, pp. 150–51). David L. Moore makes a similar point in Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature and suggests that Alexie’s characters are “looking for islands of human connection” (Moore 2005, p. 304). Joseph Coulombe praises Alexie’s use of humor as it enables “all readers-Indian and non-Indian-to recognize the possibility of a common space, to understand and appreciate their shared humanity” (Coulombe 2002, p. 110). Jennifer K. Ladino suggests that Alexie “seems to have evolved into an author with considerable hope for human compassion that cross racial, ethnic, tribal, geographic, and socioeconomic boundaries” (Ladino 2009, p. 38). Extending these observations, I would like to suggest that in Ten Little Indians, it is Indians as ordinary people whom are emphasized. Alexie celebrates the triumph of the ordinary by creating new kinds of social relations and building a caring community of strangers in response to urban Indians’ emotions of fear, loneliness and grief.

Alexie’s compassion and empathy for victimized Indians can be seen from the kind characters in “What You Pawn I will Redeem”. The story centers around a homeless Spokane Indian named Jackson Jackson who embarks on a journey to reclaim his grandmother’s regalia, a valuable artifact that was stolen fifty years ago. During his attempts to gather the money (nine hundred and ninety-nine US dollars) that he needs to redeem the regalia, Jackson encounters various warm-hearted characters, including the Big Boss of Real Change1 who offered him fifty papers for free to sell on the streets and Officer Williams, a white cop who picked him off the railroad tracks and gave him thirty bucks. Both of them suggested recovering the regalia back legally by calling the police, which was rejected by Jackson. He asserts that “That’s not fair. The pawnbroker didn’t know it was stolen. And besides, I’m on a mission here. I want to be a hero, you know? I want to win it back like a knight” (Alexie 2003, p. 189). Compared to the Big Boss and Officer Williams whose interactions, behaviors and perceptions are shaped by the social norms, Jackson’s worldview seems to be more tribal, predicated upon warrior traditions. These traditions emphasize the commitment to cultural preservation. The regalia not only contains sentimental value to Jackson, but also serves as a symbol of his cultural heritage. As “the living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins” (Alexie 2003, p. 171), Jackson takes it as “a quest” (Alexie 2003, p. 177) to win the powwow regalia back. Despite working hard, Jackson, with no savings or high income, had only five US dollars left when he returned to the pawnbroker. To his surprise, the pawnbroker gave the regalia back to him for free after knowing that the five US dollars was not the same from yesterday. The pawnbroker was a stranger to Jackson, but his actions radiated an unexpected gentleness that heartened the monetary transaction, which deeply moved the noble Jackson by giving an exclamation: “Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!” (Alexie 2003, p. 194). The pawnbroker’s kindness is both personal and political. On the one hand, he empathized with the deprived and homeless Indians, their poor living conditions, and their desperation for belonging and understanding; on the other hand, the pawnbroker felt responsible for the redemption of broken souls fragmented by the settler colonialism. His claim that Jackson won the regalia suggests a reversal pattern between the white colonists and Indigenous people as takers and givers. The story ends with Jackson’s wrapping himself in his grandma’s regalia and stepping into the intersection, the one that moves beyond nationalism and embraces interactions with ordinary people towards a cosmopolitan future.

In “The Search Engine”, Alexie explores the shared humanity among strangers and depicts one’s need to be respected and loved in an alienated world. Homelessness connects Corliss with the white man outside a McDonald’s and motivates her to befriend a stranger. “Displaced by colonial rule, Corliss had always been approximately homeless” (Alexie 2003, p. 29), as Indians have been moved far away from their ancestral lands and relocated into the reservation system. Their interaction is based on the reciprocal transaction. Corliss bought the man lunch in exchange for being told the directions of the Spokane Indian writer Harlan Atwater’s place of residence. Connected by the goodness of their hearts, they were engaged in a conversation about how the old man who seemed to be smart ended up homeless. The white man claimed that he used to be an economics professor who was trapped by his own profession. As an economics professor, his ultimate career goal is supposed to be to promote the economic growth of the United States and make the world a better place. However, he realized one day that a good society cannot be created through the pursuit of materialistic wealth while ignoring people’s need to be loved and feel that they belong. He asserts that “knowing economics only means you know numbers. Doesn’t mean you know people” (Alexie 2003, p. 30). In dealing with economic numbers, he found out that his humanity was not acknowledged, and consequently he fell out of love with the world.

“I kept shouting, ‘I want some respect! I want some respect!’ I shouted it all day and all night. And nobody gave me any respect. I was asking directly for it, and people just kept walking around me. Avoiding me. Not even acknowledging me.

(Alexie 2003, p. 31)

Ironically, only a young woman by the name of Melissa who was terrible with numbers responded, hugging him and saying that she respected him. This “pathological need for respect” (Alexie 2003, p. 30) started his journey of being a homeless man, living on the kindness of strangers. The human aspect of the characters is emphasized throughout their conversation such as the man’s words that “I made a human promise to you, and I will keep it, as a human” (Alexie 2003, p. 32). The man earned the respect of Corliss not only because of his kindness, but also due to the fact that his words bore a strong resemblance to Indigenous people’s ways of thinking, seeing and being. As an Indian, Corliss knew that the white colonists had broken most of the treaties that they had signed with Native American nations in history. However, this white man, despite being homeless, was willing to keep the promise, which brought Corliss comfort and warmth in a city of strangers, “a space in which empathetic boundary crossing and community building take place” (Ladino 2009, p. 38). This communal warmth comes from a community woven together from sharing and mutual respect, “a community of concern and responsibility for the equal right to be human and the equal ability to act on that right” (Bauman 2001, p. 150).

Alexie further addresses the importance of human beings’ good hearts as joint forces to defend against the state of emergency in the story, “Can I Get A Witness?”. The story begins with its unnamed female narrator lunching at Good Food, “a postcolonial wonder house that served Japanese teriyaki, Polish sausage sandwiches, Italian American pizza, and Mexican and Creole rice and beans” (Alexie 69). While waiting for her bills to be checked, she witnessed a small and dark man exploding the restaurant. Knocked unconscious by the explosion, the woman was rescued by a man who lived nearby. Because of the woman’s seizure symptoms, the man called 911, police, fire departments, hospitals and churches successively, but all he heard was busy signals. Then he realized that he lived in such a fragile world that “One building explodes, and the whole system falls apart” (Alexie 2003, p. 82). The government failed to provide basic functions including the prevention of violence and protection of rights, which made him feel more afraid than before. The heightened fear prompted him to turn to people nearby for connection. He dialed Domino’s Pizza, and unexpectedly found out that it was open. Knowing that the young man who answered the telephone was also scared, the male protagonist recommended him to “forget the corporate office” (Alexie 2003, p. 83) and make free pizza for the rescue workers, a very humane act that rebels against the capitalistic society. Both the man’s assistance to the woman and his recommendation for the pizza guy represented “a smallish act of human goodness, as a way of dealing with a large fear” (Alexie 2003, p. 77). In an interview with Timothy Harris, Alexie claims that his politics are “not about race, region, or country, but about a particular group of people sharing the same circumstances…. That’s been my response [to 9/11]: to see people by their power or lack thereof, rather than the color of their skin” (Harris 2003, p. 16). Alexie doubts that the event can be simply seen as a terrorist attack and that any kind of retaliation or surveillance would help resolve the devastating effects that it has exerted on ordinary people or avoid the tragedy happening again. Despite the fact that Alexie does not believe in Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance” against victimization, he remains hopeful that human beings have a chance to avoid traumatized experiences with the power of community.

The community of strangers that they have formed in spite of its transitory nature has lasting effects and could possibly provide the collective forces of warmth and strength for individuals in an insecure world. “Strangers smiling at strangers! It was no longer a city but a tribe!” (Alexie 2003, p. 147). Through smiling at strangers, the city can be transformed into a tribe. Smiling does not necessarily mean the physical impression, but more importantly, refers to crossing racial, class and gender boundaries, against stereotyping and being kind and respectful to others.

5. Conclusions

In Ten Little Indians, Alexie has discussed issues of authenticity, identity, belonging and community through portraying Spokane Indians’ life experiences and their emotions of fear, loneliness and grief living in the city of Seattle. Alexie emphasizes the importance of escaping from the mental reservation, which still haunts Native Americans after they leave the physical reservation and makes them constantly question and feel confused about their identity. Instead of paying excessive attention to ethnicity, Alexie suggests a cosmopolitan point of view, seeing American Indians, African Americans and White Americans as ordinary people who are all victims of the traumatic events such as September eleventh. Highlighting the limitations of racial profiling on brown people’s interpersonal mobility, Alexie imagines a new form of community, a community of shared humanity, a human social community which could provide forces of warmth and strength to relieve fear, pain and loneliness, which exhibits his considerable hope for “the triumph of the ordinary”.