A History of American Literature

792 The American Century: Literature since 1945

reinventing the very notion of “the Indian.” The Heirs of Columbus is as typical of all

these shapeshifting texts as any other – above all, in its author’s refusal to conform

to generic conventions or cultural expectations. Published a year before the

quincentenary celebrations of the “discovery” of America by Columbus, it is a

cunning mix of science fiction, satire, fantasy, trickster tale, and postmodern murder

mystery. Not content with either simply celebrating or dismissing the concept of

discovery, Vizenor expropriates the practice itself. This strange “tribal story” makes

its own “discovery,” that Columbus was a man of “mixedblood,” including Mayan.

The controlling idea of Columbus as a “crossblood,” with its provocative rider that

“mongrels created the best humans,” realizes several purposes. It reinforces the

hybrid nature of the text; it comments on the doubtful nature of what the white

world calls history; it puts in question the authority of any supposedly authoritative

account. This revisionist version of American history, Vizenor intimates, is quite as

plausible, as (un)reliable as the standard one, which claims that Columbus

“discovered” a “New World.” By reimagining the man who mistakenly called the

tribes “Indians,” Vizenor not only rattles the bars of the national tradition and the

history manuals. He stakes a claim for his own teasing, transgressive styling of

those tribes, one resistant to what is called here “the notion of blood quantums,

racial identification, and tribal enrolment.” The styling is, of course, to return to that

phrase, as “postindian mixedblood.”

The fiction of Sherman Alexie maps a territory in which the mysticism of Silko

and the postmodern tricksterism of Vizenor are likely to coexist along with the

contemporary reality of casinos and sweat lodges, rock music and ancient ritual,

landfill and sacred sites. Alexie’s first novel is titled Reservation Blues (1996) and

reservation blues music, we are told, is a “little bit of everything.” It is a “tribal music”

that cannibalizes elements from all kinds of distinctive idioms – delta blues, country

and western, punk, heavy rock, American Indian traditions – to create “new songs”

responsive to the crisscross “crossroads” culture Native Americans now inhabit. And

it is the music of Alexie’s stories. They are exhilaratingly ragged and freewheeling,

with an immediacy, energy, rawness, and sometimes downright clumsiness –

clumsiness here seems almost a measure of authenticity – that contrasts with the

measured tone of the work of Momaday – or, for that matter, the minimalist cadences

of Welch. Alexie registers a “cable-television reservation world” in which the

“reservation staples” include “Diet Pepsi, Spam, Wonder bread, and a cornucopia of

various carbohydrates, none of them complex.” It is a place where members of the

tribe queue up at “the Trading Post” to try out a new slot machine, and where

poverty, alcoholism, domestic discord, and community factionalism often lead to

violence. And he registers this “in-between” place, the “rez” where identity always

resembles a “goofy ... mixed drink,” in multidimensional terms that are quite

different from those of Erdrich. Nervous, edgy, with the syncopated rhythms of jazz,

blues, or rock – music, the guess is in Reservation Blues, “just might be the most

important thing there is” – his narratives concoct a strange brew of snappy one-

liners and ghostly dreams, jokes and anger, laughter and pain. “There’s a little bit of

magic in everything and then some loss to even things out:” that line borrowed from

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