144 Allende, Isabel
Alexie deals with the misplaced assumptions of
a positive tradition transparently in “A Drug Called
Tradition.” His position is clearly stated: “Indians
never need to wear a watch because your skeletons
will always remind you about the time. See, it is
always now.” There is no past, no future; there is
only the present reality of circumstance. After a
hallucinogenic round of storytelling (the “new drug”
the protagonists take, while never named, may be
the “traditional” Indian hallucinogen, peyote, but it
could just as easily be mushrooms or LSD), Alexie’s
narrator asserts that there is no real past for today’s
Indians, nothing to reach back to but fictions cre-
ated by deluded minds. The most potent stories
come from a drug-induced haze, based on legends
that are not theirs but have roots in Anglo mythol-
ogy and iconography (as one boy says, “Van Gogh
should’ve painted this one”), making ownership of
an authentic past impossible. Without an authentic
past, they cannot have real traditions, only fictions
conglomerated from the pictures on television. They
are reflected in Tonto, the loyal, semiliterate sidekick
of the heroic Lone Ranger, spiritually bonding with
the horses they steal; in Geronimo, sitting lonely
in long-forgotten pictures; in the “young warrior,”
an icon without name or resolution, archetypal but
empty. But the story, as always, is more complex than
the author’s apparent claim.
While Alexie asserts that the conception of
“Indian” has been usurped by the image of “the
Indian,” the authentic replaced by the (Anglicized)
image in the broader cultural identity, he identifies
(purposefully) a more subtle, less idiographic but
also more personal idea of the traditional at the very
end of the story. Big Mom, the spiritual leader of the
Spokane tribe, hands the narrator a small drum. “It
looked like it was about a hundred years old, maybe
older,” he writes. It is a small gift, a memento from
the past that physically connects him to the spirit of
his tribe. It is not an image, does not do great deeds
of warriors, does not overthrow those who would
oppress the tribe. The drum will not subvert the
inexorable march of time and entropy, or so it seems.
“I guess you could call it the only religion I have,” he
says, “one drum that can fit in my hand, but I think
if I played it a little, it might fill up the whole world.”
Tradition can be a drug, a destructive denial of
reality. As Native Americans try to construct an
identity culled from a tradition that is both theirs
and not theirs, both Indian and media-imaged, “tra-
dition” becomes meaningless. It is a present thing,
a television presentation of an ancient myth that
never was. Thus, the conventional role of tradition is
fatally flawed for the Native American, as destruc-
tive as the hallucinogenic enterprise that initiates
the story. But in the end, there remains a history that
is real, and that is the narrator’s own. The old stories
can no longer fulfill their function—they cannot
inspire warriors to be great seekers of renown—but
there remains a powerful history, a real past that
can be held in the palm of the hand, from which
the narrator derives the promise of a hopeful future
where his stories, the drumming of his words, fill
the world. In this sense, a personal tradition that
rebuilds the stories one voice at a time resonates
throughout Alexie’s book. His world of stories, the
powerful rhythms of his narratives, reconstruct the
potential of the promise the old traditions typified.
Like the old stories, he weaves a world of possibility,
illuminating the pitfalls of the present in the hopes
of a future in which warriors can be proud to ride
through the world outside the confining boundaries
of the reservation.
Aaron DruckerALLENDE, ISABEL The House of the
Spirits (1982)
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, published
in 1982, tells the history of several generations of
the Trueba family against the backdrop of Chile’s
socialist government and the 1973 military coup
that gave rise to the dictatorship of Augusto Pino-
chet. Clara, who regularly converses with the spirit
world, marries Esteban Trueba, a wealthy landowner
who regularly rapes peasant women working on his
hacienda. Trueba becomes enraged when his daugh-
ter, Blanca, falls in love with one of the hacienda’s
workers. Despite Trueba’s efforts, Blanca and her
love are eventually united, but the circuitous path of
their relationship is repeated in the lives and loves of
other characters.