Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

A: Oh, stop it, just stop it. Don’t give me that oral tradition garbage. It’s so primitive. It makes it sound like Indians sit around naked and grunt stories at each other. Those books about Indians, those texts you love so much, where do you think they come from?

Q: Well, certainly, all written language has its roots in the oral tradition, but I fail…

A: No, no, no, those books started with somebody’s lie. Then some more lies were piled on top of that, until you had a whole book filled with lies, and then somebody slapped an Edward Curtis photograph on the cover, and called it good.

Q: These books of lies, as you call them, are the definitive texts on the Interior Salish.

A: No, there’s nothing definitive about them. They’re just your oral tradition. And they’re filled with the same lies, exaggerations, mistakes, and ignorance as our oral traditions.

Q: Have you even read these books?

A: I’ve read all of your books. You show me a book written by a white man about Indians and I’ve read it. You show me almost any book, any of your so-called Great Books, and I’ve read them. Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad. Read them. Austen, Kakfa, James, read them. Whitman, Dickinson, Donne. Read them. We head over to this university or that college, to your Harvard, and grab their list of required reads, and I’ve read them. Hundreds of your books, your white-man books, thousands of them. I’ve read them all.

Q: And what is your point in telling me this?

A: I know so much more about you than you will ever know about me.

Q: Miss Joseph, I am a leading authority, no, I am the, the, the leading authority in the field…

A: Mr. Cox, Spencer. For the last one hundred and eighteen years, I have lived in your world, your white world. In order to survive, to thrive, I have to be white for fifty-seven minutes of every hour.

Q: How about the other three minutes?

A: That, sir, is when I get to be Indian, and you have no idea, no concept, no possible way of knowing what happens in those three minutes.

Q: Then tell me. That’s what I’m here for.

A: Oh, no, no, no. Those three minutes belong to us. They are very secret. You’ve colonized Indian land but I am not about to let you colonize my heart and mind.

Q: Tell me then. Why are you here? Why did you consent to this interview? What do you have to tell me that could possibly help me with my work? You, you are speaking political nonsense. Colonialism. That’s the tired mantra of liberals who’ve run out of intellectual imagination. I am here to engage in a free exchange of ideas, and you’re here, you want to inject politics into this. I will have no part of it.

A: I lost my virginity to John Wayne.

(forty-nine seconds of silence)

Q: You’re speaking metaphorically, of course.

A: Spencer, I am speaking of the vagina and the penis.

Q: As metaphors?

A: Do you know the movie The Searchers?

Q: The western? Directed by John Ford? Yes, yes, quite well, actually. Released in 1956, I believe.

A: 1952.

Q: No, no, I’m quite sure it was 1956.

A: You’re quite sure of a lot of things and you’re quite wrong about a lot of them, too.

(five seconds of silence)

Q: Well, I do know The Searchers. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, the ex-Confederate soldier who sets out to find his niece, played by Natalie Wood. She’s been captured by the Comanches who massacred Ethan’s family. Along with Jeffrey Hunter, who plays a half-breed Cherokee, of all things! Wayne will not surrender to hunger, thirst, snow, heat, or loneliness in his quest, his search. A quite brilliant film.

A: Enough with that academic crap. Listen to me. Listen carefully. In 1952, in Kayenta, Arizona, while John Wayne was playing Ethan Edwards, and I was playing a Navajo extra, we fell in love. Him, for the first and only time with an Indian. Me, for the first time with anybody.

“My real name is Marion,” said John Wayne as he slid the condom over his erect penis. His hands were shaking, making it nearly impossible for him to properly fit the condom, so Etta Joseph reached down, smoothed the rubber with the palm of her left hand — she was touching John Wayne — and then guided him inside of her. He made love carefully, with an unintentional tantric rhythm: three shallow thrusts followed by one deep thrust, repeat as necessary.

“Does it hurt?” asked John Wayne, with genuine concern, and not because he was arrogant about being her first lover.

“It’s okay,” said Etta, but it did hurt. It hurt a lot. She wondered why people were so crazy about this act. But still, she was making love to John Wayne.

“Oh, oh, John Wayne,” she moaned. She felt uncomfortable, silly, like a bad actress in a bad love scene.

“Call me Marion,” he said between thrusts. “My real name is Marion. Call me Marion.”

“Marion, Marion, Marion,” she whispered.

They laid together on a Pendleton blanket on the red sand of Navajo Monument Valley. All around them, the impossible mesas. Above them, the most stars either of them had ever seen.

“I love you, I love you,” he said as he kissed her face, neck, breasts. His lips were thin, his face rough with three days of beard.

“Oh,” she said, surprised by his words, even frightened. How could he be in love with her? He didn’t even know her. She was just an eighteen-year-old Spokane Indian woman — a girl — a thousand miles away from home, from her reservation. She was not in Navajo land by accident — she was an actress, after all — but she hadn’t planned on lying beneath John Wayne — Marion! — as he confessed his love, his impossible love for her.

Three days earlier, she’d been an extra in the Navajo camp when John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter traded blankets, hats, and secrets with the Navajo chief. Etta hadn’t had any lines. She’d only been set dressing, a pretty girl in a purple dress. But she’d been proud and she was sure to be on camera because John Ford told her so.

“Girl,” Ford had said. “You are as pretty as the mesa.”

For just a moment, Etta had wondered if Ford might cast her then and there for a speaking role, perhaps even give her the role of Look, the chubby daughter of the Navajo chief, and send that other Indian woman packing. Of course not! But Etta had wished for it, however briefly, and had chided herself for her ambition. She’d wished ill will on another Indian woman just because a white man had called her pretty. Desperate and shallow, of course, but Etta had not been able to help herself.

This was John Ford! He was not handsome, no, but he was a Hollywood director. He made dreams come true. He was the one who filled the movie screens with the movies! He was a magician! He was a feature-film director and she knew they were the kindest and most decent men in the world.

“Stand here,” Ford had directed Etta. “Right here, so the audience can see your lovely face in the background here. Right between Jeffrey and the Duke.” She had not been able to contain her excitement. Five feet away, John Wayne was smoking a cigarette. John Wayne! But more than that, it had been Jeffrey Hunter who’d captured her imagination. He was a beautiful boy, with dark hair, brown skin, and those blue, blue eyes. John Wayne might have been a movie star — and a relatively homely one at that — but Jeffrey Hunter was simply the most gorgeous white man on the planet. But here he was playing an Indian, a half-breed Cherokee, so perhaps Jeffrey himself was part Indian. After all, Etta had thought, why would they cast a white man as an Indian if he didn’t have some Indian blood himself? Otherwise, the movie would have been a lie, and John Wayne didn’t lie. And judging by the kindness in his eyes, by the graceful turn of his spine, by the way he waved his sensuous hands when he talked, Jeffrey Hunter was no liar either.