Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

What do you want from your sister?

What do you want from your mother?

Treaties never remember

They give and take ’til they fall apart

Treaties never surrender

I’m sure treaties we made are gonna break this Indian’s heart

I don’t know what I want from love

I just know it ain’t easy

I just know how it all feels

It’s just like signing a treaty

(repeat chorus)

I just know it ain’t easy

It’s just like signing a treaty

Thomas, Victor, and Junior rehearsed in Irene’s Grocery Store. Even though the building had been condemned for years, boarded up and dangerous, everybody still called it Irene’s. The band crawled through a hole in the back wall and practiced for hours at a time. Thomas had spent most of his savings on a bass guitar and an amplifier for himself and a drum set for Junior. Victor wore gloves when he played Robert Johnson’s guitar but still suffered little burns and scratches. At first, Thomas had worried that his amplified bass and Junior’s drums would overwhelm the acoustic lead guitar, but Victor could have kicked the guitar around the floor and it would have sounded good enough. Even without an amplifier or microphones, Robert Johnson’s guitar filled the room.

Pretty soon, the band’s practice sessions started to draw a crowd. In the beginning, only Lester FallsApart materialized, like a reservation magician, and usually knocked somebody or something over, like a reservation clown. After a few days, however, a dozen Spokanes showed up and started to dance, even in the heat. Undercover CIA and FBI agents dressed up like Indians and infiltrated the band practices but didn’t fool anybody because they danced like shit. The crowds kept growing and converted the rehearsal into a semi-religious ceremony that made the Assemblies of God, Catholics, and Presbyterians very nervous. United in their outrage, a few of those reservation Indian Christians showed up at rehearsals just to protest the band.

“You’re damned!” shouted an old Catholic Indian woman. “You’re sinners! Rock ’n’ roll is the devil’s music!”

“Damn right it is!” Victor shouted back and hit an open chord that shook the protestors’ fillings out of their teeth. The Indian Health Service dentist spent the next two weeks with his hands deep in Christian mouths.

“No,” the dentist had to say more than once to Catholic patients, “I don’t think there is a saint of orthodontics.”

Father Arnold, priest of the reservation Catholic Church, didn’t care much about the band one way or the other. He thought the whole thing was sort of amusing and nostalgic. He’d been a little boy, maybe five years old, when Elvis appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and threw the entire country into a righteous panic. Arnold would never have thought that Indians would be as judgmental as those white people way back when, but he was discovering exactly how Catholic Spokanes could become.

“Listen,” he said to one of his more rabid parishioners, “I really don’t think God is too concerned about this band. I think hunger and world peace are at the top of His list of things to worry about, and rock music is somewhere down near the bottom.”

Father Arnold had waited tables in a restaurant and sung in a rock band for a few years after he graduated college, before he received his calling into the priesthood. They’d played mostly fifties songs, like “Teen Angel” and “Rock Around the Clock” with Father Arnold on lead vocals. He’d had a good voice, still had a good voice, but now the music he sang was in church and was much more important than the stuff he used to sing at American Legion dances and high school proms.

Arnold was twenty-eight, buying a Big Mac at a McDonald’s, when the call came to him. He’d always been a Catholic, alternating between devotion and laziness, but had never thought of himself as a priest. He had always believed, had always been taught, that priests were extraordinary men, nearly heroic. He had never been anything but ordinary. An ordinarily handsome man, with ordinary intelligence and an ordinary car, he’d graduated college with a 3.1 G.P.A. in English. Surely not the makings of a Catholic priest. Even now, when he talked about his calling in that McDonald’s, he was embarrassed by how ordinary it all seemed.

He had just picked up his order when he heard the voice. At first, he thought the cashier was talking to him, but the cashier was busy with another customer. The voice didn’t say anything exactly. It was just a voice, a series of words, or sounds. He was never quite sure about the voice, but he knew there was no music, no harps, no sudden shaft of light, no shift of the earth.

He found a table, ate his Big Mac, and then walked across the street to the Catholic church.

“Hello,” he had said to the priest there. “My name is Robert Arnold. I want to be a priest. But I’m not a virgin. Can you help me?”

“You don’t have to be a virgin,” the priest had said. “You just have to be celibate from now on.”

“Well, okay,” Arnold said. “But I really hope you’re right about this celibacy thing, you know?”

He had quickly gone through seminary, assisted at a few churches, and then was shipped to the Spokane Indian Reservation when the residing priest died.

“Father,” the bishop had said to him just before he left for the reservation. “We need you out there. You have youth, a robust faith that is needed to reach these Indians. We have tried discipline. We have tried strength. But they need something different. Someone like you.”

Father Arnold had never been too concerned about the vagueness of his assignment. He was never sure how faith could be robust and often worried that his prayers were too thin, stretched to the point of breaking. Still, he knew he was a good priest and could deliver a homily with the best of them. Sometimes it was almost like being a lead singer again, onstage, with the audience hanging on his every word. As a lead singer, as a priest, he could change the shape of the world just by changing the shape of a phrase.

“A-men,” Father Arnold often whispered to himself, practicing different pronunciations of the word. “Ah-men. Ay-yyyy-men. Uh-man.”

Arnold came to the reservation in his yellow VW van, expecting tipis and buffalo, since he had never been told otherwise. He was genuinely shocked when the Indians in his congregation spoke English.

“Buffalo?” asked Bessie, the oldest Catholic on the reservation. “What do you mean, buffalo? You really thought there were going to be buffalo here?”

“Yes,” he said, “I was looking forward to it.”

“Oh, Father,” Bessie said and laughed. “There weren’t any buffalo here to begin with. We’re a salmon tribe. At least, we were a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river.”

“What about the buffalo? I mean, Indians were always hunting buffalo on television.”

“It was those dang Sioux Indians. Those Sioux always get to be on television. They get everything.”

Arnold’s Indian education was quick and brutal. He heard much laughter.

“Father Arnold, we’re not laughing with you, we’re laughing at you.”

He was impressed by the Spokanes’ ability to laugh. He’d never thought of Indians as being funny. What did they have to laugh about? Poverty, suicide, alcoholism? Father Arnold learned to laugh at most everything, which strangely made him feel closer to God.

However, he was most impressed by the Spokanes’ physical beauty. Perhaps it was because he had spent most of his life surrounded by white people and had grown used to their features. The Spokanes were exotic. Perhaps it was because of the Indians’ tremendous faith. But Father Arnold thought the Spokanes were uniformly beautiful. When members of other Indian tribes visited the Spokane Reservation, he began to believe that every Indian in the country was beautiful.