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Summary
Summary
A serial killer is stalking Seattle--taking the scalps of white males. Dubbed the "Indian Killer" by the local populace, the murderer's action have thrown the city's Native American community into turmoil. As retaliatory hate crimes against Native Americans escalate, John Smith--a Native American raised by a white family--must confront the violence in the streets--as well as in his own heart.
Author Notes
Sherman J. Alexie Jr. was born on October 7, 1966. His mother was Spokane Indian and his father was Coeur d'Alene Indian. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He decided to attend high school off the reservation where he knew he would get a better education. He was the only Indian at the school, and excelled academically as well as in sports. After high school, he attended Gonzaga University for two years before transferring to Washington State University, where he graduated with a degree in American studies. He received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992.
His collections of poetry included The Business of Fancydancing, First Indian on the Moon, The Summer of Black Widows, One Stick Song, and Face. His first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. His other short story collections included The Toughest Indian in the World, Ten Little Indians, and War Dances. His first novel, Reservation Blues, received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and the Murray Morgan Prize. His other novels included Indian Killer, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Flight. He won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2018 for You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir.
Alexie and Jim Boyd, a Colville Indian, collaborated on the album Reservation Blues, which contains the songs from the book of the same name. In 1997, Alexie collaborated with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian, on a film project inspired by Alexie's work, This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, from the short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Smoke Signals debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998, winning two awards: the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 the film received a Christopher Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a startling departure from his earlier, more lyrical fiction, Native American novelist Alexie (Reservation Blues) weighs in with a racially charged literary thriller. Seattle is rife with racial tension as the city is terrorized by a serial murderer nicknamed "Indian Killer" because the victims, all white, are scalped and their bodies topped with a pair of white owl feathers. At the center of the novel stands the mentally disintegrating John Smith, a 6'6" Native American ignorant of his tribal roots because he was adopted and raised by white parents. As the city's racial divide increases, Marie Polatkin, a combative Spokane activist and scholarship student, organizes demonstrations and distributes sandwiches and sedition to homeless Indians, while reactionary shock-jock Truck Schultz rails on the air against casinos on reservations. Three white men with masks and baseball bats (compatriots of a murdered University of Washington student) prowl the downtown area beating any Native American they find; a trio of Indians similarly beat and knife a white boy. Through it all float a number of psychological half-breeds, among them a mystery writer who's an Indian wannabe and a buffoonish white professor of Native American literature who is forced to re-evaluate his qualifications. Over the last few years, Alexie, who is Spokane/Coeur d'Alene, has built a reputation as the next great Native American writer. This novel bolsters that contention. It displays a brilliant eye for telling detail, as well as startling control, as Alexie flips points of view among a wide array of characters without ever seeming to resort to contrivance. The narrative voice can sound detached and affectless, and some readers will miss the lyricism and humor of the author's earlier work, but this novel offers abundant evidence of a most promising talent extending its range. 75,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour; rights: Nancy Stauffer. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A terrific second novel by the talented young Native American author whose highly praised fiction (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993; Reservation Blues, 1995) has already moved him on to the short list of the country's best young writers. It's a rich, panoramic portrayal of contemporary Seattle that uses the form of the mystery to tell some uncomfortable home truths about Indian-white relations, and indeed racism in all its forms. Alexie begins by focusing on the ironically named John Smith, who was either given up for adoption by, or stolen away from, his teenaged Indian mother. He is raised by loving and conscientious white ``parents'' and finds himself in traumatized adulthood ``an Indian without a tribe,'' a misfit who belongs to no culture, wandering the streets among the city's homeless, seeking an outlet for the unfocused rage he knows he can no longer suppress. Is John Smith the ``Indian killer'' who stalks and murders white men, scalping them for good measure, terrorizing the city and provoking a rash of racially motivated violence? Alexie teases us with that possibility right up to the last page, meanwhile populating his exciting story with a host of keenly observed and rigorously analyzed characters. The most memorable include Marie Polatkin, a fiery Native American college student and activist with no use for sentimental white liberals; Jack Wilson, an ex-cop turned popular novelist, whose exploration (and exploitation) of a small trace of ``Indian blood'' in his ancestry infuriates his full-blooded ``brothers''; and John Smith's adoptive parents, Olivia and Daniel, whose decency and good will are portrayed with fairness and respect. Alexie succeeds brilliantly at suggesting the time- bombticking character of John Smith's ravaged psyche, and the novel rips along at a breathless pace. Both a splendidly constructed and wonderfully readable thriller--and a haunting, challenging articulation of the plight and the pride of contemporary Native Americans. (First printing of 75,000; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Booklist Review
In his previous novels, including Reservation Blues (1995), Alexie, a Spokane/Cour d'Alene Indian, has mixed magic realism, black humor, and sparkling lyricism. Here he is up to something very different: a serial-killer tale in which there is no detective and no investigation. Instead, there is fear and anger. Bodies in trendy Seattle have been turning up scalped and decorated with owl feathers, prompting anti-Indian rhetoric from a vitriolic shock jock and leading to a spate of street violence, white against Indian and Indian against white. The killer, John Smith, is an Indian without a tribe. Adopted by a white couple, John quickly slips into a delusional fantasy life in which he dreams of righting all the wrongs inflicted on Native Americans. Alexie surrounds John with a cast of wanna-be Indians, activists, and skinheadish thugs--all of whom see the murders through a distorted lens. Anger is rarely an endearing trait--it tends to flatten even the most well-rounded characters--and this novel is populated almost completely by angry people. There is not even much black humor to ease the pain of a world gone wrong. But the anger and the fear smell so real, so shockingly familiar, that we resist the temptation to turn away. Indian Killer is a difficult pill to swallow, but Alexie compels us to take our medicine. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1996)087113652XBill Ott
Library Journal Review
Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, LJ 9/1/93) was recently cited by Granta as one of today's best young American novelists. In his latest novel, a quasi-thriller, a mysterious Indian is killing and scalping white men in Seattle. The most obvious suspects are John Smith, an Indian who was adopted and raised by white parents, and Reggie Polatkin, the product of a marriage between a Spokane woman and an abusive white man. The novel's appeal, however, lies not in our drive to detect the killer's identity but in the sheer wonder of Alexie's fabulously sketched minor characters: Marie, a young, idealistic Spokane woman who befriends John; Wilson, a celebrated white mystery writer à la Tony Hillerman, who mistakenly believes he can elucidate the Native experience; and Dr. Mather, a "Wannabe Indian" who teaches Native American literature and clashes with Marie. Unfortunately, the humor that made the bleak stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto so enjoyable is missing here, and the grinding of Alexie's axe is sometimes a bit loud. Still, this is a fine novel by an up-and-coming writer and, given the 75,000-copy first printing, there should be ample demand. For most fiction collections.Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
