SOURCE: Gillan, Jennifer. “Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie's Poetry.” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 91–110.

In the following essay, Gillan examines Alexie's work and comments on its focus on an anglicized version of American-Indian history and tradition.

When David Bell, the protagonist in Don DeLillo's Americana, leaves New York, he heads north on a long journey into the “gut of America.”¹ He arrives in a small Maine town resembling a sound stage and stays overnight in an old house, “the place where everyone's grandmother lives in television commercials.” He is told a story about a Sioux holy man, Black Knife, who prophesies that only a trip into what Bell earlier calls the swamp of our being would cure America and allow it to become, finally, “the America that fulfills all of its possibilities” (128–29). The story reassures David that he needs to travel to the “great golden West” filled with Indians...