SOURCE: Evans, Stephen F. “‘Open Containers’: Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians.” The American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 1 (winter 2001): 46-72.

In the following essay, Evans discusses Alexie's depiction of contemporary reservation life in his poetry and fiction.

Ironic and satiric impulses consistently suffuse the tone, structure, realization of characters, and vision of contemporary reservation reality in the small press collections of poems and stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) through The Summer of Black Widows (1996), as well as his mainstream works of fiction, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) to The Toughest Indian in the World (2000).¹ Much of the praise bestowed on Alexie's early efforts and The Lone Ranger and Tonto has focused on the author's unflinchingly bold depiction of the dysfunctional nature of contemporary reservation life and the fragmented, often alienated “bicultural” lives of characters who daily confront the white civilization...