SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “Haunted by Salmon.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 12 (20 July 2000): 20.

In the following review, Oates explores the search for ethnicity undertaken by the characters in The Toughest Indian in the World.

What is an Indian? runs through Sherman Alexie's second collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World, like a demented, demanding mantra. In these nine stories, irony is sounded like the tribal drums of the ghost musicians of the story “Saint Junior” that haunt the Spokane Indian Reservation. (“Irony, a hallmark of the contemporary indigenous American.”) Alexie, best known for his novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian educated at Gonzaga University and Washington State University, a funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious postmodernist voice set beside his elder and conspicuously more writerly and “spiritual” Native American contemporaries N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise...