The Toughest Indian In the World by Sherman Alexie

When one reads realistic fiction, you expect to see the many areas of life with which we all wrestle: love, lust, anger, fear, sadness, joy and so on.  This is why reading books of short stories can be so rewarding.  I felt each of these emotions in turn as I read: Saint Junior describes the love between a man a wife and what that love means as time ticks by.  Assimilation tells about an American Indian woman (Coeur d’Alene) married to a white man who wants to have sex with an Indian man.  Any Indian man. Class gives the reader the story of an Indian man married to “the tenth most beautiful white woman in the room” and how he processes the resentment of her affairs and the loss of their child.  The entirety of Sin Eaters is filled with a terror that steadily creeps along your skin as you read about a future in which American Indians are captured and forced to reproduce.  Indian Country tells of a successful writer who discovers that his long-distance lover has eloped with another man and finds himself in the middle of a tense dinner with mostly strangers. South by Southwest is about a man who holds up an IHOP and takes a hostage, hoping to discover love.  The collection’s final story, One Good Man, ticked all of these boxes while continually asking the question: What is an Indian?

Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World is a book of stories written by a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene man who has spent his life thinking and writing about being an American Indian. It is a heartfelt look at life and the many types of people who inhabit it. Alexie is also the author of many other books of short stories including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the acclaimed Young Adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Check out some of his fiction at the library today.

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides

Many Americans know little about the history of the American Southwest, other than the false impressions we have gotten through cowboy movies. In some of our minds, the fight for the Alamo was part of the Mexican-American war; “Manifest Destiny” was a righteous ideology justifying the absorption of western lands by the United States; the Indians were savages; and Kit Carson gets jumbled in with those other buckskin-wearing frontiersmen, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The actual history of the area and its people is far more complicated and interesting than these stereotypes would make it seem. Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides is a well-researched, detailed, and entertaining history of the territory taken from Mexico by President James K. Polk as a result of the Mexican-American War. Basically a biography of Kit Carson-- hunter, trapper, explorer, guide, U.S. Army officer and both friend and foe of Native Americans—this book sets Carson’s life in the context of the greater American experience. And a violent and bloody experience it was, as emigrants from the East struggled to wrest New Mexico, Arizona, California and Colorado from the control of the indigenous people and residents still loyal to Mexico.  Later, after the discovery of gold in California and Colorado, and still later the Civil War, additional factions contributed to the turbulence in the area. Carson was at the center of much of the action. He lived in the vast wilderness west of the Missouri River from the age of sixteen and, although illiterate, could speak English, Spanish and various Native American languages. He became the go-to man when Santa Fe Trail merchants or the U.S. Army needed a scout or guide. He assisted John C. Fremont’s exploration of California. He was a scout and messenger for General Kearney, the first U.S. Army officer in the newly acquired territory. He was an agent for peace and war with Native American tribes, particularly the Navajo. And he was an officer in the Union Army, fighting in little known battles of the Civil War fought in New Mexico. The life of Kit Carson and the story of New Mexico are intertwined and filled with contradictions: cruelty and kindness, courage and cowardice, nobility and dishonor.  Blood and Thunder is fascinating reading, relaying an American history we should all be aware of.