English literature about The life of Mr. Sherman Alexie

"Evolution" - by Sherman Alexie (1992)

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation

right across the border from the liquor store

and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry

television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit

it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians

pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin

and when the last Indian has pawned everything

but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old

calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter.

* * * * *

Sherman Alexie, Jr., is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian

Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. He is the author of 22 books, including two collections of poetry,

I Would Steal Horses and The Business of Fancydancing, in which the poem “Evolution”

appears, and the novels The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Ten Little Indians, and

the The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the 2007 National Book Award

for Young People’s Literature. He lives with his family in Seattle, WA.