for Eng.Kelvin

_________________________________________________________________________________ MELUS, Volume 35, Number 3 (Fall 2010)

“If I were Jewish, how would I mourn the dead?”: Holocaust and Genocide in the Work of Sherman Alexie

Nancy J. Peterson Purdue University

One of the longest-reaching aftereffects of World War II, the Nazi camps, and the Holocaust is the belated recognition of other acts of mass destruction and genocide, especially in the United States. When Toni Morrison published her now-canonized novel Beloved in 1987, she included an epigraph that became controversial—“Sixty Million / and more”—referring to an estimated number of Africans who perished both in Africa after being captured and on the Middle Passage before entering slavery in the Americas. Similarly, Native American demographers have attempted to estimate the number of indigenous peoples extinguished in North America since the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492, with estimates varying from several million to fi fteen million and more.1 The painstaking and painful work of arriving at such victim counts follows in the wake of the historical legacy of the Holocaust and cultural con- sciousness of the devastation. Comparing other instances of genocide to the Holocaust unleashes a host of unsettling issues, however. In a vitriolic review of Morrison’s Beloved, Stanley Crouch takes issue with her refer- ence to sixty million, reading this fi gure as a direct, exponential reference to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust (six million times ten) and criticizing Beloved for being a “blackface holocaust novel” (40). Crouch’s charged reaction to Beloved demonstrates how comparisons of tragic his- tories can become caught up with victim counts, leading to a hierarchy of suffering or victimization.

For many minority peoples in the United States, claiming the visibility and ethical weight of the Nazi Holocaust has become a way to articulate and call attention to their own traumatic histories.2 In fact, this has become a prominent line of analysis in Native American studies over the past two decades, with several scholars drawing attention to the “American Holocaust” that has gone unrecognized. Russell Thornton’s demographic study American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (1987) set the stage for this kind of comparison. While Thornton draws an explicit connection between Holocaust history and Native American depopulation only in his title and preface, subsequent studies have extended the comparison. Like Thornton’s work, David E. Stannard’s groundbreaking American Holocaust: Columbus and the

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Conquest of the New World (1992) and Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (1997) insist not only on comparing Native history to the Nazi Holocaust, but also claim the term Holocaust to refer to the tremendous devastation wrought on indigenous peoples since 1492, brought on by the introduction of diseases, liquor, and guns, as well as the escalation of warfare.3

More recently, Native literary anthologies have entered the conversa- tion. In particular, Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (2003) and Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust (2006), both edited by MariJo Moore (Cherokee), and Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing Volume II (2007), edited by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga), bring together Native writers from many different tribal backgrounds from across the Americas, writing to insist that the devastating legacy wrought by the Indian wars and other forms of colonialism be recognized. They vehemently protest

“whitewashed” versions of American history that speak of “settlement” and “civilization” without recognizing the decimation of Native peoples, cultures, and languages since 1492. These works also testify to the fi ercely honed ability of Indian peoples to survive and assert their sovereignty in the twenty-fi rst century.

While the historical and demographic work of Thornton and Stannard is known by scholars, the poems, essays, and stories gathered in these Native literary anthologies address themselves to a broader audience and bring up complicated epistemological and ethical issues. In his essay “American Heritage,” for instance, Gansworth begins by posing a haunting question:

“There is no equivalent of the Shoah Foundation in American Indian com- munities, but even if there were who would we record on videotape— ghosts?” (267). By giving voice to occluded personal and tribal histories using a full range of literary, narrative, and poetic techniques, the authors and texts included in these anthologies intervene in this crisis of witness. They shape powerful stories—stories so compelling that they may offer the most effective means of intervening in and reshaping historical memory.

The poetry, fi ction, and fi lm of the acclaimed Spokane/Coeur d’Alene author Sherman Alexie is a particularly rich and valuable body of work to turn to in this regard, for over the course of his career, Alexie has devel- oped a keen sense of possible intersections between Native and Holocaust histories, and he has incorporated numerous references to Jewishness and to the Holocaust as part of his ongoing effort to scrutinize Native American identity, marginality, and history. Alexie’s use of Holocaust references has also elicited critical attention. In a 2005 interview with Alexie, for instance, Åse Nygren questions the author about the pervasive sense of personal and

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 65

collective trauma, genocide, and Holocaust found in his work. Asked spe- cifi cally to comment on whether it is appropriate to use the term Holocaust to characterize Native American history, Alexie’s response is instructive:

I’m sure it could be interpreted as anti-Semitic in a way of claiming ownership of somebody else’s word. But I call it that to draw direct parallels in a way that people don’t want to. . . . I realize the term was generated to mean something specifi c, but I want it to mean more. . . . I want what happened here to receive the same sort of sacred respect that what happened in Germany does. I want our dead to be honored. (“World” 166)

Alexie’s response shows an awareness of the ethical issues attached to any comparison of genocide and suffering, even as he insists on the effi cacy of aligning Native and Holocaust histories. As the following discussion insists, Alexie’s self-refl exive literary, narrative, and rhetorical experi- ments are not merely playful or imaginative; they refl ect a signifi cant ethi- cal engagement with issues attached to genocidal histories and our use of them.

Holocaust Histories

Alexie published his fi rst book, The Business of Fancydancing, in 1992, the year of the Columbian Quincentennial, when many white Americans unthinkingly commemorated the event, while most Native Americans were outraged by the public and national celebrations of an arrival that had devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. In the following year, Alexie produced three full-length books: Old Shirts and New Skins, a col- lection of poems; First Indian on the Moon, a collection of poems, prose poems, and stories; and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfi ght in Heaven, a collection of short stories. In the three volumes from this watershed year, Alexie developed a lexicon for his depiction of contemporary Indian life drawing on his family history, life on the Spokane Reservation, pop cul- ture and mass media, and tribal history and traditions. Alexie’s fi rst articu- lations of genocide and the Holocaust appear in these volumes as well.

What historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has termed “the legacy of conquest” (18) lies behind many of the poems in Alexie’s Old Shirts and New Skins, but “Custer Speaks,” a poem written mockingly from George Armstrong Custer’s point of view, takes on the issue of genocide directly. Alexie’s Custer is a warmonger, eager to parlay battlefi eld accomplish- ments and a reputation as a ruthless Indian killer to build momentum for political, White House ambitions. He chillingly justifi es massacres of Native peoples, even women and children:

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I see by your eyes what you think of me, of my surprise ride into Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita River. It’s easy

to blame me, to call it a massacre. But it was no Sand Creek, no Wounded Knee. Still, call me what you need to call me:

the Great Indian Fighter who cut down women and children, ordered them shot as they sought cover, shot them in the back.

But I was forced to do that. They attacked us with everything, everyone they had. It was maddening to see an Indian girl

pick up a rifl e from the blood-soaked snow and fi re at my men, at me. It doesn’t change anything, make the fi ght mean less.

Just because Black Kettle’s camp was on the reservation doesn’t allow it to be called anything short of victory.

They had to be removed to make Kansas, the West, safe. They were barriers to progress. You call it genocide; I call it economics. (Old Shirts 36-37)

Alexie’s Custer speaks almost as though he is on trial as he defends his attack on Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River on 27 November 1868. Addressing his unnamed accusers, Custer justifi es the attack by insisting it was not as heinous as the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864—when Third Colorado Volunteers led by Colonel John Chivington killed approximately two hundred Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe, mostly unarmed women and children, and then scalped and dismembered them, riding through Colorado towns with body parts (including genitalia) displayed proud- ly. Nor does Custer regard his actions against Black Kettle’s people as equally reprehensible as the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890—when the Seventh Cavalry killed three hundred Lakota belonging to Chief Big Foot’s Minneconjou band, including starving women, children, and elders who had already surrendered and been disarmed.4 Historically, the Battle at the Washita against Black Kettle was the only “great” military victory Custer led against Native peoples. Alexie’s Custer revels in this accom- plishment, wishing to be called a “Great Indian Fighter”—not a killer or murderer—but as he explains his perspective, he reveals why he should be thought of precisely in those terms. Shooting at fl eeing people, being enraged at an Indian girl who takes up a rifl e in self-defense to ward off his troops, casually dismissing the act of attacking people on their own res- ervation—these details portray Custer as complicit in policies to wipe out Indian peoples.5 This poem makes an unforgettable connection between US colonialism, Indian massacres, and genocide.

Alexie’s poem does not stop at this revelation, however; it goes on to connect Custer to other atrocities throughout history and around the world:

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 67

I was born again in Hiroshima. I was born again in Birmingham. I was born again in the Triangle Shirt Factory. I was born again in Chile. I was born again in Saigon. I was born again in Iraq. I was born again in Hollywood. (Old Shirts 38)

This list—a grotesque chant—includes sites at which the United States has been directly or indirectly involved in atrocities during the twentieth century. Alexie’s Custer thus becomes a symbol of US hegemony—politi- cal, economic, and cultural—and unacknowledged genocide.

In his subsequent volume, First Indian on the Moon, Alexie extends his analysis of genocide by juxtaposing Native American history and Jewish history in a poem titled “The Game Between the Jews and the Indians is Tied Going into the Bottom of the Ninth Inning.” The poem is narrated by a young Indian man who is in a relationship with a young Jewish woman. We know this because, as they touch each other intimately, memories of genocide and the Holocaust fl ash into their minds: specifi cally, the sites of Native American massacres—Sand Creek and Wounded Knee—and Nazi death/concentration camps—Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The poem, though brief (just fourteen lines), explores the important issue of how a history of genocide may weigh upon individuals of a younger generation.

The speaker at fi rst tries to evade the burden of their traumatic his- torical memories through an emphasis on the present moment and on the joyous possibilities of their love. But there is also the suggestion that his- tory must be bracketed because the lovers might begin to compare their histories and to compete for “most victimized” status. In fact, the fl ip title of the poem refers to a baseball game that is “tied going into the bottom of the ninth inning,” which means that one side has already had its turn at bat, so only the other side has a chance of winning before extra innings would be necessary. Will the Jews or the Indians win this game?

The parodic, metaphoric title seems completely inappropriate for a poem that references genocide. But it is telling that the game used meta- phorically in the title is the “all-American” game of baseball, for America has been a nation that plays off minorities against each other and forces them to compete for visibility. Alexie’s poem refuses to play this game and instead ends with the speaker describing a memory an Indian man and a Jewish woman might cling to together:

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but every once in a while we can remind each other

that we are both survivors and children and grandchildren of survivors. (First 80)

Though not explored fully here, the ending of this poem anticipates an emphasis in Alexie’s later works on cross-cultural, dialogic exploration of history and the importance of survival.

While Alexie’s poems develop key images and provocative juxtaposi- tions of genocide and the Holocaust in relation to American Indian history, his early stories emphasize the signifi cance of narrative and storytelling to reveal the truth of a traumatic past. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfi ght in Heaven, his acclaimed collection of short stories, Alexie includes a sur- realistic story that recounts some of the most terrible moments in Spokane tribal history. “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire” appropriately begins with an epigraph from Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been tell- ing lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fi ne morning” (Lone 93). This quotation not only anticipates the trial Thomas will be subject to in the story, but it also calls to mind the political upheavals of Kafka’s own lifetime and the tortured exploration of oppressive claims of juridical authority and government bureaucracy in Kafka’s fi ction that some scholars read as anticipating the Holocaust.

Using this framework, Alexie creates a story in which Thomas is absurdly put on trial in a modern-day courtroom for initially unspecifi ed charges, which later turn out to be “crimes” committed in 1858. To defend himself, Thomas decides to tell a story about “the worst kind of war crime” (Lone 96). The term war crime echoes with the momentousness of the Nuremberg Trials, and the fi rst story Thomas tells is of a particularly bru- tal moment in Spokane history: Colonel George Wright’s mass slaugh- ter of eight hundred to nine hundred Indian horses in September 1858. Thomas narrates the story as though he were one of the few ponies who escaped death:

Somehow I was lucky enough to be spared while hundreds of my brothers and sisters fell together. It was a nightmare to witness. They were rounded into a corral and then lassoed, one by one, and dragged out to be shot in the head. This lasted for hours, and all that dark night mothers cried for their dead children. The next day, the survivors were rounded into a single mass and slaughtered by continuous rifl e fi re. (Lone 97)

The double signifi cations of this passage are striking. As Wright and his troops slaughter the horses, the horses are also Native people—brothers,

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 69

sisters, mothers, and children—being killed en masse. Images of mass slaughter by shooting squads and the specter of mass graves evoke Nazi actions during World War II. Two discourses come together here as Thomas fi nds a way to narrate Native genocide through Holocaust echoes in order to command the attention of the court.6

Thomas is moved to tell other painful stories of Native devastations, and once the connection is made between Native and World War II Holocaust history, the fl oodgates open. Thomas proceeds to tell the story of Qualchan, a Yakima warrior who was told to surrender or his father would be killed. As Thomas reveals, Qualchan surrendered to Colonel Wright in late September 1858 to free his father, but rather than receiving just treatment, he was put in chains and publicly hanged. At the conclu- sion of this story, the Natives in the visitors’ gallery erupt “into motion and emotion,” and one women yells to Thomas, “‘We’re all listening. . . . We hear you’” (Lone 99). Thomas’s narration of this traumatic history awakens a collective tribal response, one that threatens juridical authority and “whitewashed” offi cial versions of American history. This moment creates the conditions for what Craig S. Womack (Creek) identifi es as an important “literary aspect of sovereignty”—“a tribal voice” that conveys

“a people’s idea of themselves” as a nation (Red 14). To contain the threat of Native peoples rising up to protest genocide,

the judge and prosecuting attorney quickly turn the tables on Thomas, charging him with murdering “two soldiers in cold blood and with pre- meditation” during the May 1858 Battle of Steptoe (Lone 101), in which an alliance of Spokane, Yakima, Palouse, and Coeur d’Alene warriors fought and defeated troops led by Colonel Steptoe. Thomas is ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison because “new federal sentencing guidelines ‘require the imposition of a life sentence for racially motivated murder’” (Lone 102). In a skewed interpretation of history and a miscar- riage of justice, Thomas is imprisoned to prevent him from telling any other true stories about the horrors of colonialism and genocide.

One of the struggles of Holocaust survivors that Alexie seems to take most to heart is fi nding a way to articulate the terrors of genocide when ordinary words are inadequate. At times, his characters silence themselves or are denied the opportunity to tell the truth, but even then their dreams unleash images with which they must reckon. In another story from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfi ght in Heaven, a young Indian man who drinks fi nds himself in jail and experiences the “DT’s so bad” that:

the walls are Nazis making lampshades out of my skin and the toilet is a white man in a white hood riding me down on horseback and the fl oor is a skinny man who wants to teach me a trick he’s learned to do with a knife

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and my shoes squeal and kick and pull me down into the dead pig pit of my imagination. Oh Jesus I wake up on the bottom of that mass grave with the bones of generations of slaughter and I crawl and dig my way up through layers and years of the lunch special. (Lone 123)

A nightmarish convergence of images of Nazis, the KKK, mass graves, murder, sadomasochism, and vomit confront him and compel him to face the unsettling truth of his life as an Indian man in this country: racism and racially motivated violence are part of his history and daily experience.

The Holocaust and genocide become valuable reference points through which Alexie recognizes and names this condition. As Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk) points out, “The only way for Native people to heal from the historical trauma that we have experienced—genocidal warfare, land theft, ethnic cleansing, disease, the attempted destruction of our religious and ceremonial life at the hands of the government and Christian churches— is for us to speak the truth about what has happened” (“Acknowledging” 321). Alexie’s early works share this urgent impulse to tell the hard truths of Native history. His poems and stories reference the Holocaust to clamor for recognition and justice on behalf of the Spokane specifi cally and American Indians more broadly.

The Ethics of Comparative Suffering

While I have suggested above that Alexie’s early engagement with Jewish history and the Holocaust develops in such a way as to advance the claims of decolonization and Indian sovereignty, I now want to consider some of Alexie’s subsequent work, which interrogates the appropriate- ness of using Holocaust allusions to explicate Indian loss and suffering. How might separate histories of genocide be brought together without one overshadowing the other? How might individuals from one group con- structively engage another group’s devastations? These are critical, ethical issues that emerge in The Summer of Black Widows, Alexie’s 1996 vol- ume of poetry, which represents his most sustained engagement with the Holocaust.

“Fire as Verb and Noun,” a poem in thirteen sections, draws on the tragic loss of Alexie’s sister and brother-in-law in a trailer fi re, and it effec- tively weaves together this personal, familial loss with references to the Holocaust during World War II and traumatic events of American Indian history. The poem explores at length the ethics of reading one’s own tragic experiences as analogous to other horrifi c experiences. To reckon with the question of analogy and comparative suffering, Alexie creates a speaker who imagines himself to be a victim in shifting contexts—fi rst as a Jew

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 71

during the Holocaust, then as an American Indian being tortured:

Let’s say I am a Jew. I am a Jew who lost a sister and brother-in-law in the ovens during World War II. No, let’s say

I am an American Indian who had heated bayonets held against his hands until they blistered and blossomed open. No, let’s say

this all happened to me because I can’t tell the difference between the size of a metaphor and the temperature of the fl ame. (Summer 54)

The self-conscious scrutiny of the speaker is signifi cant. He initially iden- tifi es analogies between very different histories and losses, but then dis- avows them by repeating the phrase “No, let’s say.” The poem also ref- erences Alexie’s own familial loss, but even then, the poem hesitates to translate the loss of sister and brother-in-law into a Holocaust experience and instead raises doubts about the speaker’s capacity to tell the difference between fl ame as metaphor and fl ame as temperature. In this way, the poem raises important epistemological and ethical questions about the effi cacy of comparing suffering or constructing a hierarchy of victimhood.

The poem’s self-consciousness about using the Holocaust in metaphoric terms takes on another level of signifi cation as well, developing into a critical self-refl ection on the ability of language to convey reality and tell the truth. As a later section of the poem reveals, even when the writer- speaker mourns painful losses in the most effective words he can summon, his words cannot offer direct access to or articulation of tragedy, but must always speak via metaphors and fi gurative language:

11. What do you do when your sister burns like a bad fi rework?

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She sparks and sputters smokes uselessly

and leaves only a shell a husk

and the smell and the smell and the smell and

12. it smells exactly like what it is.

13. There is a grave on the Spokane Indian Reservation where my sister is buried. I can take you there. (Summer 55)

The appalling simile comparing the sister’s death to “a bad fi rework” and the pitiless image of how she “smokes uselessly” as she burns to death shock readers into an awareness of how poetry and metaphor can diminish tragic losses and real grief. What seems irreducible in these stanzas is the smell, which try as he might, the speaker cannot describe adequately. He in fact stutters—repeating “and the smell” three times—only to rest in a tautology that points back to the smell as having its own indescribable, yet unassailable materiality (“it smells exactly like what it is”). Then comes the mention of the sister’s grave in two fi nal fl atly declarative sentences. In the end, the poem refuses to compare historically specifi c episodes of loss and suffering, but instead memorializes one loss—one death—and readers are called upon to respond and fi ll in the emotional content and historical contexts for themselves.

While “Fire as Verb and Noun” explores the limits and possibilities of metaphor, specifi cally of appropriating the Holocaust as metaphor, “Inside Dachau,” a seven-part long poem also from The Summer of Black Widows, works through ethical issues involving tourism and the Holocaust, wres- tling with the question “what does it mean to become an ethical witness to such devastation?” The poem opens with the Native speaker and his wife visiting the site of the former camp while on a trip to Germany. Somewhat surprisingly, this visit turns out to be a secretive one; the speaker and his wife inexplicably lie to their German hosts about where they spend the day, telling them they wish to spend the time “searching for rare albums in Munich,” but instead, they tour Dachau (Summer 117). The poem never

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 73

directly explains why the lie is necessary: the German hosts apparently are quite open about the camps—they “spoke of the camp / as truthfully as they spoke about the seasons”—and they admit guilt with a simple directness—“‘We are truly ashamed of Dachau’” (Summer 118). Perhaps part of the answer lies in the speaker’s initial, less than worthy motives to visit the camp to obtain writing material:

Once there, I had expected to feel simple emotions: hate, anger, sorrow. That was my plan. I would write poetry about how the season of winter found a perfect home in cold Dachau. I would be a Jewish man who died in the camp. I would be the ideal metaphor. (Summer 117)

How safe to be a tourist, metaphorically trying on the Holocaust and Jewish identity.7 The poem quickly takes a more serious turn, however, when one of the German hosts asks what seems to be an innocent question:

“‘but what about all the Dachaus / in the United States?’” (Summer 118). With this question, the German host may very well be trying to defl ect attention away from Dachau and the Holocaust and onto US atrocities. However, even if his motives are disingenuous, the question triggers an important sense of crisis, and as the rest of the poem unfolds, ethical ques- tions concerning the Holocaust and Native American history emerge and preoccupy the speaker.

The speaker begins to scrutinize his own motivations, repeating the question “Why are we here?” and offering the haunting question “What have we come to see / that cannot be seen in other countries?” (Summer 119). He understands that there is a real danger to playing the part of tour- ist at Dachau when it leads to a false assumption that the Holocaust is something that happened only to Jews under Nazism, that it is part of the past, something that happened only during World War II and is over now. Rejecting this narrow approach, the speaker recognizes, “Every country hides behind a white door” (Summer 119), and this insight leads directly to the fourth section of the poem, provocatively titled “the american indian holocaust museum”:

What do we indigenous people want from our country? We stand over mass graves. Our collective grief makes us numb. We are waiting for the construction of our museum.

We too could stack the shoes of our dead and fi ll a city to its thirteenth fl oor. What did you expect us to become? What do we indigenous people want from our country?

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We are waiting for the construction of our museum.

We are the great-grandchildren of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. We are the veterans of the Indian wars. We are the sons and daughters of the walking dead. We have lost everyone. What do we indigenous people want from our country? We stand over mass graves. Our collective grief makes us numb. We are waiting for the construction of our museum. (Summer 119-20)

The images of mass graves, shoes of the dead, and ghosts in these stanzas are associated on one level with the Holocaust; they also testify to Indian massacres and devastations in the Americas. Like Jewish survivors today, indigenous peoples share enormous “collective grief,” the poem points out, but they have no public or offi cial site at which to mourn those lost and to clamor for recognition. There is no “american indian holocaust museum” that could function analogously to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993 in Washington, DC. This is an asymmetry that Alexie has commented on sharply in a 2003 article: “The arrogance of this country to have a Holocaust museum, to point out the genocidal sins of another culture is amazing. Philip Sheridan, who was the Colin Powell of his day, said, ‘We should kill Indian children because nits make lice.’ President Andrew Jackson said, ‘Let’s kill the Indians’” (Campbell n. pag.).8 Alexie’s poem likewise points out that the terrible history of colonialism and killing of indigenous peoples in the US has never been offi cially recognized nor taken seriously; hence, the call for a museum to make this history publicly visible and the strategic use of the word holo- caust in the title of this section.9

If “Inside Dachau” ended with this moment of insight, it could be read as being primarily interested in developing a comparative suffering framework to make visible the connections between US colonialism and American Indian genocide, and to clamor for justice. But the poem contin- ues, and it turns in the last sections from advancing a politics of comparison to developing an ethics of comparison. The sixth section of the long poem directly confronts the ethics of juxtaposing Jewish and Spokane histories. It consists of two-line stanzas in which the speaker imagines himself to be Jewish in the fi rst line and then speaks of being Spokane in the next:

If I were Jewish, how would I mourn the dead? I am Spokane. I wake.

If I were Jewish, how would I remember the past? I am Spokane. I page through the history books.

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 75

If I were Jewish, how would I fi nd the joy to dance? I am Spokane. I drop a quarter into the jukebox. (Summer 121)

Each couplet offers an open-ended question in the fi rst line followed by a simple statement in the second, and the overall effect is to locate provoca- tive points of difference and connection. The fi rst couplet, for example, suggests that because of the Holocaust and perhaps because of Jewish religious traditions, a strong and meaningful connection exists between Jewish identity and mourning the dead. The speaker asks himself fi rst to imagine what it would mean to mourn according to a tradition and ethnic- ity outside of his own lived experience, but then he immediately shifts perspective and brings to mind his Spokane identity. What might seem to be a point of nonnegotiable difference makes way for a moment of contact and insight. The speaker understands that he cannot merely play at being Jewish—indeed, he keeps repeating “I am Spokane”—but he also fi nds an important point of connection, articulated as “I wake”—wake, in the sense that he has the capacity to wake up and live another day that all the Jewish dead do not, but more importantly wake as in the collective commemora- tion of the life of someone who has died. Mourning, whether in the form of eating and telling stories at a wake in Native/Christian tradition or in the form of sitting shiva in Jewish tradition, becomes a cross-cultural con- nection for the speaker between his own Native experience and Jewish culture and history.10

In this section, Alexie uses Dachau and the Holocaust to reference and interrogate Indian history and contemporary politics, all the while remaining cautious about the possibility of confl ating the two. This is an ongoing, complex, and necessary struggle. To insist on the uniqueness of either Native genocide or Jewish Holocaust is to foreclose the possibility of situating genocide comprehensively. To merely confl ate these histories is to risk eliding signifi cant differences, a move that would be unwelcome to either group. To compare events and circumstances in order to estab- lish a hierarchy of victimization or suffering is another dead end. Alexie’s speaker struggles in the poem to make vital connections between Native and Jewish devastations from a position that remains in motion, capable of being rethought and renegotiated as his insights provoke new ethical questions and possible vantage points.

The concluding section of “Inside Dachau” maintains this delicate bal- ance. The speaker realizes the limits of his own understanding—“I am not a Jew. I was just a guest / in that theater which will never close”—and yet he also recognizes that he is involved in what Dachau represents because terrible atrocities continue around the world: “I wonder which people will

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light fi res next / and which people will soon be turned to smoke” (Summer 122). He sees himself as a witness with profound ethical responsibilities: to speak the truth of American Indian history as genocide, to bear witness to the horrors of Dachau and the Holocaust, and to recognize the recur- rence of genocide wherever and whenever it arises.

The ability of Alexie’s speaker to claim the Holocaust on behalf of American Indians while also recognizing the claims of other traumatic his- tories and violated peoples represents a valuable, often overlooked aspect of American Indian intellectual sovereignty. Commenting on a story by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) set in Jerusalem and Oklahoma, Womack argues that one of the most signifi cant implications of the story is its “insistence that Indians have something to say about the world beyond Indian coun- try, that Native studies is not inherently parochial, that tribally specifi c approaches have global implications” (Review 158). Womack identifi es

“rigorous empathy”—which “both seeks connections and examines the things that separate us from other peoples” (161)—as a valuable aspect of Howe’s work, and it is precisely this quality that Alexie’s “Inside Dachau” and “Fire as Verb and Noun” employ as the poems ethically consider American Indian history in relation to other losses.

The Holocaust and Survivance

Drawing connections between American Indian history and the Holocaust, and identifying compelling moments of “rigorous empathy” across different cultures and histories, are essential strategies in the strug- gle toward decolonization. Emphasizing devastations, however, can inad- vertently feed into an image of Indians as “vanishing” peoples. To counter this stereotype, Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) has developed a theory of surviv- ance that he sees as crucial to Native stories and storytellers. Survivance acknowledges colonialism and trauma, but it claims more than survival as an ending to this history. “Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Manifest vii), Vizenor explains; they

“take on the world with wit, wisdom, and tricky poses” (“Postindian” 38) to insist on the continuing presence of Native peoples and their wisdom in the contemporary world.

The transformation of a legacy of colonialism and genocide into a story of survivance is a signifi cant theme in one of Alexie’s most acclaimed short stories, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” which appears in Ten Little Indians (2003). Alexie creates a protagonist, Jackson Jackson, who is down on his luck—he is homeless, alcoholic, and diabetic. Jackson is also the narrator of the story, and he describes himself quite candidly

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 77

as “the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins” (171). In Alexie’s fi ctional world, however, Jackson Jackson is not consumed with anger or despair about his situation; rather strikingly, he is friendly, smart, and comic. The story, in other words, draws attention to the lasting effects of colonialism on Native peoples and presents Jackson as a homeless hero; in its ability to yoke these two very different narrative possibilities together, the story affi rms the importance of “survivance.”

The tension of the story arises from an accidental encounter: walk- ing by a pawnshop in downtown Seattle, Jackson sees old-time powwow regalia on display in the window and immediately recognizes it as his grandmother’s. Alexie’s readers may wonder whether to trust his claim, and Jackson himself readily admits, “I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d seen only photographs of my grandmother dancing in it.” Then he adds, “But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same colors of feathers and beads that my family always sewed into their powwow regalia” (171-72). He does not have a fi rsthand memory, as it turns out, because the regalia was stolen some fi fty years earlier and was never recovered. And he has not seen his grandmother dancing in the regalia because she died from cancer when he was just fourteen years old; the family cannot agree whether her breast cancer was caused by uranium mining on the reservation or by the motor- cycle that hit her and left her with broken ribs that never healed correctly. His grandmother’s regalia becomes a potent site of memory for Jackson.

Part of his memory concerns the legacy of conquest. When Jackson confronts the white pawnshop owner to reclaim the stolen regalia, the owner wants proof that it indeed comes from his grandmother. Jackson remembers that his family always sewed one yellow bead out of place on their regalia, and sure enough, the regalia in the pawnshop turns out to have a misplaced yellow bead underneath one arm. Even with this proof, the pawnshop owner will not relinquish the regalia: “I can’t afford to do the right thing,” he tells Jackson. “I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t give away a thousand dollars.”11 Jackson and his friends mention that they could contact the police and report the stolen goods, but the owner responds with a harsh truth: “Well, I suppose you could go to the cops. . . . But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said” (173). Jackson’s confl ict with the pawnshop owner results in a stark recognition that being Native, homeless, and alcoholic prevents him from even approaching offi - cial authorities, who cannot and will not listen to claims from the outer margins of society.

Jackson does not give up; rather, he evinces Vizenor’s call to “take on the world with wit, wisdom, and tricky poses.” He continues to talk with

78 PETERSON

the pawnshop owner, and the owner agrees to sell Jackson the regalia for $999: “I’d lose a dollar,” he explains. “It would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing” (173). The pawn- shop owner then gives Jackson a twenty-dollar bill out of his own wallet and tells him he has twenty-four hours to come up with the rest of the money. This particular monetary denomination is signifi cant: President Andrew Jackson’s portrait appears on the face of the twenty-dollar bill, and it quickly becomes clear that Alexie’s Jackson has been named for a President whose policies decimated Native peoples. In his own name, Alexie’s Jackson carries the burden of colonialism and conquest.

This initial encounter with the pawnshop owner evokes a long legacy of unequal power relationships carried out between Native peoples and white settlers. The story is wracked by other painful moments: Jackson and his pals spend the money from the pawnshop owner on booze and end up passing out in an alley. When Jackson scrapes together another two dollars and fi fty cents, he spends it on lottery tickets and miraculously wins one hundred dollars. But then he takes the money and buys round after round of shots for everyone in an Indian bar. Hour by hour, moment by moment, Jackson fritters away his time and money—and perhaps any chance of reclaiming his grandmother’s regalia.

The most harrowing moment of the twenty-four hour period is when Jackson passes out, drunk, on railroad tracks.12 He turns out to be lucky: before a train comes, a benevolent cop named Offi cer Williams fi nds him, pulls him off the tracks, and tries to help him. Jackson and the offi cer engage in a good-natured, easy conversation about his condition, which Jackson jokes about: when the offi cer says he’s driving Jackson to detox, Jackson comically protests, “‘No, man, that place is awful. . . . It’s full of drunk Indians’” (186). Offi cer Williams can hardly believe that Jackson has retained a lively sense of humor in these circumstances and asks him for an explanation: “‘You Indians. How the hell do you laugh so much? I just picked your ass off the railroad tracks, and you’re making jokes. Why the hell do you do that?’” Jackson replies: “‘The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide’” (186-87). This provocative, risky joke calls attention to an important thematic thread in the story: perhaps there is not so much an “inherent humor of genocide” that connects Jews and Indians as an inherent humor of survivance, a trickster laughter that draws Indians and Jews together as tribal peoples and beckons Offi cer Williams to join in.

This moment of shared laughter leads to a remarkably triumphant end- ing. Jackson returns to the pawnshop without enough money to reclaim

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 79

the regalia; it seems at fi rst that his quest will end in failure, and Jackson will once again lapse back into marginality. But, quite surprisingly, the pawnshop owner reaches out with empathy and gives Jackson the rega- lia—a moment of generosity that asks readers to rethink the assumptions they may have brought to bear on the characters up to this point. On one level, Alexie’s story concerns the gritty truth of urban Indian homeless- ness and alcoholism, but on another level, the story inspires its characters (and readers) to move beyond colonial relations into a new space, where the practice of “rigorous empathy” leads to an affi rmation of survivance.

The Holocaust emerges as a set of complex meanings and identifi ca- tions in Alexie’s work, and this essay has traced three different modes of engaging the Holocaust in his poetic and fi ctional texts. In the fi rst mode, Holocaust images arise to tell the truth of Native history as genocide, a signifi cant move in the struggle for achieving decolonization and assert- ing sovereignty. In the second mode, politics engages ethics as Alexie’s poems work through the claims and interests of comparing losses and suf- fering, alternating between Jewish and Indian perspectives and adopting a framework of “rigorous empathy.” In the third mode, the project of com- paring Holocaust and genocidal histories moves from tracing traumatic devastations to narrating stories of survivance. Overall, Alexie’s work suggests that there are multiple ways of engaging the Holocaust respect- fully to serve the needs of ethnic and minority writers to articulate their own tribal stories; most importantly, this engagement may lead to life- affi rming moments of cross-ethnic laughter and cross-cultural communi- cation. It may be that in the twenty-fi rst century, we need all these modes of engagement as we reckon with claims of reparative justice and seek to build communities and coalitions in newly imagined ways.

Notes

I wish to thank Martha J. Cutter, Aparajita Sagar, Marcia Stephenson, and the anonymous readers for MELUS for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. All quotations from Alexie’s poems are reprinted by permission; I am grateful to Robert Hershon of Hanging Loose Press, to Christy Cox of FallsApart Productions, and to Sherman Alexie for granting this permission.

1. See Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., for an analysis of methods used to arrive at population and depopulation fi gures for indigenous peoples in the Americas. 2. James E. Young critically examines the representation of the Holocaust in the work of Holocaust survivors, Jewish writers removed from the event, and non- Jewish writers such as John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. His analy- sis helps to explain why references to the Holocaust have become ubiquitous

80 PETERSON

in contemporary America: “Because the suffering of the Holocaust was not like anything else, it became a referent, a standard, by which subsequent suffering would be measured” (128). I assert that for minority writers, it becomes a useful referent not just for subsequent events, but also for devastations occurring prior to World War II. Young adds that once the Holocaust was “entered . . . onto the

‘public record’ during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem [in 1961], a time when images of the camps fl ooded the media and commanded world attention as they had not since the war, the Holocaust necessarily began to inform all writers’ liter- ary imagination as a prospective trope” (132). Thus, Young urges critics to move beyond moral, evaluative questions such as “should the Holocaust be used” to an analysis of “how has the Holocaust been used” (129). 3. The commemoration of the Columbian Quincentennial in 1992 provoked com- parisons of Native American history to Holocaust history for many writers. David E. Stannard’s book was published in 1992, as was M. Annette Jaimes’s edited collection, The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. In her introduction to the volume, Jaimes argues explicitly that there are enough

“distinct and pronounced commonalities between the attitudes and practices that obtained during the ‘Winning of the West’ in the United States during the 19th century, and the nazi [sic] outlooks and policies evidenced within Germany’s

‘War in the East’ during the 20th century” to make the term Holocaust applicable to both (“Sand” 6). 4. Indian losses in battles with soldiers in the nineteenth century are best expressed as approximations. Reliable body counts were not made, and often oral stories from the tribal nation under attack differ widely from the accounts of US military authorities, for various reasons. The fi gures I use for those killed at the Sand Creek massacre and for those killed at Wounded Knee are approximations agreed upon by many Native Studies scholars. At Wounded Knee, for instance, 146 bodies are interred in the mass grave, but as Richard E. Jensen observes, “The total number of fatalities was undoubtedly higher, for survivors and their friends removed some of the dead and dying before the burial party arrived.” After noting that oral tribal accounts remember others who died during and after the massacre, Jensen concludes, “A total in excess of 250 is almost certain” (20). Similarly, in her foreword to Finding Sand Creek, his- torian Christine Whitacre observes that “historical and archeological evidence” is often “compelling,” but on certain points “Sand Creek descendants . . . believe that it confl icts with oral histories and traditional tribal knowledge” (xix). Whitacre states that sites such as Sand Creek “are large enough to accommodate more than one view of history” (xx). It is thus fi tting that Jerome A. Greene and Douglas D. Scott acknowledge that a decisive fi gure for Native lives lost in the Sand Creek Massacre is approximate: while “at least 150 Cheyennes and Arapahos lay dead” after the full-scale bombardment, the authors also note that for the rest of the day

“parties of cavalrymen roamed the area for miles around fi nishing off any survi- vors they could fi nd” (19). 5. Black Kettle’s people were camped at Sand Creek when Chivington’s troops attacked in 1864. Black Kettle escaped the Sand Creek massacre but was killed

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 81

by Custer almost four years later to the day in the 1868 attack along the Washita River. Alexie’s representation of the battle is not entirely accurate: Black Kettle’s village was not within reservation boundaries, but was in an area along the river reserved for the use of the Cheyenne under the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. Moreover, as Jerome A. Greene points out, Custer did not understand at fi rst that he had attacked the wrong group of Cheyenne. He unfortunately targeted Black Kettle’s people, who had wanted to negotiate peace with the white authorities, and recognized only later that the main Cheyenne camps were downriver, hold- ing some of the Cheyenne who had been involved in attacks on white settlers— ostensibly the reason for the military action (186-87). Alexie’s depiction of the battle in this poem, while not entirely consonant with the historical information available today, nonetheless conveys the sense of terror the Cheyenne must have felt that day and the hubris that subsequently led to Custer’s demise at Little Big Horn in 1876. 6. Alexie’s 1995 novel Reservation Blues establishes a similarly surreal connec- tion between Indian and Jewish history. Phil Sheridan is an executive for Cavalry Records in Alexie’s novel, but he also speaks from the perspective of the histori- cal Philip Sheridan, who was a nineteenth-century Army commander:

I remember once . . . when I killed this Indian woman. I don’t even know what tribe she was. It was back in ’72. I rode up on her and ran my saber right through her heart. I thought that was it. But she jumped up and pulled me off my mount. I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry that I threw her to the ground and stomped her to death. It was then I noticed she was pregnant. We couldn’t have that. Nits make lice, you know? So I cut her belly open and pulled that fetus out. (237)

In a few lines, this passage links Indian massacres to Nazi extermination poli- cies and Vietnam atrocities. The rhetoric is particularly chilling in its historical precision: as Stannard explains, Colonel Chivington used the phrase “nits make lice” in the nineteenth century to justify killing all Indian women and children his troops attacked (though he was not the fi rst to do so; see Stannard 313, n123). This is a phrase that reverberates into the twentieth century: Heinrich Himmler spoke of killing Jews as “delousing” (Stannard 131). See also Katie Kane’s analy- sis of this phrase for what it reveals about the politics of colonial extermination in Native American and Irish history. 7. Though developed independently, my analysis of “Inside Dachau” dovetails with Laura Arnold Leibman’s argument that a major current in Alexie’s poetry is to build “a bridge of difference” between Native and nonnative readers. Leibman emphasizes the form of the individual poems in “Inside Dachau,” paying particu- lar attention to Alexie’s use of the villanelle and the sestina. Such formalism com- bined with oral traditions, Leibman argues, allows Alexie’s speaker to explore Native and nonnative identities, “to be empathetic but not parasitic in confront- ing tragedy” (552). My analysis not only teases out the empathetic moments of Alexie’s poem, but also locates the precise ways the poem works through our ethical

82 PETERSON

obligations to witness the Holocaust specifi cally and genocide more broadly. 8. Lilian Friedberg also comments on the nonrecognition of genocide in the US:

“In the pathological dynamic of genocidal histories, the perpetrator culture invari- ably turns its gaze to the horrors registered in the archives and accounts of the

‘other guys.’ This is why Holocaust studies in the United States focus almost exclusively on the atrocity of Auschwitz, not of Wounded Knee or Sand Creek” (354). 9. The National Museum of the American Indian opened on the Mall in Washington, DC, in 2004, several years after Alexie published his poem, but rather than func- tioning as an “american indian holocaust museum,” as Alexie’s poem alludes to, it is a museum designed to document and celebrate the rich history and culture of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. This emphasis has given rise to controversy, and some Native studies scholars and indigenous peoples see the museum as deliberately omitting the devastations of Native history. The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, a collection edited by Amy Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb, includes a helpful range of essays exploring both affi rmative and critical views of the museum. The essays by Sonya Atalay (267-89) and Lonetree (305-27) offer particularly compelling analyses of the shortcomings of the museum’s emphasis on celebrating survival rather than docu- menting genocide. 10. Alexie’s fi lm The Business of Fancydancing amplifi es this cross-cultural con- nection. The fi lm depicts a Spokane wake held to memorialize the life and death of a young Indian man named Mouse, and many of the mourning preparations the characters make as they come together are specifi cally Native (the use of blankets to honor the dead, the ritual preparation of frybread, and so on). At other moments, the fi lm also intertwines Jewish and Native identities: Agnes Roth, a strong female character in the fi lm who has a Spokane father and a Jewish mother, is played by Michelle St. John, an actress who is both Native and Jewish. As Agnes prepares Mouse’s body for the wake, she follows traditional Spokane rituals and she also says Kaddish for him. 11. Could the pawnshop owner be Jewish? Such a reading would be based in stereotypical associations of Jewish people as money-lenders, since there is no piece of specifi c unequivocal evidence in the story itself. But if Alexie intends this subtlety, the story then could be seen as featuring a stereotypical homeless, alcoholic Indian and a stereotypical Jewish pawnshop owner, who in the end sig- nifi cantly transform themselves and their attitudes as they recognize each other’s compassion and humanity. 12. There is a deliberate echo in this situation of an earlier Alexie story: “A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfi ght in Heaven. That early story ends in Samuel Builds- the-Fire’s death, or perhaps suicide, as he realizes he has nothing left to live for. It is worth noting that Alexie’s more recent story treats the devastations of colo- nialism as seriously as the early story, but it ends with survivance, an important development in Alexie’s lengthy engagement with the trauma of American Indian history.

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE 83

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