Urban indians in the short fiction of Sherman Alexie.

Abstract

Although we still think of American Indians as riding horses, paddling canoes or hunting buffalo, the fact is that three out of four Native Americans now live in cities.The migration from the backwoods and reservations to the big metropolises began late in the 19 th century, but only gained great momentum after World War II.While Sherman Alexie's early fiction focused on the tribulations faced by American Indians on reservations, by the turn of the new millennium he was portraying the experiences of the Native diaspora in urban areas.In the two collections of short stories The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Ten Little Indians (2003), Alexie captures the more complex and unpredictable relationships that Native Americans build in diverse and fluid urban spaces.These new relationships are often marked by feelings of loss (of tribal bonds), alienation (from other human groups), nostalgia, ambition, and other psycho-social diseases.Helped by the ideas of experts such as