of short stories about the experiences of a cast of characters living on the Spokane Indian Reservation in northeastern Washington state. Several stories were eventually adapted into a screenplay for the 1998 filmSmoke Signals, also written and produced by Sherman Alexie.

The inspiration for the book comes directly from the childhood of the author as well as the history of his tribe; Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian himself, and he spent his early years on the Spokane Reservation. The author has verified the parallels between his early life and his creative work—including the full scope of his fiction, poetry, and film—in many interviews. However, it is clear that Alexie is concerned not so much with memorializing his life specifically as with addressing the social and political position of Native American peoples more generally. In short, this author always extrapolates a broader social or cultural message from his own experiences. Alexie inserts details from his own life into the stories of his characters, and events from the actual history of his tribe into fictional situations, in order to emphasize the struggles that many American Indians share in contemporary America. These struggles are often focused on the difficulty of preserving tribal identity while surviving in a dominant white culture that largely fails to either recognize or understand the experience of Native Americans.

The irony is that even after a century of contact between indigenous and white peoples, the two groups still have not developed a viable model for living alongside one another. Instead, Alexie suggests that American Indians are still undergoing a process of colonization by whites that began when the first European explorers landed in the Americas. As a result, many critics have compared his work to that of other writers concerned with the present challenges facing indigenous peoples who were, or still are, colonized, especially in South Asia and the Americas. This movement, called “postcolonialism,” aims to speak from the perspective of the colonized group in order to challenge the racist beliefs and systems of their colonizers. Alexie accordingly speaks out on behalf of Native Americans. His characters are confined to reservations with seriously inadequate living conditions, social services, and career opportunities. Moreover, the racism prevalent in white culture makes any attempt to either improve or leave this environment difficult to impossible to achieve. Both on or off the reservation, opportunities for improvement often depend on the charity of whites—through assistance meted out sparsely and ineffectively by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), or by indifferent, even sometimes racist, employers offering only minimum-wage jobs. Both choices result in exclusion from the cultural acceptance and economic advancement available to others. As such, Alexie challenges the assumption that the American dream—the promise that hard work will result in economic and social success—is available equally to everyone living in the United States. His work highlights the irony and injustice of this failure to achieve equality in a country dedicated to its cause.

Alexie is often compared to writers like N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, who were credited, among others, with popularizing American Indian literature earlier in the twentieth century. Yet, he adds his own sense of irony to the tradition begun by these earlier writers, evident in repeated contrasts between humor and sadness, hope and despair, survival and tragedy. In fact, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven offers clear proof of Alexie’s unique approach from the beginning to the end of the book. The opening story, “Every Little Hurricane,” attests to the irony that the best antidote to the emotional trauma and social strife common to life on the Spokane Indian Reservation is the act of remembering, not forgetting, the pain of the past.

Victor makes this fact most apparent in the story. The story is told from his point of view during a New Year’s Eve party at his parents’ home in 1976. Unsettled by the party, the boy attempts to make sense of the drinking, fighting, and yelling around him. His confusion is symbolized by the hurricane that he imagines has hit the Reservation on this night, pulling everyone and everything into its destructive path.

The hurricane is an apt metaphor because it speaks to both the emotional turmoil and social chaos prevalent in the story. As Victor contemplates the choice between remembering and forgetting the destruction of the storm, it is clear he is really making a decision about his future: whether or not he ultimately will be able to understand and accept his childhood experiences on the Reservation.

It is appropriate, then, that Alexie attributes this disaster more to man-made than natural causes; he suggests that the turmoil caused by the hurricane is a product of long-standing disturbances in tribal life that have become habitual, and thus almost normal, on the Reservation. Alexie presents his case for this point as Adolph and Arnold begin to fight, becoming embroiled in “a misdemeanor that would remain one even if somebody was to die. . . . [For] one Indian killing another did not create a special kind of storm.” The group has internalized the violence inflicted on them since their contact with white Europeans to such an extent that even murder goes unpunished and almost unnoticed. They have become silent “witnesses,” accustomed to watching and not intervening in violence, because this power has been denied them so often in the past; according to Alexie, “[t]hey were all witnesses and nothing more.”

Yet, the author offers an alternative to the role of silent witness in this story, that of the imaginative storyteller determined to record the history of his life and tribe, even if it is mostly one of turmoil and suffering. As such, he introduces a theme that will be repeated throughout the book: the potential of storytelling to respond to, and perhaps even resolve, the challenges facing contemporary Native Americans. The storyteller, in this case, is Victor, who resurrects the past as he watches the present unfold. The most vivid memories are of his father, who cries over the absence of Christmas gifts one year and frequently attempts to drink away the sorrow of his family’s poverty. In fact, the experience of poverty is encapsulated in an image of Victor’s father repeatedly opening and closing an empty wallet; this futile attempt to conjure money from a perpetually empty wallet is the only “ceremony” that this twentieth-century American Indian family performs.

The emotional pain of these memories is only heightened, not lessened, by the physical hardships of living through cold winters with little food on the Reservation. Alexie makes the pain of his protagonist real with several references to the smell and taste of “sweat and whiskey and blood,” which provide the primary sensory touchstones Victor’s life. It is the taste of his parents’ alcohol-soaked skin that accordingly calms Victor and lulls him to sleep at the end of the story.

The link between sensory images of alcohol and experiences of childhood in this story is clearly ironic. The pain that alcoholism causes in this boy’s life is an affront to the assumption that a child should be free of worry and care. Victor cannot afford to be carefree; he must learn instead to use his fear and knowledge of alcoholism as survival skills. In fact, by the end of the story it is clear that alcohol abuse constitutes the most serious threat to his family and tribe. It is the final element in the “natural” disaster that threatens to consume them all. Victor’s dreams and memories again attest to the seriousness of this claim; he sees the danger of drowning all around him and even understands that the sight of “an old Indian man drowned in a mud puddle at [a] powwow” sums up the tragedy of his people.

It seems that Victor finally cannot forget such memories and deny his childhood. After all, he shares these experiences with his family and tribe; every place and person around him bears eternal witness to his pain. The final scenes underscore this realization. The party ends; the uncles reconcile; everyone frolics in the snow. But the sharing of memories finally brings them all together. Alexie writes: “. . . [T]he storm . . . had not died. . . . Instead, it moved from Indian to Indian at the party, giving each a specific, painful memory.” The recounting of these memories finally provides a sense of community, ironically, in the shared experience of suffering. These experiences only seem to make the need for “all the Indians, the eternal survivors . . . to [gather] . . . and count their losses” stronger.

As a whole, this story demonstrates that Victor must not only survive, but also make some sense of, his childhood. He simply does not have a choice. The suggestion that his “memory” has become a witness more faithful to this truth than even a “video camera” hints at the themes and conflicts of the stories to come in the other stories in the book.