Summary and Analysis: All I Wanted to Do Was Dance and The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire
New Characters
Victor’s former white girlfriend, who is unnamed in this story.
David and Esther WalksAlong: the tribal chief, who “walks along” with BIA policy, and his wife.
Summary
In “All I Wanted to Do Was Dance” and “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire”, Victor and Thomas each play the role of protagonist for the last time in the book.
In “All I Wanted to Do Was Dance,” Victor is in Montana after a break-up with his white girlfriend. He begins one night of drinking on the dance floor of a bar and ends it in a car on the roads of an unnamed reservation.
Once in bed, he doesn’t sleep; instead, Victor entertains himself by remembering his girlfriend. He imagines that they stand by a river. He asks her if she knows about Custer. She asks him if he knows about Crazy Horse. The vision only exacerbates his insomnia, and the night stretches into morning. Victor ends the night by rising and remembering another scene from their time together. The memories are his only companion now.
He goes running in the morning and returns to watch television. He wishes that the color images could be transmuted into black-and-white scenes; the absence of color would make life “clearer,” less “complicated” for him. He sips a cup of coffee and regrets his sobriety that morning.
The action shifts to two scenes of dancing, in childhood and then adulthood. As a child, Victor fancydances at a performance, watched by his drunk parents. As an adult, a drunk Victor sways across the dance floor of another bar. He takes a woman home and tries to pass out, but sleep still eludes him.
The new relationship doesn’t last either. A lone Victor returns home to work odd jobs on the Reservation and buy beer at the Trading Post. One morning he gives a bottle of wine to a stranger in the parking lot, instead of drinking it himself, and walks home with visions of dancing into the future.
In "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," Thomas is on trial for “a storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth.” He begins to speak just before the trial after taking an oath of silence for more than twenty years; the reemergence of his voice is celebrated by Esther WalksAlong, who leaves her husband David, the tribal chief infamous for “walking along” with BIA policy. This rebellious act foreshadows the turmoil of the impending trial.
The trial begins with Thomas’s testimony. He tells a story of the 800 horses first stolen from his tribe and then killed by invading white armies in 1858. Thomas speaks in the voice of a horse that lived to tell the story by escaping the slaughter. Upon a request for additional evidence, Thomas tells another tale, this one of a Spokane warrior named Qualchan who is captured and hanged by the same troops. Chaos erupts in the courtroom after Thomas ends the story with a protest; a new golf course is to be built in this valley and named after the fallen warrior by city officials. After order is restored, Thomas offers one more story; he speaks in the voice of a warrior named Wild Coyote who killed two white soldiers during wars between the Spokane tribes and white armies. The trial ends as Thomas takes responsibility for these murders.
A newspaper article reveals the penalty for this crime: two life terms in the state penitentiary for “racially motivated murder.” The story ends as Thomas rides to the prison on a bus and tells another story to the men who...
(This entire section contains 1367 words.)
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ride with him.
Analysis
These stories are the last tales that focus on the experiences of Victor and Thomas. As such, they provide a final comparison between these two men and the directions their lives have taken.
Victor has returned to the Reservation, first to Montana and then to Spokane, to lose himself in working and drinking. Scenes from his present escapades alternate with memories of past experiences from his childhood and a relationship with a white woman. This technique allows us to compare his past and present lives and determine where Victor stands now.
Victor has learned more about himself during the relationship. The conversations with his girlfriend that he recalls about Custer and Crazy Horse suggest that the relationship could not last. Like these fabled warriors from the Battle of Little Bighorn, their fates were determined by their membership in warring races; they were always aware of, and thus doomed by, a history of conflict between whites and Native Americans. It is thus fitting that Victor wishes for a black-and-white, instead of a color, television. A world without color or race would be much easier for him.
Yet this new awareness does not rescue Victor from his personal and cultural history. Instead, he seems to fall into despair and the repetition of behaviors from his childhood. The contrasts between his dancing and drinking provided throughout the story make this fact clear. Victor recalls fancydancing while his parents drank the night away as a child; as an adult, he partakes in both activities, drinking and dancing his way through bar after bar. Yet, he finds little comfort in this pattern. Victor cannot sleep, keep a girlfriend, or find a long-term job. These failures help him to realize that he might not “be somebody’s hero” after all; in fact, he “[isn’t] going to save anyone . . . maybe not even himself.”
The story ends as Victor resists the urge to drink a bottle of wine one morning. He gives it to a stranger instead and walks off into the morning sunshine. The only thing that he can be certain of is a determination to “dance tomorrow.” This open ending suggests that Victor will continue to survive his journey, dancing through the challenges that face him in the future.
Thomas’s test in the second story is different from Victor’s. The plotline challenges the dedication of this character to himself and his tribe. His allegiance becomes clear as he responds to the accusation of "tell[ing] the truth" too frequently with testimony about crimes committed against the Spokane during the Indian Wars. The stories included in the trial tell of the destruction of horses, invasion of lands, and murder of warriors during battles with invading white armies. Thomas finally accepts responsibility for his role in these events and receives a sentence of two consecutive life terms.
The trial, however, is clearly a satire; it employs irony to emphasize the violence and injustice experienced by the Spokane tribe during the Indian Wars. Thomas speaks to the magnitude of the crimes suffered by his people. Hundreds of horses are destroyed in a dispute between the Spokane tribe and an invading army. Warriors are killed after peace treaties are broken and bloody battles erupt between white and tribal armies. The irony, of course, is that Thomas is accused of these crimes. After all, he speaks as a victim, not perpetrator, of these crimes. The actual criminals, in the meantime, have gone free. It is clearly the white community, not witnesses like Thomas, that should take responsibility at the end of the story. Therein lies the double irony. The sentence is not only misdirected, but also imposed far too late, more than a century after the fact.
This failure to investigate these crimes in an accurate and timely manner is important, for it highlights the continuing failure of whites to seek justice for Native Americans. This story suggests instead that white culture remains ignorant of this history altogether. The naming of the golf course after Qualchan offers the best evidence for this claim. It is assumed that city officials would not name a place of recreation after a murdered warrior if they were aware of the story and its important to Spokane history. This moment causes the most chaos in the courtroom, a sign that like Esther, the tribe will not merely “walk along” with a government policy of denial and betrayal anymore.
Thomas might receive a life sentence, but his sacrifice is worth the cost, for his trial and testimony finally offer hope for justice to his tribe.
Summary and Analysis: The Fun House, A Good Story and First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue
Summary and Analysis: Distances and Imagining the Reservation
