Summary and Analysis: A Drug Called Tradition
New Characters
Thomas Builds-the-Fire: a key character in the collection who stands apart from his peers for his wisdom and his talent as a storyteller.
Junior: a wild teenager who plays the role of Victor’s sidekick in this story.
Summary
“A Drug Called Tradition” follows an older, presumably adolescent, Victor as he parties with Thomas and Junior one night on the Reservation. The story is told in the first-person from his point of view.
The night begins with a beer party at Thomas’s house and quickly moves to a wild ride in Junior’s car. The change in plans is instigated by Victor, who wants to take drugs and cruise for girls. He convinces Thomas to join in the fun by claiming that the experience will provide a chance to explore their spirituality, and thus, be quintessentially “Indian.” The destination is a lake on the Reservation, where the three experience drug-induced hallucinations, including visions of Victor stealing a horse, Thomas dancing naked by firelight, and Junior singing country-and-western songs.
As the three drive through the night, the action begins to shift between the imagined visions of the boys and the actual joyride through the Reservation. In the first imagined scene, Victor steals a horse under cover of darkness and learns that its name is “Flight.” In the meantime, the three boys continue to take drugs, tease each other, and laugh into the night as they near Benjamin Lake. The action then cuts to the second scene, a vision of Thomas completing a Ghost Dance in order to resurrect his tribe, which has been lost to smallpox. It seems that the dance is successful, for it ends with the return of the white explorers, along with the disease they brought to indigenous peoples, to Europe. The tribe dances “until the ships fall off the horizon.” At this moment, the visionary sequence is interrupted momentarily as the boys stop the car, only to resume again with a performance from Junior. He sings an anthem about Crazy Horse, the warrior “who helped . . . [them] win the war against the whites,” and dedicates it to the President of the United States. He imagines that songs such as these are so powerful that they can make “a thousand promises come true.”
The action winds down as the visions end. In the final scenes, the boys sit by the edge of the lake, and Thomas tells his friends a story. The story places the three boys around a fire, where they fast, dance, and sing in an attempt to inspire visions of their “adult names” and identities. The ritual succeeds, inspiring the boys to throw out their drinks and return to the pure state that existed before the arrival of alcohol, when boys became men by stealing horses rather than by partying.
As the group breaks apart, Victor and Junior tease Thomas about his story. He replies by admonishing them not to “dance with . . . skeletons.” Alexie interrupts the tale again with a clarification. The skeletons are the past and the future, which walk alongside each of us, just one step behind and one step in front of us. Although the skeletons might tempt us with sex, alcohol, and gifts, the trick is to keep on walking: to live only in the present.
At the end of the story, Victor and Junior sit outside the convenience store on the Reservation. They have a mysterious encounter with Big Mom, a woman who has visions and dispenses “good medicine” to the tribe. Big Mom tells the boys that she knows about their visions at the...
(This entire section contains 1328 words.)
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lake and gives Victor a small drum in case he needs to reach her. Victor imagines that tiny drum is the only sign of his “religion.”
Analysis
This story sustains both the themes and styles of the previous tale. Alexie again explores American Indian identity, the primary theme from the first story, by merging events from both the past and the present into a single storyline. Yet, the atmosphere of this story is even more dream-like and visionary than the first, as the narration shifts repeatedly and suddenly between the experiences and visions of the three boys. Alexie favors this narrative style throughout The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
These interruptions to the plot can make it difficult to follow the action; however, a rhythm and pattern do emerge as the story progresses. Moreover, these shifts in time and place are essential to identifying and understanding the central problem of this tale. As the three visions unfold, a contrast is created between different attempts by young American Indian men “to be hero[es] and earn . . . [their] names.” In the past, the transition to adulthood included stealing horses, dancing, and singing. In the present, however, manhood is earned mostly by partying. The men must invent experiences that test their endurance and strength; in the absence of the old feats, they take drugs and drink alcohol in order to gain the status otherwise denied them.
Alexie suggests that this attempt constitutes a response to “the problem with Indians these days.” It seems that they “wear their names like a pair of bad shoes,” never changing or evolving “all their lives.” The old tradition thus has either been lost or irrevocably changed by the new generation. A sense of Native American culture and identity seems to be in danger of extinction. Yet the suggestion that naming might solve all of the problems facing American Indians is certainly more comic than serious. After all, the naming ritual is just one of many experiences important to Native American identity. Alexie pokes fun at this fact with Victor’s claim that the drug-induced hallucinations will “be very . . . Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?”
The author again applies his sense of humor and irony to address a situation that otherwise might be too depressing or overwhelming to tackle. The content of the visions speaks to this fact in the story. Each tale refers to real and serious instances of suffering inflicted on the indigenous population by white settlers, including the loss of land and livestock, the spread of smallpox, and the violence of the Indian Wars. Those events killed thousands of Native Americans and marked the beginning of a disastrous encounter with white Europeans; as such, they symbolize the beginning of the systematic oppression of the tribes. It is significant, then, that Alexie overturns the outcome of these events. In the three visions, Victor steals the horse, Thomas sends the explorers’ ships back to Europe, and Junior sings a victory song to commemorate the Indian Wars. These endings, even if only imagined, are intended to bring hope. Like the broken treaties between the government and the tribes, the visions thus have the power to make “a thousand promises come true.”
The tragedy of this story, however, is that Victor and Junior still do not accept the promise of the visions. Instead, they disregard Thomas’s warning that the skeletons of the past and future might lure them to unfortunate endings in their own lives. They heckle Thomas, who departs from this story and does not “tell . . . [them] any stories again for a few years.” Thomas is clearly wiser than his peers but not yet respected enough to command their belief; he is both a prophet and an outcast in this tale, roles that he must reconcile later in the book, if others are to comprehend and learn from his advice.
Tradition is finally like a drug that the boys must learn to use on their own. This story demonstrates that Victor, Thomas, and Junior each must create a vision that draws on old knowledge, such as the coming-of-age ritual, but adapts it to new circumstances, such as drug and alcohol abuse on the Reservation. The “little drum” that Victor receives at the end of the story foretells the effect this technique might have; it might be small, but “if . . . played . . . it might fill up the whole world.”
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