Sherman Alexie's Audacious Revamps of Native American Identity in the Toughest Indian in the World

Abstract

Sherman Alexie’s collection of short stories The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) offers one of the sharpest and most touching renditions of the challenges faced by Native Americans in the new millennium. The reader soon realizes that Indians from different tribes are pigeonholed as representatives of a particular ethnic and/or social category, which reduces the complexity of their character and restricts their possibilities for meaningful transformation. Although the clashes are usually against white Americans, there are also instances in which their own people reject them or question their roots for various reasons. Alexie’s stories can be said to have a liberating power as they poke fun at the pseudo-scientific discourses that attempt to classify human groups into closed categories.