Evan Wu

Rehabilitation for Separatists

Sherman Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition”

Sherman Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition” explores the modern-day friction between Native American culture and Western culture by means of a youthful drug-fueled adventure. Alexie grounds the fraught dialectic between cultural separatism and cultural hybridity in two revealing scenes that put the story unabashedly into a contemporary context of sex and economics: in one, the story’s narrator, Victor, ponders the desirability of half-Indian girls, and in the other, a large corporation leases land from a resident of the reservation. Alexie, himself a Native American, has evidently imbued this work with the intersection of contemporary American society and reservation life. We may be tempted to read in Alexie’s writings abundant motivation for critique and censure; such a conclusion would be understandable

considering the historically deceptive and destructive treatment of Indians by the people and government of the United States. But even at the outset, however, the story presents an important ambiguity: the narrator is quick to admit that when Indians receive such lease payments from American corporations, his people “can never tell whether [their ancestors] are laughing at the Indians or the whites” (387). In other words, Victor questions whether their ancestors are applauding them for economically avenging their historical mistreatment. Might their ancestors be laughing at them for relying on such passive methods of profit, methods that might well look to the past instead of to the future? A consideration of the short storyin the context of hallucination reveals that Alexie rejects the impulse to read this story’s apparent embrace of separatism. Alexie’s story actually welcomes a more pragmatic approach to the continuing friction between Native American traditions and present day realities of Western culture. Native Americans must rehabilitate, as the title makes explicit, that “drug called tradition” in order to accept the cultural hybridity in which they live.

Let us first address the many moments in the text that, ignoring the hallucinatory framework of the short story, would seem to suggest a wholehearted embrace of separatism. A large portion the short story consists of five hallucinations that Victor and his friends experience after consuming a drug, and the first four of these hallucinations hint that Alexie might well embrace some form of retaliation against Western society. The characters in these initial hallucinations resort to drastic

measures in response to acts that are, admittedly, historically accurate and morally horrendous. The hallucinations make explicit reference, for instance, to the “blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox” (390) that killed off entire tribes and to the “thousand promises” (391) that went either unfulfilled or outright broken by the United States government. A quick perusal of the hallucinations reveals the kind of imagined responses Native Americans could make to such attacks: in the first hallucination, an Indian steals a horse from a group of “Others”; in the second, an Indian resurrects his tribe and forces European settlers to retreat from the American continent; in the third, a Native American, “Mr. Edgar Crazy Horse,” becomes the President of the United States; and in the fourth hallucination we encounter three young Indians performing a coming-of-age ritual that involves the discarding of Western alcohol and the stealing of more horses. In themselves, these passages would certainly seem to promote varying degrees of aggression as instruments for separatism. In this reading of the short story, acts of aggression could be interpreted as punishing Western society while giving rebirth to native traditions.

Such a reading, however, would be reasonable only outside the hallucinatory context of the story itself. Although the first four hallucinations aim violence, directly or indirectly, at Western society, the very fact that they are hallucinations implies that their visions are impractical if not entirely imagined. In short, these acts of revenge live only in a mind hijacked by hallucination. Each of the four visions develops only after one of the three main characters swallows a powerful drug that Victor

provides, a drug that causes them to “poke [their] head[s] through some hole in the wall into another world” (388). They are obviously disconnected from reality. What’s more, the drug and the subsequent hallucinations might well deliver these acts of vengeance in a context that is comic, buried in obtuse declaration. The first person to experiment with the drug, for instance, tells Victor, “You’ve got braids and you’re stealing a horse. Wait, no. It’s not a horse. It’s a cow” (388). If we do not question the apparent embrace of separatism during these hallucinated visions, in other words, we should at least read them as comedic: the inability to distinguish between a horse and a cow is, indeed, patently funny. In framing the visions as drug-induced hallucinations, Alexie discredits their ideas at best as idealistic dreams and at worst as comedic moments.

These hallucinations might allow the text to expose the subconscious hypocrisy that underlies the mindset that underlies the very notion of separatism. By “hypocrisy” here I refer to the cultural bind in which the Native Americans of Alexie’s short story find themselves: while hallucinating, the characters of the story take belligerent action because they yearn for a return to traditions, but internally they have adopted many aspects of Western culture they outwardly reject. In fact, they often seem to view their actions through a Western lens. They do not see the possibility of cultural hybridity, in other words, because they are caught in the polarized logic of separatism or assimilation. For example, in the third hallucination, an Indian plays a guitar in a theater for the President of the United States.

Alexie here quite literally stages his character in a venue emblematic of Western culture playing an iconic American instrument. The Indian puts great value on his own popularity, bragging that Indians “camp out all night to buy tickets” (391), as if he were an American pop star. The irony is not lost on us as readers of Alexie’s story: it is only after characterizing himself as typically white does he attempt to recover his own culture, and only after making clear that he has already lost the battle against Western culture does he sing about how “the Indians keep winning” (391). Unbeknownst to him, his ability to make his “guitar sound like a drum” is elegiac, not celebratory (391).

There are, in other words, consequences to the story’s context of drugs and hallucinations: it allows us to see the subconscious hypocrisy and cultural bind of its characters. This hypocrisy carries into the fourth hallucination, where Alexie’s use of “real” is plainly sardonic: “real Indians” do not drink Diet Pepsi, perform time-honored rituals, and steal white people’s horses all on the same night (392). These instances of incongruous dichotomy between action and intention suggests that it is problematic to have an exclusive attachment to the past, even one as important as traditional Native American life. This becomes especially true in “A Drug Called Tradition” when such attachments are so inflexible that they fuel hostility towards the present. The inflexibility here seems to embody the foundation of separatism in the short story, one that the very title of Alexie’s story calls an addiction. By giving a drug the name “tradition,” the title suggests that drugs can allow one to experience the past, a phenomenon the text clearly demonstrates through the

characters’ hallucinations. More importantly, the title also suggests that traditions are dangerously addictive, and that they can skew their perception of reality.

In the context of a drug that is both revelatory and addictive, we are left with a critical question: how might Alexie resolve the dilemma of contemporary Native American life? Such a question is answered by the fifth hallucination. If we were to carry the drug metaphor further, Alexie in this hallucination encourages tradition-addicted separatists to rehabilitate. In other words, the text advocates that “real Indians” should become comfortable with the contemporary amalgam between their culture and mainstream American culture, however balanced or imbalanced it may be. Instead of fleeing from the present and seeking refuge in the past, Alexie would seem to suggest that settling into cultural hybridity comes at the expense of the pre-eminent role of their native traditions. The apparent conflict here is perhaps best captured by Victor’s friend, Thomas. He is the only character whose surname, Builds-the-Fire, is mentioned (387) and who is therefore a ready symbol of tradition. Thomas is infamous in the reservation for his incessant storytelling (388), but between the fourth and fifth hallucinations, Thomas leaves. Victor explains that Thomas “wouldn’t even try to tell us any stories again for a few years” (393). As he walks away, Thomas yells back to his two friends that they should not “slow dance” with their skeletons (393). What could such a loaded image suggest about this story’s stance toward past?

Alexie clarifies the meaning of Thomas’s mysterious message in this fifth hallucination, in which the drugs had begun finally “to wear off” (392). It makes for a scene that is both literally and figuratively sobering. More important, it becomes the most significant section of the short story because it positions this final hallucination as the least ironic, the least unreal. The hallucination suggests that the skeletons referenced by Thomas symbolize traditions—they are skeletons “made of memories, dreams, and voices” and sometimes appearing as “beautiful Indian women” or one’s parents (393). Although the skeletons are “not necessarily evil,” one should “keep walking” with them (393). This might seem to suggest a solidarity with one’s heritage, but it can also be read as a way to minimize contact with tradition, a way to preclude tradition from blocking a path. The text explains that “your past ain’t going to leave you behind,” that Native Americans are “[t]rapped in the now” like everyone else. At the end of the short story, Alexie crafts a scene that captures the kind of cultural hybridity he embraces: he positions Victor to throw away his drugs, no longer wanting the past to cloud his present (394). In the scene, Alexie has Victor given a small drum by the spiritual leader of his tribe, which Victor chooses to “keep … really close” (394) but not to use. This would certainly suggest that, in Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition,” staying “in step” with the present includes the white culture that accompanies it.

Work Cited

1. Alexie, Sherman. “A Drug Called Tradition.” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 2002. 287–394.