Toughest Indian in the World

            Sherman Alexie provided an insight into searching for your identity when one may feel like an outsider to those with whom they feel like they belong and also from those they look like they belong. In The Toughest Indian in the World, the main character is of Spokane Indian decent living Seattle, Washington, and works as a features writer for the local newspaper. The main character by all accounts has the dark hair and eyes, along with the complexion of an Indian. He also is a suburban white-collared man who dates outside of his ethnicity and drives a 1998 Toyota Camry, which he boasts that it was named Consumer Reports as the most reliable family sedan. With these causal inference of the way he actually looks depends on who is looking at him and the fact that they see what he is searching for, his true identity.

            In the story, the main character references salmon, which signify the bountiful salmon which once flowed in their rivers, are just ghosts, extinct as his father has instilled in him what the white man wants to do with the Indians. As a boy, he learned that the “ghosts of the salmon rise from the water to the sky and become constellations. For most Indians, stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across a dark graveyard.” He also learned from his father of a tradition of being able to pick out who was an Indian while walking along the roadside hitchhiking. He stated that his father “wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood.” He would pick up three to four mostly male hitchhikers a week and described their journey to be on their way back to the reservation if they were near one, but never asked them for the reasons why they were hitchhiking.

            The main character feels displaced as he describes many events in this short story. The first that comes to mind is how he described intercourse with Cindy who is by all accounts a good catch because she is employed, cute, smart, and funny. He then changes his tone by stating that something must be wrong with her because she is this white woman who only has relations with “brown-skinned men”. The feeling of exhaustion from her erotic vocabulary, she stated that he “would fall asleep before his orgasm, continue pumping away as if I were awake” seems to validate his distance from his reality which he has chosen for himself. He does end his portion of describing Cindy with divulging she left him for a bi-racial man who left her “dizzy with the interracial possibilities”. Was this an inference that he thought his place was one of her possibilities? This was never discussed again in this story, however with the nest story; there is a direction that his search for his identity continued.

            He had not been on the reservation for twelve years, and although he does not live far from there, he hardly goes home. His parents still live in the same house in which he grew up, including his siblings. He calls once or twice a week, but he does not touch on his connection with his family as where he belongs, nor does he mention he misses being on the reservation. The hitchhiker he picks up was a large man who seemed muscular and a bit weathered by experiences he could only imagine. He in intrigued by his physical presence and made it seem as if that embodied what an Indian was supposed to look like. He is fascinated that the Indian is a fighter who travels from one reservation to another in search of a fight for money which may be illegal but did not care. The fighter described a story of his last fight with supposedly the Toughest Indian in the World, whom he could have killed but this large brute would not submit and he did not want to kill him so he gave in. This was possibly what the whites in his outside world imagined him to be, the women he chooses to be intimate with may fancy the underlying danger. This could not be farther than the truth, but what was the truth?

            At the end of the story, he describes an encounter for which he invites the hitchhiker to room with him since it was late and they had not reached their destination. The evening began with the hitchhiker curled up on the floor and the main character uncomfortable in the bed at this motel with motif that was ironic and cynical with scenes of the U.S. Cavalry fighting a band of Indians. In the middle of the night, he realizes that the hitchhiker has curled up behind him in bed, he was naked and although this was a strange thing for him, he did not fight it. Going along with the oddity of this encounter, it did not satisfy a desire nor was he feeling sexual. He was still detached, searching for his identity. He only realized how he felt, and it was as if the salmon his father had warned him about was what consumed him and had he lost what he wanted to find all along.