Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

Indian Education

(1993)

 

Sherman Alexie

(October 7, 1966– )

 

Notes

174  hit-and-run:

 

174  HUD house: HUD is short for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.



     

 

Study Questions

  • How does Alexie's grades framework for "Indian Education" correspond to the content within each school year section?

  • What causes the narrator's problems in the first grade?

  • What causes problems for the narrator in the second grade compared to the first?

  • Why does Junior "[run] home after school" (174)?

  • In what situations does the narrator use overstatement and to what effect? Consider, for example, "thought I'd never breathe again" (171) and "no one spoke to me for another five hundred years" (177).

  • Where is the humor in the story compared to the laughs (ex. "a beautiful white girl...laughed" 176)?

  • Consider simultaneous or parallel situations in the story. What is the function of describing the narrator picking up "a basketball for the first time" "at that same moment" as his cousin sniffing rubber cement (174–75)? What is the point of other side-by-side events such as growing skinny (177), driving (178) and graduation (179–80)?

  • Pick a grade and consider what the narrator learns (of all the things that could be learned) in the scenario and the significance of that lesson being the outcome of his experience.
  • What is the significance of hair in the story?

            

 

 

 


Vocabulary

genre
form
content
style, stylistic
point of view
narrator
voice
dialogue
repetition
imagery
irony; satire; satirizing
humor
overstatement
understatement
familiarization
defamiliarization
reality
stereotypes
fallacy
identity
education
learning, unlearning, relearning
poverty
colonialism
oppression; pressure
sovereignty
imagination
rez
conservatism
liberalism
escape, escaping
betrayal
loss
isolation
resist, resistance
empowerment, empowering

 


Sample Student Responses to Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education"

Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Kemaradh Abhakulchai

2202235 Reading and Analysis for the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

January 15, 2015

Reading Response 2

 

The Lengths of Education

 

Hair begins and ends Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education," framing a contemporary process that is a reverse of the historical Indian education intended to school Indians into extinction. Late nineteenth century boarding schools saw long haired tribal fledglings enter, and shorn young American men and women leave. Alexie's protagonist, Victor Polatkin, comes to school with "too short hair" (171) and graduates  with "hair longer" (179). The twelve years of schooling—including high school in white environments—have birthed an Indian, politically and literarily, rather than eradicated him. From the first grade where he is attacked by his own tribe (171) to the third where he is told to stand "alone in the corner, fac[ing] the wall" (174) to the fifth where he misses is first basketball shot, the narrator emerges, like his name, victorious. But this is exceptional. These new kinds of obstacles, injustice and discrimination, part and parcel of the sub-standard modern education that are worse than the earlier Acts supposed to wipe out the Indian and keep the man, a century later than that terrible predecessor wipe out both Indian and man, producing, in most cases, "drunken" and dead results instead of forming an aware and modern strong Indian.


Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. “Indian Education.” The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove, 2005. 60–80. Print.

 

 

 

 

 

            




 

 

Reference


Alexie, Sherman. "Indian Education." 1993. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 2005. 171–80. Print.


 


Links

 



Media
  • Sherman Alexie, UCSD Guestbook (2002; interviewed by Ross Frank; 27:39 min.)

  • Sherman Alexie, Conversations, KCTS 9 (2008; interviewed by Enrique Cerna; 26:43 min.)


  • Big Think Interview with Sherman Alexie, Big Think (2012)

  • Smoke Signals, dir. Chris Eyre, Lionsgate (1998 trailer)

  • 500 Nations, dir. Jack Leustig (1995 TV mini series)

  • Q’orianka Kilcher, "Chief Joseph Recounts His Trip to Washington D.C. (1879)," The People Speak (2009)

  • Unseen Tears: The Native American Boarding School Experience in Western New York, dir. Ron Douglas (2009; 30 min.)

  • Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School (2008 documentary excerpt)

 


Sherman Alexie

 


 


Further Reading

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Grove Press, 2005.


Las Casas, Bartolomé de. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. [Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.] Trans. Herma Briffault. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.



 

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Last updated January 30, 2019