Flight and Distances - Sherman Alexie

I chose the two Sherman Alexie stories because I like his work.  I first learned about Alexie from the film “Smoke Signals.”  If you have a Hulu Plus account, you can watch Smoke Signals by CLICKING HERE, otherwise you can watch a trailer for it by CLICKING HERE.

The one issue that I have with Walking the Clouds is the use each individual brief introduction that precedes each story.  While I appreciate those, at the same time, I think it reveals too much before letting the reader understand the larger indigenous context (details, nuances, and issues) that is implicit in the stories.

Sherman Alexie Flight
I have to confess, I loved the show Quantum Leap and was excited when Grace Dillon referenced that awesome show from the 1990s (53).  The brief introduction before the story excerpt definitely left me wanting to get the actual book.  While the excerpt describes the protagonist's (Michael) ability to "manifest" in five characters, the excerpt only gives us a glimpse of one of those characters, an orphaned 15-year old called "Zits".

I cannot help but believe (especially after Sherman Alexie's comments in the interview above at around 25:10) that Alexie wants to ending harmful "cycles" or "stopping [harmful] images" facing Native American youth.  Alexie uses Michael/Zits as a way of ending a cycle of violence in Flight.  Dillon described this as, "reject[ing] the chance to participate in a Columbine-like random killing spree at a Seattle bank" (53).

I also wonder how much of Alexie's Michael/Zits character is representative of himself.  The interview above, taken with the statement, "these slippages represent rites of passage that allow him to move beyond the self-loathing of internal colonization that Alexie might argue typifies reservation youth today . . . and toward a more holistic sense of self and place" (52-53) indicates that Alexie himself today is not (and probably never was) the typical reservation youth.

Reviewing the text of the excerpt, I didn't immediately realize that when Michael first stated,  "Yes, I'm supposed to kill for Justice," that he was actually referring to his co-conspirator also named Justice.  But, the excerpt isn't clear that Justice is really a person.  Maybe the actual story elaborates more on this.


Sherman Alexie Distances
As Dillon explains, Distances continues the survivance of the Ghost Dance.  I thought that Distances also had traces of identity, especially since there were three categories: Others; ancestral persons, Urbans; Indians who previously lived in the city and now live on the reservation, and Skins; Indians who lived their whole lives on the reservation.  I thought it was interesting how Urbans and Skins were prohibited from marriage as determined by the Tribal Council.  

I wonder if Alexie intended to use the transistor radio as a metaphor for something else.  The protagonist states, "I examined it closely . . . for  . . . damage.  But there was nothing, no imperfection I could see.  .  .  . All the mistakes would be on the inside, where you couldn't see, couldn't reach."  Clearly, Alexie encourages all of us to go beyond the surface.