For a while you are really into Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man.įor a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer’s Last Stand special, thinking there might be a Tourist or two who want to live out a Crazy Horse Experience. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands with Fists your best girl. What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. “I mean, we’re Catholic, for Christ’s sake.” “We’re not the right kind of Indian,” you counter. “Turnblatt’s Indian-sounding enough because you’re already Indian.” “Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.
Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning. Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig.
But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed.
All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most.
#Can you mask the sound of a gunshot behind a water bottle how to#
Sherman Alexie, How to Write the Great American Indian Novel In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
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