Reservation Blues
Sherman Alexie (1995)
“A blues guitar with the devil's fingerprints arrives on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and three men form a band that plays the soundtrack to five hundred years of loss.”
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Reservation Blues
Sherman Alexie (1995) · 306pages · Contemporary / Postcolonial · 2 AP appearances
Summary
A mysterious stranger — the ghost of blues legend Robert Johnson — arrives on the Spokane Indian Reservation carrying a guitar that burns anyone who touches it. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph, and Junior Polatkin form a band called Coyote Springs, believing music might be their escape from the reservation's gravitational pull of poverty, alcoholism, and despair. They gain local fame, attract two Flathead Indian sisters (Chess and Checkers Warm Water), and earn an audition with a major record label. But the guitar carries a curse, the music industry wants to package them as exotic commodities, and the reservation itself seems to punish anyone who dreams too large. The audition fails catastrophically, the band fractures, and Junior kills himself. Thomas and Chess leave the reservation together — an ambiguous ending that reads as both escape and exile.
Why It Matters
Reservation Blues was one of the first novels to bring reservation life into mainstream American literary consciousness without filtering it through white perspectives. Published in 1995, it arrived during the Native literary renaissance alongside work by Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Leslie M...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Informal reservation vernacular mixed with lyrical narrative flights — the voice of oral storytelling filtered through literary ambition
Narrator: Third-person limited, cycling between characters but most often anchored in Thomas. The narrator shares Alexie's own ...
Figurative Language: High but grounded
Historical Context
1990s America — post-Indian Self-Determination Act, reservation poverty, Native cultural renaissance: The 1990s saw a paradox for Native Americans: increasing cultural visibility (Native literature, Dances with Wolves, casino wealth for some tribes) alongside unchanged or worsening conditions on mo...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Alexie choose Robert Johnson — a Black blues musician — as the figure who brings the cursed guitar to the Spokane Reservation? What does this cross-racial connection suggest about the relationship between African American and Native American histories of oppression?
- Thomas Builds-the-Fire tells stories that nobody on the reservation wants to hear. Why does the community reject its own storyteller? What does their rejection reveal about the psychological effects of colonialism on cultural self-regard?
- Alexie names the record company 'Cavalry Records' and its executives 'Phil Sheridan' and 'George Wright' — historical U.S. Army officers who committed atrocities against Native peoples. Is this heavy-handed, or is the heavy-handedness the point?
- After the failed audition, Cavalry Records offers a recording contract to Betty and Veronica — two white women — to play 'Indian-inspired' music. How does this scene function as a critique of cultural appropriation? Is the critique still relevant today?
- Junior Polatkin's suicide is described without dramatic buildup or shock. Why does Alexie refuse to sensationalize this death? What does the community's unsurprised grief reveal about the normalization of loss on the reservation?
Why Read This
Because this is what happens when a writer refuses to make his own community palatable for outside consumption. Alexie writes about poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and racism without apology and without the redemptive arc that American readers have ...