Ten Little Indians

Ten Little Indians is a 2004 collection of short stories about the Native American experience. Written by Sherman Alexie, a descendant of the Coeur d’Alene tribe who was raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation, these nine tales evoke the struggles and beauty of indigenous culture in the Pacific Northwest through a combination of fictionalized and autobiographical elements.

The first story, “The Search Engine,” concerns Corliss Joseph, a bookish nineteen-year-old student of Spokane Indian ancestry and her attempts to investigate the truth behind a previously-unknown Spokane Indian poet, Harlan Atwater. Through the character of Corliss, Alexie examines his own issues of identity, which arise from being teased over the years by relatives over his own bookishness and academic pursuits.

“Lawyer’s League” also concerns itself with identity issues—namely those of Richard, a half-black, half-Spokane Indian man who wishes to run for the US Senate and later become the President of the United States. Richard sums up his complex identity issues, thus: “I’m a biracial revolutionary leftist magician with a 20-foot jumper encoded in my DNA.”



“Can I Get a Witness?” continues the legal theme from the previous story. It concerns a fifty-year-old Spokane Indian woman who is a paralegal at a civil rights law firm. After becoming the victim of a bombing caused by a Syrian-American terrorist, she is suspected of having something to do with the blast because of her comparatively dark skin.

The fourth story, “Do Not Go Gentle,” introduces an absurdist spin to Alexie’s storytelling. This story of exaggeration and fantastical surrealism involves a baby who is saved from a grim reaper-like figure named  “Mr. Grief” by, of all things, a dildo. Despite the baby’s survival, the brush with death leaves the baby’s father paralyzed by paranoia. He begins to see Mr. Grief everywhere—including in his own wife—and even refuses to name the baby for fear of inviting Mr. Grief back through the father’s hopeful thoughts, which create a metaphysical door, the father believes, to allow death back in their lives.

“Flight Patterns” is in many ways a story that fuses together the themes of the two previous stories, “Can I Get a Witness?” and “Do Not Go Gentle.” As in “Do Not Go Gentle,” the story concerns the father of a young child—however, instead of fearing the child’s death, the man fears his own death at the hands of fundamentalist terrorists. This fear of so-called “little brown men” is ironically juxtaposed against the narrator’s own identity as a little brown man.



The sixth story, “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,” may be the most directly autobiographical as it concerns a young man growing up with a fiercely feminist Spokane Indian mother and living hand-to-mouth on fruits and vegetables.

“Do You Know Where I Am?” tells of a love affair between two college students, David and Sharon. David and Sharon are both “Catholic Indians” and believe that because they are the only such people with this unique heritage in the surrounding area, they must be fated to fall in love and stay together forever.

“What You Pawn, I Will Redeem” concerns a panhandling street vagrant, Jackson who, on the way to buy a bottle of wine, notices in the window of a pawn shop a piece of Spokane Indian regalia that supposedly belonged to his grandmother fifty years ago but was stolen. Jackson’s goal is to identify a distinctive yellow bead on the antique that would, in his mind, settle the question of whether it really belonged to his grandmother.



The ninth and final story is called “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” Thirty-nine-year-old forest park ranger Frank Snake Church receives a vision of his father dying, only to see his father actually die precisely one year after the vision occurs.

The fact that the collection is called “Ten Little Indians” but has only nine stories would seem to suggest that the tenth “Indian” is the author himself. It is suggested that the nine narrators add up to make up one larger authorial psyche. As such, the psyche contains various fragments of the author’s identity, coming to define the writer in ways that are both flattering and not so flattering. As a result, the collection is a brutally honest look at indigenous Spokane Indian identity that has earned the many plaudits it has received from critics the world over. For example, in a review for the Guardian newspaper, Maya Jaggi writes: “Whether gently probing the literal homeless or the spiritually destitute, these stories irreverently explore the yearning for the sacred. In some of the best, Alexie lends the bleak minutiae of the street an epic resonance, rather as Walter Mosley does in his Socrates Fortlow stories—but with more laughs.”