Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr., born October 7, 1966) is an American poet, writer, and filmmaker. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 October 1966
CityWelpinet, WA
CountryUnited States of America
country native-american mean
I am extremely conscious of my tribalism. And when you talk about tribalism, you talk about living in a black and white world. I mean, Native American tribalism sovereignty, even the political fight for sovereignty and cultural sovereignty is a very us versus them. And I think a lot of people in this country, especially European Americans and those descended from Europeans don't see themselves as tribal.
mean hands order
In order to know somebody through their words, I mean, it has to be an, it has to be a letter, you know? It has to be a long e-mail. It has to be a five-page hand-written letter, you know, it has to be overwhelming and messy and sloppy as humans are.
dry who-we-are life-is
The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.
white world persons
I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.
new-york thinking people
Also because I'm ambiguously ethnic looking, you know, I come to New York and I can be anything. People generally think I'm half of whatever they are.
people poor poor-people
I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
teacher book mean
Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn't mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I'll say that this is not how people actually learn.
folks international knows
Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
thinking selfishness agendas
I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
writing years two
I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.
use comedy language
A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
two luxury people
Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.
responsibility moral problem
The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
war native-american ideas
There's this whole notion of being an Indian - the idea that "warrior" is a positive description of us [Indians as native Americans]. When an Indian guy does well, he's a warrior, even now. He could be a computer salesman, but if he does well, he's a warrior. I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.