The survivor of both surgery to correct hydrocephalus and alcoholism – his father’s and his own, Sherman Alexie received a mostly mainstream education because his mother saw such a route as the road to success and survival (Grassian, 2005). gives Natives the right to perform the blues, and the knowledge to perform it well” (Cain, 2006, p. Populated by more or less normal beings as well as supra-natural figures, RB literally is a blues-based work that embodies an argument grounded in paradox that warrants Alexie’s contention that a “shared history of pain and oppression between African-Americans and the First Nations. Johnson’s guitar, which fixes itself and talks to people, continues to wreck havoc as it impacts the fate of Coyote Springs.

great musicians who shaped the twentieth century”- Elvis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, Paul McCartney (p. 286), ascending the Spokane reservation’s Wellpinit Mountain to find respite with Big Mom, a pan-Indian figure who’s been around for centuries and who’s not only “a part of every tribe” (p.

Johnson leaves his guitar behind because it rules “its possessor like a drug” (Pasquaretta, 2003, p. the devil’s son-in-law, too lazy and too proud to work for a living” (Pearson, 1984, p. The historical Johnson was the paradigmatic blues artist: a “trickster, hoodoo man. The visitor is bluesman Robert Johnson, not dead in 1938 as advertised, but alive and seeking an “ld woman lives on a hill.” He needs her help because he “sold soul to the Gentleman so could play.

“At the crossroad,” the black man said (pp. Characters, scene, and their conversation intimate the novel’s trajectory: Sherman Alexie’s (1995) (Spokane/Coeur d ‘Alene) Reservation Blues ( RB), the saga of the rise and fall of an American Indian blues band named Coyote Springs, opens as a “black stranger” with a “guitar slung over his back” stands at a “crossroads,” waving “at every Indian that by” until Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the “misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe” (pp.

In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident.

Reservation blues