The past haunts the present

Summer Bridge Essay
July 23, 2010

How the past haunts the present


        The stories within The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the ones told by Thomas Builds-the-Fire in particular, help to illustrate the relationship between the tribe's past and its present. The story's characters want to embody the past so that they can be modern day warriors and become something more than what they are now. The present has gone away from the tribe's past traditions leaving Alexie's characters searching for something more – something beyond "beer and broken dreams" (Alexie 74). These stories show how the past is brought into the present, haunting the characters, signifying the importance of the past as illustrated by Thomas's trial. His stories of the past are what he is ultimately condemned for, he lives in the past that everyone else in the book is haunted by.

        The character of Thomas Builds-the-Fire is the embodiment of the tribe's past, the stories that he tells are of the time when the Spokane Indians were warriors and followed their lives by tribal traditions.

        In the chapter "A Drug Called Tradition," the book's protagonist Victor and his friend Junior decide to go to the lake, take a new drug, and find some sort of way to leave their day- to-day life, which the act of getting high would do for them. On the way to the lake, Victor and Junior come across the reservations resident storyteller Thomas who is simply walking on the side of the road. The two characters decide to take Thomas along for the ride with only one condition, "don't tell any stories until after you've taken the drug" (Alexie 14).

        While Victor, Junior and Thomas are high they see each other different then they really are. Victor is seen as a young man stealing his first horse so that he can "be a hero and earn [his] name" (Alexie 15). Thomas is dancing around a fire after his entire tribe dies of small pox, and Junior is singing stories of how the Indians won the war in an alternative reality, a reality where all is right with the world and Indian reservations never existed.

        At the end of the night Thomas has one final story to tell, a story about three modern day Indian teenagers who wish to keep with the ancient traditions and to receive their own visions their tribesmen saw all those years ago.
        

Although it is the twentieth century and planes are passing overhead, the Indian boys have decided to be real Indians tonight. They all want their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names. . . The boys sit by the fire and breathe, their visions arrive. They are all carried away to the past, to the moment before any of them took their first drink of alcohol . . . Then the boys sing. They sing and dance and drum. They steal horses. I can see them. They steal horses (Alexie 21).


        Alexie's incorporation of Thomas' stories, this last one in particular, shows the reader how the book's characters wish that there was a way that they could be more then themselves like the warriors of the past. They imagine themselves either in the past stealing horses, or they see themselves in an alternative reality where they are better off than they ever will be on the reservation. Though Victor, along with Thomas and the rest of the Indian's on the reservation, know that the now is now and it is not good to be living in the past. Victor describes it well when he talks about skeletons keeping time at the end of "A Drug Called Tradition," saying that:


Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That's what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it wrapped up in the now. That's how it is. We are trapped in the now (23).


A return to tribal tradition would mean a step back and "such a return ignores Thomas's point that the past and future are "wrapped up in the now." It is a retreat into cultural monologism . . . thereby avoiding the necessity, or even inclination, of situating oneself in relation to modern day realities" (DeNuccio 94). And Victor's "relationship with the storytelling Thomas, whom he bullied since childhood and whose stories he ignores, precisely because, for Victor, those stories register cultural loss" (DeNuccio 89).

Alexie shows that his characters revere the past, are haunted by it, yet understand that now is where they are. That their now is not the best, and that they cannot live in the past. The characters outcast Thomas because of his connection with the past, they are shunning the past and Thomas is shunned because he represents that past.

In later chapters, and in years later within the story, there is a chapter entitled "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire." In this chapter Thomas is put on trial because of his "storytelling fetish" (Alexie 93) and his "extreme need to tell the truth" (Alexie 93). As you read this chapter you get the feeling of surrealism, as if what you're reading is just another story in and of itself help illustrate the importance of Thomas' character. Thomas, in his own defense during the trial, tells three stories.

One of the stories that Thomas tells is when he was a horse, the second is when he got hung by Colonel Wright, than his last story, the most important story that Thomas tells, is of when he was a warrior fighting off soldiers. In the story Thomas, named Wild Coyote, kills two of Steptoe's soldiers. This story, this admission to taking another's life, is what Thomas is convicted for.

During the trial the Spokane tribe finally acknowledges Thomas, they finally "burst into motion and emotion" (Alexie 99) on his behalf. The years before Thomas had been out casted because of all the stories he tells. Even when he was imprisoned, waiting for his trial, he still heard stories when he decided to not tell any verbally for twenty years. "Often he closed his eyes and stories came to him quickly, but he would not speak. He nodded and laughed if the story was funny; cried a little when the stories were sad; pounded his fists against his mattress when the stories angered him" (Alexie 94).

Before Thomas tells his last story Eve Ford yelled "we're all listening . . . we hear you" (Alexie 99). Her, along with the rest of the tribe, finally stick up for Thomas who they have casted for so many years. They finally are able to accept him as one of their own; they finally are accepting that the past needs to be part of the present in some way or the other. The Spokane Indian's needed Thomas Builds-the-Fire; they needed his stories, his traditions.

Earlier in the book Thomas talks about how important his stories are to him and his words ring true for everyone. No matter what you do, it's you whose doing them so it's important.


We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn't matter as long as I can tell the stories . . . They are all I have. It's all I can do (Alexie 72-73)


The past, may it be ancient or recent history haunts everyone. In Sherman Alexie's book he shows this through stories of the past told by Thomas Builds-the-Fire. The past is always a part of the present which is why Eleanor Roosevelt said "yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that's why it's called the present." Now is so important but yesterday is why today s what it is.




Work Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Fistfight in Heaven. New York City: Grover Press, 2005. Print.
DeNuccio, Jerome. "Slow Dancing with Skeletons: Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." Critique 44.1 (2002): 86. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 21 July 2010.