The Real Reality

The title may appear redundant, I know... But through Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, this statement's meaning can be found. In the collection of stories, Alexie quickly figures out that the societies of the Indians and white people are completely separate. His realization of this, and how through the society of Indians he would only be stereotyped and shunned from the other society, is shown by his constant stereotyping of his own people. While Alexie realizes that he cannot live in isolation from the white society, his Indian classmates are not able to realize this. They live in their own reality that the two cultures can remain isolated from each other, for example Alexie recalls that one of his classmates said that they didn't need a school reunion because "'My graduating class has a reunion every weekend and the Powwow Tavern.'" He acknowledges that to be successful, he needed to merge his own culture with the other and this result in him being where he is today. One thing that Alexie surreptitiously implies is that the reality of the Indian's situation is that either they must assimilate or be constantly barraged by stereotypes. He also points out that his Indian classmates have not found this truth about reality yet, and are hence living in a false reality where they isolate themselves from the other culture. However, even though Alexie realizes that he must assimilate, he maintains as much of his old culture as possible, one purpose of this is to show other Indians that they can also assimilate without losing their cultural identities. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie describes how he found two different societies, one progressing into the future, and one in which ". . .they look back toward tradition."