To adapt the common phrase, “You can take the kid off the Rez, but you can’t take the Rez out of the kid.” When Sherman Alexie tells stories and reports what his mother, sisters, uncles, or brothers said, his accent is pure Rez. Last night we enjoyed listening to the famous author, poet, and storyteller at an intimate gathering at our favorite independent bookstore. Village Books scheduled a conversation with Alexie about his 2017 memoir, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” for this evening. Available seats sold out so quickly that they added a second opportunity for last night. We were lucky to get seats at the second sold-out gathering.

The bookstore has a space for public gatherings, but can accommodate only about 100 persons, even with overflow seating. Sometimes the store sponsors events at local schools and other venues to allow more people to participate, but the smaller crowd was just right for an evening of storytelling. The first story we heard was from one of the store’s owners, Paul Hanson, who recounted how the store was set to host Alexie during his book tour after the memoir's publication. However, the tour was too emotionally taxing for Alexie. Speaking about his complex relationship with his mother night after night exhausted him, and the tour had to be canceled. Then the COVID-19 pandemic came, and other things came up, and it took until this week to get the event rescheduled. It was worth the wait.

One of the gifts Alexie brings is his incredible ability to share Rez humor with white folks. I remember watching the movie “Dances with Wolves” in a theater with several Lakota people. The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Michael Blake. I missed all of the laugh lines. The natives laughed at points that didn’t seem funny to me. I didn’t find much humor in the movie at all. But we all laughed together when I watched “Smoke Signals,” based on a Sherman Alexie story with a similar audience. Alexie has a gift for sharing stories across cultures in ways that bring people together. In his memoir, he tells the story of addressing a white, upper-class audience in Bellingham and winning them over to his sense of humor by calling his mother on his cell phone and putting the phone up to the microphone for the audience to hear what she had to say.

One of the ways that Alexie talks about the experiences of American Indians is by using the term diaspora. A diaspora is the spreading or dispersing a group of people from their homeland. It is generally applied to spreading those people over a much larger area than the place they came from. It has been applied to the experience of Israel during the exile and the subsequent spreading of Jews far from ancient Israel. The term was also often used about the boat people who fled Vietnam and Cambodia following the wars that devastated those countries. I have also heard the term applied to the migration of Latin Americans across the United States. However, I hadn’t considered the term with Indigenous Americans before reading its use by Alexie.

It is true that part of the migration of people following the creation of reservations has been spreading folks off of the reservations. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Reservation in the town of Wellpinit. He attended elementary school on the reservation, but went to high school off the reservation in the town of Reardan. From there, he went to college and never returned to the reservation to live. Moving away from the intense poverty of what he calls “Pre-Casino Reservation life” brought him academic, sports, and career success. He has lived in Seattle for many years and raised his family there. A lot of other native people share his story. We had next-door neighbors who had grown up on reservations: he was from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, and she was from the Navajo Reservation. They became medical doctors and researchers with the National Institutes of Health. Though they lived on the traditional land of the Lakota People, it was off the formal reservation. The US city with the largest Lakota population, however, is far from the traditional lands of the tribe. It is Oakland, California. We have a Lakota friend who lives here and began her life on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The American Indian diaspora has spread people with indigenous heritage all across this land. Often, their ethnic and cultural identity is not recognized by their neighbors. Some of this process is the result of intentional governmental programs of cultural genocide in which language and culture were suppressed. Some of the process results from intense poverty, forcing people to resort to desperate measures to survive. Part of the diaspora is what happens in all diaspora situations: people meet and marry outside their group. Traditions and languages blend. Histories are adapted and forgotten.

I am not a cultural anthropologist and have no expertise in human migration. But I am so grateful for all of the Spokane stories and traditions Alexie has kept alive by writing. By publishing those words, he shared those cultural stories and traditions with those from different backgrounds. Our communities are richer for knowing the many stories of the people who have come to live here. I belong to another type of diaspora. The migration of Europeans to this continent was the result of colonialism, with no small amount of theft and violence.
Along with the colonists were folks who had been forced out of their homelands in Europe and landed on the shores of this continent. They came not to conquer, but to survive. Our heritage is mixed.

Sharing our stories strengthens our community, and I have been blessed to hear the stories of others, including those whose people were here long before mine arrived. Sherman Alexie has given us the gift of stories that enrich our community. Hearing him tell them is precious indeed.