Collection: Ten Little Indians

Overview
Ten Little Indians (2003) gathers nine short stories that track Native lives in and around contemporary Seattle, with most protagonists connected to the Spokane Tribe. The title nods to the lethal nursery rhyme and the long history of erasure, while the book counters that erasure by populating the city with vividly present, contradictory, quick-witted Native characters. Alexie blends comedy and grief, mythic gestures and everyday errands, to ask how people carry ancestry, love, and loss into strip malls, airports, basketball gyms, and pawnshops.

Stories and characters
The collection’s range is wide yet cohesive. A college student, Corliss, hunts down a forgotten Native poet in The Search Engine, chasing literary lineage and discovering how desire can be both intimate and archival. In Lawyer’s League, a mixed‑race attorney measures the politics of pickup basketball alongside the tensile racism of public spaces. Can I Get a Witness? opens on a downtown bombing and follows two strangers whose fragile confidences expose the ethical messiness of pity, marriage, and survival.

Do Not Go Gentle reimagines prayer through an absurd talisman in a neonatal ICU, turning gallows humor into a communal medicine. Flight Patterns places a Spokane businessman and an Ethiopian cabdriver into a moving confessional where global and American traumas intersect, creating a shared map of exile. The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above is a son’s unruly love letter to his fiercely intellectual mother, a story of generational argument that becomes an inheritance of resistance.

What You Pawn I Will Redeem follows Jackson Jackson, a homeless Spokane man given twenty‑four hours to buy back his grandmother’s stolen regalia from a pawnshop, his odyssey through bars, friends, and windfalls revealing a city stitched together by generosity as much as by want. Do You Know Where I Am? tracks a couple trying to sustain love across the fault lines of confession and forgiveness. Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church? sees a grieving middle‑aged man return to basketball, testing whether ritual and sweat can carry the weight of parents’ deaths.

Themes
Identity is elastic rather than fixed. Characters move between rez pasts and urban presents, between imposed stereotypes and self‑invented roles. Alexie interrogates how America sees Native people, often not at all, and how Native people see themselves when faced with that invisibility. Community manifests as chosen family and spontaneous kindness; at the same time, solitude and addiction threaten to hollow lives. The stories repeatedly stage exchanges across difference, where strangers confess, argue, and share food, cash, or stories, suggesting that survival is relational.

Violence and tenderness braid together. The post‑9/11 climate hums through several pieces, illuminating fear, profiling, and the temptation to simplify others. Basketball, music, and literature operate as secular sacraments, ways to measure pain and imagine transformation. Redemption arrives not as a grand cure but as a moment of recognition, a comic wrong turn, a well‑timed assist.

Style and tone
Alexie’s voice is conversational, sly, and rhythmic, with sudden pivots from joke to elegy. First‑person narrators dominate, inviting complicity while revealing their blind spots. The prose is studded with pop culture, brand names, and tossed‑off philosophy, grounding the stories in material specificity as they reach for allegory. Magical or improbable elements surface not to escape realism but to widen it, letting myth step into a crosswalk.

Setting and symbolism
Seattle is more than backdrop; ferries, coffee shops, sidewalks, and pawn counters become contact zones where past and present negotiate. The recurring image of regalia, books, and basketballs turns possessions into repositories of memory. Across the collection, objects travel from hand to hand, implying that history is carried, pawned, borrowed back, and sometimes, against the odds, redeemed.