Poetry: The Business of Fancydancing

Overview

Sherman Alexie's 1992 debut collection, The Business of Fancydancing, gathers poems and short prose pieces that move between memory, myth, and sharp observation to chart contemporary Native life, especially on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State. The book is both intimate and political, recording the everyday textures of reservation living, family kitchens, gyms, funerals, powwows, commodity food lines, while tracing the aftershocks of historical violence and the uneasy negotiations of identity in a country that consumes Native images. Humor, grief, and love sit side by side, each sharpening the other.

Structure and Voice

The collection reads like a mosaic. Lyric poems, narrative vignettes, and fragmentary stories echo across pages, repeating images and refrains, rivers, drums, basketball courts, winter, firewater, hunger, and laughter, until they form a chorus of voices. Many pieces speak in the first person, intimate and conversational, but the “I” is porous, at times collective, at times sharply individual. Alexie’s lines break mid-thought to lay bare a punchline, a wound, a sudden tenderness. The prose pieces expand the lyric world, supplying scenes of childhood bravado, young love, and the rites of grief that shape adulthood.

Themes and Motifs

Survival and inheritance anchor the book. The speakers inherit language, songs, trauma, and jokes; they inherit treaties and poverty; they inherit the persistence to make a life anyway. Alcoholism and its ripple effects recur, not as stereotype but as lived catastrophe threaded through family dynamics and community rituals. Basketball glows as skill, escape, and communal theater, a form of glory available to poor kids with quick hands and battered sneakers. Religion surfaces in hybrid forms, Catholic saints elbowing for space beside tribal spirits, reflecting a layered spiritual landscape.

The poems return to history as a living presence: broken promises, boarding schools, and massacres press into contemporary scenes, demanding witness. Yet the collection resists elegy alone. It celebrates jokes told at wakes, the smell of fry bread, children’s bravado, lovers’ bodies, and the stubborn radiance of cultural practices that adapt and endure.

Title and Metaphor

“Fancydancing” names a flamboyant powwow style built on speed, color, and showmanship. The word “business” tilts the phrase from ritual to economy, evoking the complicated traffic between cultural expression and public performance. The collection interrogates what it means to “dance” one’s identity for audiences, especially white audiences hungry for a single, consumable Indianness, and the costs and uses of such display. The title points to the tension between authenticity and spectacle, survival and commodification, and the ways performers, writers, and communities negotiate visibility without surrender.

Setting and Characters

Although figures recur, mothers and fathers, cousins and ballplayers, lovers and drunks, elders and tricksters-in-disguise, the book resists tidy character arcs. It offers instead a collage of moments that, together, sketch a community’s inner weather. The reservation is not a backdrop but a protagonist: a place of scarcity and ceremony, fierce loyalties and complicated departures. Cities appear as both promise and exile, where a Native poet might read to rooms of strangers and feel the pull of the river back home.

Style and Impact

Alexie writes with a spliced mode of stand-up timing and prayerful cadence: jokes land hard, then open into ache; laments swerve into sideways laughter. His language is plainspoken and musical, built from repetitions, sharp images, and sudden shifts in register. The collection’s power lies in its refusal to flatten Native life into tragedy or triumph; it insists on complexity and contradiction.

Taken together, these pieces stage a ledger of costs and dividends: what is lost to history and addiction, what is kept through story and dance; what can be sold, what must be protected. The Business of Fancydancing inaugurates Alexie’s enduring concerns, memory, performance, community, while offering a vivid, unsentimental portrait of Native survival in late twentieth-century America.