SHERMAN ALEXIE’S AND GREG SARRIS’S URBAN INDIAN NOMADS:
SHERMAN ALEXIE’S AND GREG SARRIS’S URBAN INDIAN NOMADS:

Summary/Abstract: The development of an urban, cosmopolitan and politically sovereign Native American subject has determined a shift of perspective in recent indigenous literature from the land-oriented understanding of William Bevis's notion of a traditional “transpersonal” identity to a more mobile, critically transnational “conscience of coexistence,” as suggested by Ojibwa critic, Gerald Vizenor. Two of the most popular American Indian writers today, Sherman Alexie and Greg Sarris, have proposed a new understanding of the indigenous presence in the world, by locating it in the space of the multicultural city. My paper seeks to demonstrate that Alexie’s and Sarris’s mixedblood characters mark the new trajectory of “homing in” (Bevis) from the reservations of Indian Country to the deterritorialized global flows of the city. Thus, the question of identity vs. alterity will be approached in a new light and read in the cosmopolitan frame of two West Coast cities, where the concept of an essentialized racial identity no longer holds in the encounter with a diverse and sometimes solidary, rather than inimical, Other.

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