NAVIGATING NATIVE AMERICANS' INDIGENOUS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ALEXIE'S TO FIND SASQUATCH: A CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Abstract

This research will analyze Native American’s indigenous and cultural identity that has been recreated in Sherman Alexie’s To Find Sasquatch appeared in his poetic collection The Summer of Black Widows (1996) under the lens of cultural theory postulated by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The study is grounded in settler-colonial history of marginalization, misrepresentation, and erasure of Indigenous people in America. Alexie’s poem is about Sasquatch, less as a mythical being than as a symbol of Native presence, cultural memory, mystery, and survival. This study aims to examine the representation of indigenous identity, the challenge to a colonial stereotype and the reclamation of native cultural knowledge by Sasquatch Poems, as told through the medium of storytelling, cultural practices, and pan-tribalism.  Sasquatch Poems are selected because they directly deal with Native identity and cultural memory.  The central symbolic figure selected for analysis is: Sasquatch. The findings suggest that Alexie takes Sasquatch as a symbol for Native Americans’ indigenous identity. The study concludes that the poem is a resistance as well as rebuttal to colonial discourse about the erasure of Native Americans’ reservations, cultural norms, religious and linguistic identity.  The poems under discussion are a testament to the survival of indigenous people through memory, oral traditions, and cultural diversity.