Ten Little Indians is a book of nine short stories by Sherman Alexie each dealing with trying to come to terms with lives that are no longer traditional and they need to fit into American culture. Each story is linked not by characters or even setting (even though all the stories are set in Seattle), but by ideas and themes.

The most obvious example are the Indians (that’s what they call themselves) in the stories are searching for new ceremonies for the lives they lead outside of tribal systems, outside of their traditions, and trying to assimilate into the urban west of the 21st Century. Significantly, the first story is titled “The Search Engine.” From Corliss in “Search Engine” to Frank Snake Church in “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” all the characters are searching for new ceremonies in their lives or to adapt some of their traditional ones to modern life. They work and live in an assimilated world. Something is missing in their lives. As they try to put their finger on it they discover it’s the lack of the traditional life they all have memories of or that is only a generation removed and their parents or grandparents told them about.

Most of the characters discover the same solution to their problem by creating new ceremonies and rituals for the lives they lead. Corliss in “The Search Engine” is very aware of creating new rituals as she tracks down a native American poet who doesn’t turn out to be all that she imagines him to be. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” is almost a fairy tale of a homeless alcoholic Indian and his quest to redeem at least a part of his traditional heritage and what at first seems to be a growing tragedy transcends that altogether and becomes something quite unexpected.

Don’t let all this talk of ritual and searching for new ceremonies deter you. The stories have humor to them. Not only do the characters have a cynical outlook on themselves or a sarcastic remark to comment on their situation, but Alexie invests the stories with humor and has fun with the characters. You can tell upon reading that Alexie likes his characters. Even when the characters don’t act so nice it’s evident that Alexie respects the characters and has a certain amount of sympathy for the people in the portraits he’s rendering.

While the stories are all of Indians, there are a few Anglos that enter their worlds. What turns the stories to the universal is that the search for new ceremonies for the new world we’ve created isn’t exclusively an Indian pursuit. Today more and more people turn to Native American culture and religion (the last ultimate act of assimilation?) to find their answers in life and we’re passing each other in the opposite direction looking for the same thing. ( )

There is hardly a topic Alexie didn’t cover in his collection of short stories. Infidelity, book lust and author obsession, September 11, racism, first loves and true loves, fear, passion, grief, death, menstruation—all these come up in these simple and simply wonderful stories. He manages to control his reader’s emotions so well in his carefully crafted stories. Just as “Do not go gently” got me choked up and about ready to cry, the story completely changes to surrealistic hilarity. “Can I get a witness” was so good at wrapping me up in the importance of banal interactions, I jumped in my seat when the action started happening.
I almost stopped reading because of the first story, “Search Engine.” He wrote such a bad stereotype of a librarian, I though “Gee, is he going to paint everyone with this broad a brush?” But he even flipped that notion on its head. Now, I think that’s my favorite story in the bunch. “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above” is a story that started with such a vulgar but frank tone, I wondered if I wanted to keep reading it, but his description of a mother/son relationship was so perfect in how odd it was. I’m sure we’d all love to write our mothers a letter like the one he thinks up.

I highly recommend this book. ( )

Wow. Wow wow wow. Sherman Alexie is a brilliant writer. His humor comes effortlessly, his characters are vivid and three-dimensional, and all of his stories are relatable, yet infused with all the uniqueness that the Spokane Indian culture delivers to its characters--the good and the bad. I found that some of the stories, jokes, and themes got a bit repetitive as the collection went along, but overall I am deeply satisfied with my first Alexie read, and will definitely be checking out this author's other works! ( )

In this collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie, almost all of the main characters are Native-Americans (or part), as Alexie is. Alexie is a Spokane/ Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on a Spokane Indian reservation in Washington State — and so his Indian characters are often Spokane Indians. He tends to refer to his characters as Indian, rather than Native-American.

In “Ten Little Indians”, there are nine short stories. I liked the first one, “The Search Engine” the most. In this story, Corliss is an university student who loves to read.

As Corliss walks through her university library, looking for poetry books,

“She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’e been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. an impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks”.

Corliss discovers a book of poetry by an unknown poet who is also a Spokane Indian — and nobody seems to know what has become of him. She is determined to hunt him down; and then when she finally finds him, he is not what she thought he would be like.

As with most short story collections, there were some in “Ten Little Indians” I liked more than others. ( )

Sherman Alexie writes from the heart. In this book of short stories, he tells nine different tales of contemporary northwest indian culture. One gets the feeling that his own life is wrapped up and hidden somewhere within many of them. Or perhaps he was sitting and listening to the stories of others, and they became pages in their turn.

The stories open up a piece of society that we (the non-indians) wrap either in a cloak of mysticism or in a burlap bag to hide away. Alexie says, No, wait. Look at who this person really is. Here's what you think you know, and here is what is real. Deal with it.

Laugh, cry, then laugh some more. Then pick up a mirror.