Indian Killer

In some respects, Marie serves as a counterpoint to John’s belief that growing up on a reservation would have solved his pain and his struggle with identity because Marie, a Spokane Indian raised on a reservation, also lacks a strong sense of belonging. She struggles to reconnect with her original tribal identity and primarily seeks a sense of connection in the disparate urban Indian community. However, Marie’s experiences also mirror John’s own because much of her sense of disconnection comes from the fact that she is torn between two worlds, despite being raised on a reservation. Believing that her future is outside the reservation, her parents chose not to teach her Spokane or traditional song and dance, and she often feels “less than Indian” as a result (33).

Also like John, she feels a great rage at white society and its treatment of Indians, regularly interrupting her “Wannabe Indian” lecturer, Clarence Mathers, and organizing protests against the university and the writer Jack Wilson. Her anger at Mather and Wilson stems from her belief that they are white people who feel entitled to tell Indian stories and who claim to be experts on Indians while not understanding, or having to experience, the trauma and suffering that plague so many Indian communities.

She reflects on this point in particular when she considers that “other people, Indians and not, could run around on the weekends pretending to be what they thought was Indian” (331), while she believes it is more important to volunteer to feed the homeless. That is to say, she resents white men like Mather and Wilson cherry-picking aspects of Indian identity that they find glamorous and spending their time playacting as Indians rather than acknowledging the harsh realities of contemporary Indian life or supporting those who are suffering as a result of it. In many respects, Marie could be a point of connection and even salvation for John, but he is never able to get passed his own mental health issues and his own alienation enough to truly connect with her.

Clarence Mather is a white lecturer in Native American Studies who teaches Marie’s Native American Literature class. Described by one of Marie’s friends as a “Wannabe Indian,” he dresses in a stereotypical Indian style and is obsessed with ingratiating himself into Indian communities, painting himself as both an expert of Indian culture and a liberated friend and ally to Indians. However, his attitude towards Indians is patronizing and entitled. He treats Indian cultures as historical and as fixed and never changing, complaining that contemporary Indians are not acting in his idea of a “traditional” manner and even believing that he could “teach […] them a thing or two about being Indian if they would listen to him” (135).

In reality, Mather simply cannot accept that Indians like Marie and Reggie do not accept him as a “good” white man, an expert and an ally, leading him to dismiss them as resentful, violent people who bitterly throw back his patronizing and exploitative offers of friendship and guidance. In this respect, although he believes himself to love Indians, Mather represents a variation on Reggie’s white father, Bird, complaining about “hostile Indian[s]” and on Truck Shultz’s racist rants about how Indians are bitter savages who will not accept white people trying to “save” them.