49 pages • 1 hour read
Sherman AlexieWhat You Pawn I Will Redeem
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Powwow Regalia
The ceremonial regalia that Jackson spots in the window of the pawnshop is central to the story’s plot and meaning. The clothing strongly resembles what Jackson remembers of his grandmother’s regalia, which was stolen decades earlier: “[I]t had all same color feathers and beads that my family sewed into our powwow regalia” (Part 1, Paragraph 9). Upon examining the garment more closely, Jackson finds a single yellow bead—his family’s signature—stitched into the armpit, lending further credence to Jackson’s claims.
The regalia is therefore closely associated with both Jackson’s family history and his cultural identity as a member of the Spokane tribe. The fact that it was stolen is particularly significant, and points to the theft not only of Native American lands, but also (via measures like the Dawes Act and the boarding school system) of Native American culture. Jackson’s desire to win back the regalia is therefore intertwined with his figurative homelessness as someone forcibly alienated from his own heritage; recovering the garment would mean salvaging some sense of commonality and continuity with his ancestors.
While Jackson is ultimately able to reclaim the regalia, he doesn’t obtain it on the terms the pawnbroker originally offers, which reflect the economic and cultural norms of colonialist America; although the pawnbroker concedes that giving the clothing to Jackson would be “the right thing to do” (Part 1, Paragraph 28), he also says that he “can’t afford” to do so, having paid a thousand dollars for the garment originally. By the time Jackson returns, the pawnbroker has had a change of heart and sells him the regalia for just $5, telling him that he’s earned it. Since Jackson’s “work” consisted of activities that would not be considered productive in any Western economy—in particular, sharing his earnings with friends—the moment reflects a restoration of indigenous values and culture on multiple levels.
The yellow bead stitched into the armpit of the regalia also stands out for special consideration. Jackson explains the bead’s significance as follows: “Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia” (Part 1, Paragraph 18). The bead, in other words, is a deliberate imperfection designed to celebrate a greater perfection. This symbolism makes the fact that Jackson ultimately likens himself to the bead especially significant; as flawed as Jackson feels he is, his success in winning back the regalia has redeemed him, turning even his failings towards a broader spiritual unity with his family and culture: “I knew that solitary yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in” (Part 19, Paragraph 30).
Song
Music and cultural identity are tightly intertwined in many Native American communities; traditional songs and dances, for instance, often developed as a means of storytelling or worship. It therefore isn’t surprising that Alexie often associates songs with loss and loneliness, since so many of them hearken or date back to an era of Native American history that is now long gone. Here, for instance, is how Jackson describes the Aleut singing: “They sang about my grandmother and their grandmothers. They were lonesome for the cold and the snow. I was lonesome for everything” (Part 16, Paragraph 17). Even the Western music referenced in the story reinforces this connection between song and a longing for something that has vanished; when the Aleut offer to sing Hank Williams, they describe him as “Indian” and “sacred,” presumably because they feel an affinity with the kind of loneliness and grief his songs tend to center around.
Boats and the Ocean
Ocean imagery is pervasive in Alexie’s story, often in connection with a sense of homesickness and loss. The clearest example of this motif are the three Aleuts, who spend their days waiting for the boat that will carry them home, but even Jackson—a member of the Spokane tribe, which historically lived in inland Washington—remarks, “I love the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory” (Part 3, Paragraph 2). The motif also surfaces in figurative ways, as when Jackson, struggling to find the pawnshop a second time, says it “seemed to have sailed away like a ghost ship” (Part 19, Paragraph 2).
This reference to ghost ships—a staple of maritime folklore—speaks to Alexie’s tendency to associate the ocean with a home and past so distant they seem almost mythic. The Aleuts, for example, seem less like flesh-and-blood characters than like figures out of legend; they have been waiting by the shore for no fewer than 11 years, and their exit from the story is mysterious, with some even claiming to have seen them walking on water to return to the Arctic. In this way, Alexie’s use of the ocean motif reflects the story’s broader treatment of its characters’ vanished histories and identities: If the sea’s vastness and mysteriousness suggest that Native American cultures and peoples are permanently lost, its cyclic patterns (waves, tides, etc.) imply that these things can unexpectedly return as if by magic.
Math
Jackson references math multiple times throughout the story. Generally speaking, the motif speaks to the logic of the prevailing economic system; characters like Jackson are constantly trying to make the math work, calculating how much of something they can buy for the money they have, or how much money they need to earn in order to buy something they want. In most cases, the characters still come up short, as when Jackson realizes while talking to the Big Boss that he would fail to reach his goal even if he managed to match the record for most papers sold in a single day: “That would net me about two hundred dollars [...] That’s not enough” (Part 5, Paragraphs 14-16).
In the final moments of the story, math ceases to matter. Although Jackson has not, strictly speaking, added anything to the $5 he began with, that $5 has changed both literally and figuratively; it has accumulated a less quantifiable kind of value as a result of Jackson’s interactions and exchanges with others. Similarly, when the pawnbroker gives Jackson the regalia, he remarks that there are “too many [good men] to count!” (Part 19, Paragraph 29), once again underscoring the shift away from value as something easily measurable to something with moral or spiritual dimensions.
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