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Excerpt from
On her birthday, in 1963,
My aunt and her friends drank antifreeze.
Fourteen teenage Indians died that night.
My aunt survived but she soon went blind.
And though she's no masked superhero...
Sherman Alexie at The Academy of American Poets
Sherman Alexie at Modern American Poetry
The Official Sherman Alexie site
Interview in Iowa Review
You throw in a couple of birds and four directions and corn pollen and it's Native American literature, when it has nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of Indians. I want my literature to concern the daily lives of Indians. I think most Native American literature is so obsessed with nature that I don't think it has any useful purpose. It has more to do with the lyric tradition of European Americans than it does with indigenous cultures. So when an Indian writes a poem about a tree, I think: 'It's already been done!' And those white guys are going to do it better than you. Nobody can write about a tree like a white guy.
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