Boyd-Alexie Show Demolishes Stereotypes

Critic-at-large

I kept looking for Steve Hasson last Saturday, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

You see, normally I agree with the county commissioner’s famous complaint that the cultural climate around here hurts, but now I’m beginning to wonder what he means by culture.

In the same interview in which he made the crack that got him in hot water with the Spokane Convention and Visitors Bureau, he said he planned to get some culture seeing the Rolling Stones in Seattle.

I’ve seen every Stones tour in the last 23 years, and that’s not culture - that’s entertainment.

Culture touches your soul and elevates you.

Normally it’s found in those disciplines called “the arts,” which tends to make it sound like medicine, or at least a college course.

And that’s got nothing to do with what we saw last week.

My partner, Teresa, and I took in two events last Saturday (as usual, when it rains, it pours) - Jim Boyd and Sherman Alexie at The Met and the Hal Galper Trio at Hobart’s Jazz Lounge. As I say, we didn’t see Steve at either place, although he might have been hiding in the balcony at The Met.

Sherman Alexie is the young Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who’s tearing up the literary world with his first-rate poetry and fiction. Like Thomas Hampson, our homegrown opera singer, Alexie is probably better known in New York than he is here.

His written work is gripping and powerful and subverts every American Indian myth in existence. The surprise is that he’s also a gifted humorist and storyteller.

Boyd is Alexie’s musician partner, a Colville Indian and a compelling singer/songwriter and guitarist.

Their show is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks Indian art is about beaded necklaces.

Saturday, Boyd, who is becoming an outstanding solo performer after years of playing in bands, sang plainspoken, moving songs about loss and redemption on the reservation.

His characters yearn to return to places they haven’t seen and take their leave from drugs and alcohol as if they were old lovers. They feel deeply connected with old tribal ways and inhabit their Indianness with a proud defiance.

“I’m an Indian man,” Boyd sang to whoops from the audience, “and I love the fact. I’m an Indian man who won’t apologize for that.”

Alexie cracked Saturday that Boyd “looks the way an Indian man is supposed to look,” and that he does with his long, black hair, jeans and vest.

Boyd’s set included a few songs written by Alexie for his new, soonto-be-released novel, “Reservation Blues,” and the singer breathed life into Alexie’s sharply drawn images.

After intermission, Alexie assumed the character of a drunk and disheveled Indian named Lester FallsApart and told a wonderful tale of the great bluesman Robert Johnson and how he undid his deal with the devil after accidentally stumbling onto the Spokane Indian Reservation.

This much is drawn from “Reservation Blues,” but FallsApart’s tale took many side roads.

Since Newt Gingrich kicked him off welfare, FallsApart told the crowd, he has a new job. He’s the reservation aerobics instructor.

He has developed an exercise to help Indian men beef up their characteristically flat bottoms (if you ever see a drunk Indian walking in tight little circles downtown, he’s looking for his butt, FallsApart said), but they don’t want to join his classes.

White men do, though.

“I tell white guys it’ll get ‘em closer to their inner Indian.”

In his hilarious, free-form performance Alexie used the storyteller’s art to get inside - and expose - Indian stereotypes. His use of a drunken Indian as storyteller is both bold and troubling, and this non-Indian found the experience disconcerting: It’s not easy to laugh, but it’s impossible to not join in.

“Good, you broke that law. There’s hope for you,” chortled Peter Campbell when I called him after the show. “We’ve all learned certain rules and certain laws, and we need a time and a place where we can unlearn those things and come to a common understanding.”

Campbell is a counselor in the American Indian Studies program at Eastern Washington University and an elder among the Coeur d’Alenes. Laughter is the point, he said.

“That’s what I think it’s about; it’s about just learning to come to that common place of understanding … There’s a humor in that and a healing in that humor.”

Finally, Lester FallsApart signed off: “I gotta go now. The Sunburst (Tavern) is crowded. I wanna get a good seat” - and Alexie and Boyd appeared together for a concluding three-song set.

“Small World” cataloged the ways of dying on the reservation, while “Awake” mourned the terrible losses and spoke for change.

“All these wakes for the dead are putting the living to sleep,” spoke Alexie, who is not a singer.

Boyd sang the next line, “But I think it’s time for us to find a way…”

And then Alexie: “To wake alive, to wake alive, to wake alive.”

A poem, “Prophecy,” lashed out at broken promises, using salmon and the Spokane River as the organizing metaphor:

“At every river,” Alexie read over Boyd’s haunting flute accompaniment, “we are red as salmon/At every river, we are blue as smoke.”

Teresa and I left The Met for Hobart’s Jazz Lounge to hear some jazz, another music born out of oppression.

Hal Galper is a marvelous piano player, and a large one - a white mirror-image of McCoy Tyner hunkered over the keyboard. He and his two sidemen played a couple sets of mostly standards, swapping humor with somberness and sensitivity with power. A full house hung in there with them until the morning’s early hours.

‘Twas a good evening, indeed, Steve Hasson. Hope to see you next time.