Sherman Alexie’s poem “Evolution” is a scathing indictment of the white European settlement of the Americas, and the subsequent subjugation of the Native American people. By spinning the tale of white conquest over the Natives, and the economic dependence the Natives were forced to have on whites after that, into a fable involving famed Western icon Buffalo Bill, Alexie satirically points out the hypocrisy by which the white Western narrative makes a fable out of the removal of Native peoples and culture from their own hands.
The poem begins with the establishment of Buffalo Bill, who “opens a pawn shop on the reservation” – an evocative line that combines the Western fantasy of noted cowboy Buffalo Bill with the shameful reminders of Native subjugation in reservations and the establishment of pawn shops as major economic sources for lower-class Native people who live there (line 1). Its status “across the border from the liquor store” shows Alexie combining the pawn shop with another problematic staple of reservation life, the liquor story (line 2). Pawn shops and liquor stores, as Alexie implies, are fixtures on the reservation, leading to the poverty and alcoholism that plagues his people in the modern age.
Alexie paints his people as economically desperate, coming to the pawn shop with “jewelry / television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit / it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish” (lines 4-6). Likening the ephemeral modern Western amenities of TVs and jewelry with the time-consuming, intricate Native artwork shows how Western culture objectifies Native culture and treats it like just another commodity. Buffalo Bill, representing the Western need to collect and commoditize everything it finds novel while leaving nothing in return, “takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it / all catalogued and filed in a storage room” (lines 6-8). Alexie shows this perspective to be predatory and insidious, lending order and coldness to what is meant to be a relaxed, natural spirituality and deep connection to culture.
What’s more, Alexie tragically shows the complicity economically desperate Indians have in this process. The Indians, after all, pawn “their handstheir skeletonseverything but his heart,” gladly giving it all up for some semblance of economic help and recognition from white culture (lines 9-10, 12). And, of course, Buffalo Bill, representing Western consumption, takes his heart “for twenty bucks,” the kind of paltry reward for something so important that Alexie feels Natives have been given all their lives (line 12). The final indignity, then, is when Buffalo Bill takes everything and turns the shop into “THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES [and] charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter” (lines 14-15). In this moment, the Natives have now lost everything and are forced to watch whites appropriate it for their own economic ends.
Sherman Alexie’s “Evolution” is a satirical poem airing his resentment at white culture’s appropriation of his own, while leaving little for the Natives who created it in the first place. Just as whites took Native land and personhood, they set up a system to keep Natives impoverished and off their guard (with the pawn shop and liquor store), forcing them to sell their dignity and culture just to survive. By turning that same culture into a sideshow they can just charge people for, white culture (according to Alexie) performs the ultimate perversion of his people’s way of life.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. “Evolution.” <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/evolution-4/>.
