Catherine A. Lutz - Unnatural Emotions

"Yes, it's only Reservation Blues but I like it:" On the Connection between Christian and Native Religions

One of the most interesting aspects of the anthropological study of Catherine A. Lutz, entitled Unnatural Emotions, is that the author applies the same sort of intense self-examination to her own project as an anthropologist amongst the Ifaluk as she does to the Ifaluk themselves. Every individual at some point in his or her own life has been confronted with the surprise, after all, that someone seems 'exactly like me.' Or, conversely, one is shocked how another human animal, possessing roughly the same physical attributes of one's genus and species as one's self, could behave in such a horrible/wonderful fashion, totally 'unlike me.'

Catherine Lutz suggests that these latter moments come, not so often when an individual is the presence of someone he or she regards as wholly alien, but when an individual is in the presence of someone he or she has come to regard as familiar, who suddenly surprises him or her. Lutz did not experience her own internal surprises, more often than not, when she was beginning to be acclimated to Ifaluk culture--everything seemed strange to her anthropological eyes, over the course of her initial encounters. However, after she began to think that these people were more like her than she initially though, in other words, when she began to think that she could predict their responses to a certain extent, based upon her preexisting cultural assumptions and modalities, then she when she was taken by surprise at their differences.

A reader of Sherman Alexie's novel Reservation Blues enters the text with similar assumptions of Native American life, unless of course, he or she is of that particular community. If he or she is not, however, there is the likelihood that the 'typical' reader has images of Native Americans based upon long-held social stereotypes of the Lone Ranger's Tonto and Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves," possibly chastened with some positive, homey images of the First Thanksgiving as well. However, Alexie's prose forces one to apprehend Native American life anew, and to see Native Americans as fully-fledged individual characters, with wants and needs and desires, not as those who are simply stoic and 'other.'

In short, Alexie forces the reader to see Native Americans as rock-and-roll wannabees. What could be easier to identify with than that, a reader might say? Although to cite the plot of the novel sounds strange to the ear, namely that all of the central protagonists of the novel are members of "Coyote Springs," an all-Indian Catholic rock band from the Spokane Reservation in eastern Washington that happens to see a long-dead blues musician 'come to reservation town,' these characters strike a chord in the heart of every reader who ever dreamed of being 'in a band' as a teenager or a young adult.

But beyond this initial emotional connection, the reader's sense of strangeness and estrangement of the community is again reborn by the tone of the narrative and the detailed though magical realist evocation of Native, Western reservation life. The seamless blend of Native American folklore and Catholicism is one of the oddest aspects of the novel to someone personally uninitiated and unfamiliar with Native religions, except on a superficial level. For instance, one of the novel's backup vocalists Checkers Warm Water develops a relationship with the reservation priest. It is difficult, once one accepts the level of oppression experienced by these Native American individuals, to fully understand why Christianity, the religion of Caucasians, would have any draw at all. Why doesn't Checkers simply love her own Native religion and her own Native people through the context of that tradition? Why a priest?

The only answer is perhaps found in the idea that many of the Indian characters seek, through rock and roll and through Catholicism as well, the sort of individualistic _expression that Native culture does not offer them. Checkers Warm Water seeks liberation as a woman and as a sexual being in a way that cannot be fully encapsulated by either by her Native

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