american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

108 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Alexie’s satiric narrative of the American Indian’s mock
“evolution” begins with a popular culture icon. Buffalo Bill is physically
present on the contemporary reservation in present tense verbs
and in the actions they portray. First, he “opens a pawn shop on the
reservation / right across the border from the liquor store”
(The Business 48; my emphasis here and below). His shop is inside
reservation borders, whereas the liquor store is noticeably on U.S.
land. Like a 7-Eleven, Buffalo Bill’s pawn shop “stays open 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week,” but unlike a 7-Eleven, this shop buys rather than
sells, takes rather than provides. At Buffalo Bill’s shop, “the Indians
come running in” to sell first the material possessions prized by white,
mainstream America (“jewelry / television sets, a VCR”), next their
cultural heritage (“a full-length beaded buckskin outfit / it took Inez
Muse 12 years to finish”), and finally their very bodies. This process is
the mock, reverse evolution of North American Indians.
Before Buffalo Bill takes the Indians’ bodies, he acts as a bureaucratic
government agency—the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Department
of the Interior—that keeps meticulous but skewed records of contact
between whites and Indians. Everything he takes he “keeps it / all catalogued
and filed in a storage room,” where the historical records of
these contacts are controlled, stored, and organized by an Indian
oppressor. When the Indians begin pawning their bodies, the first thing
to go is “their hands,” “saving” the final vestiges of humanity (their
thumbs) “for last.” After they have pawned “their skeletons”—typical
museum pieces in natural history museums—Buffalo Bill “takes” the
“last” Indian’s “heart.” At this juncture at the end of the poem, Indians
reach the apex of their (d)evolution as museum items to be gawked at,
laughed at, and cataloged as stereotypes for perpetuity.
When Buffalo Bill has nothing left to take from the Indians, he
“closes up the pawn shop” and “paints a new sign over the old” one.
The new sign reads “THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN
CULTURES.” This shift in purpose—from killing Indians as part of
the U.S. “evolution” to mock-celebrating them and exploiting their
cultures for entertainment—continues with further economic exploitation.
In the final line of this “Evolution,” Buffalo Bill “charges the
Indians five bucks a head to enter” their own museum. Not only are
they exploited in these ways, they are also consumers of their own
history of oppression, their own stereotypes, and their own deaths.
Whereas Stephen F. Evans rightly claims that the implied border
crossing from pawn shop to liquor store is a “powerful metaphor of
recurring Indian defeat by white civilization and the white-conditioned
habit of Indian self-defeat” (56), the more ubiquitous metaphor is the