Born from Loss: Desertification and Regeneration of Native America in Sherman Alexie’s Autobiography You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (2017)

Abstract

America construed as a “desert” or a “wilderness” by the Western settlers is an egregious, constructed, and convenient image designed to justify their hegemony in an alleged “new world.” The adjectives “desertified,” “emptied,” “drained,” or even “widowed,” would be more appropriate. The America of 1492 was a bustling and thriving place of diverse peoples who had developed multifarious cultures over millennia. Post-1492 colonization intended to erase their presence, whether physically, culturally, spiritually, or even from memory. However, Native Americans have not complied with the “great expectations” of a definitive vanishment they were assigned to by colonial society. They managed to survive, to evolve, to assert their presence. It is this tension between a forced desertification and a renewed fecundation that Spokane and Coeur d’Alene author Sherman Alexie explores in his 2017 autobiography You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. It is this exploration that is analyzed in this article in three sections. The first will break down the multifaceted process of genocide that led to the image of America as a “Native American desert” and to subsume an indigenous multiverse under the single denomination of “Indian.” We will then see, through the case-study of the Spokanes, how this erasure process was enforced, especially with the construction of dams which shattered a culture based on salmon, and how the cancer and death of the author’s mother can be considered as metonymies of the tragic fate of the First Nations. If loss and grief are the common denominators shared by all the colonized indigenous peoples, Alexie nevertheless strives to transcend and sublimate one’s tears to show that a rejuvenation of a Native identity and presence is still possible in North America, especially through powwows and moccasins, as the last part will show.