Title: Redeemers | The New Yorker
Headings: Redeemers
Redeemers
MATT DELLINGER: The main object in your story, the pawned item, is the powwow-dance regalia of the narrator's grandmother. The narrator spends twenty-four hours trying to raise the money to buy it back. The powwow dance is also at the center of the movie you wrote and directed, "The Business of Fancydancing." Tell me about the significance of Native American dancing, and of the regalia.
Are dances passed down through families?
Would the regalia have been used in one or the other?
The narrator's relationship to his culture in this story is sort of tenuous but strong at the same time. . . .
And the way he carries out his quest for the money is both very sincere and haphazard.
Are you trying to convey anything about the Indian condition in general?
I don't think anyone would say that you romanticize Indian culture.
Do you think that being investigative ultimately helps in some way?
You wrote a column recently in the Stranger that talked about the antiwar movement, which you're involved in, and about the irony you saw in America's freedom fighting. You quoted Hugo of St. Victor.
Do you participate in powwows at all?
The protagonist in your story, a homeless Indian, wanders around the city and meets homeless members of the Aleut tribe waiting on the bench for their boat, which never comes. Is their dedication to their tribe meant to feel sweet?
Reservation Indians sometimes get stereotyped as self-defeating, in the way they live their lives and regarding the choices they make, and even, some people would say, in their adherence to their own culture.
But he's ultimately rewarded for it.
He may very well go and pawn it again.
Who are your fans, mostly?
Why do you think that is?
You also do slam poetry. How does that audience differ?
You don't have the street cred?
Did you find it difficult to write a screenplay from your own work?
Could you write a movie like that?
In your writing, do you feel a responsibility to be a social commentator?
You do write columns for newspapers.
When you're writing fiction or films, how much do you consciously think about making a social comment?
What about other Indian writers?
What about white people writing about Indians? Have you read anything good?
You made a point in one of your Stranger columns about the irony of Native Americans fighting in the Army. I've seen some powwows, and at them the honoring of veterans seems to almost eclipse everything else.
So it's a personal history?
Do you feel you've snubbed your culture?
Do you mean the pure facts of your success? Not the work itself?
Do you do readings and things on reservations? Visit schools?

Content: No, I think it's tender nostalgia, and also doomed. Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming. Reservation Indians sometimes get stereotyped as self-defeating, in the way they live their lives and regarding the choices they make, and even, some people would say, in their adherence to their own culture. Well, first of all, I would argue that reservation Indians are much more assimilated into American society than people would assume, or believe, depending on the reservation. A majority are very assimilated, and, aside from particular cultural things and ceremonies, there's not a whole lot of cultural difference between poor white people and Indians. Indian culture is, by and large, pop culture. In other ways, I think it can be seen from the outside as self-defeating, and the end result might be self-defeating, but I think a lot of Indians view their separation and their refusal to belong as an open act of defiance. So, even as they might go down in flames, they're proud of themselves. They're cultural kamikazes in some sense. And I think the narrator of the story in some sense is a cultural kamikaze.