Explain how spirituality is addressed by the author.

Spirituality plays a subtle but important role in Alexie's fiction. Characters in this collection rarely engage in any kind of religious practice, and spirituality is not discussed as explicitly as some of the book's other themes. Nevertheless, Alexie often describes his characters in religious terms. The collection contains numerous references to both Christianity and traditional Spokane spirituality. For example, young James's similarities to Jesus Christ play an important role in establishing the tone of "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother...". Likewise, Samuel Builds-the-Fire's story about the creator god Coyote reveals a great deal about his attitude towards white people in "A Train Is an Order of Occurrence...". Through this system of comparisons and allusions, Alexie shows that religion and mythology give people tools to understand the world around them, regardless of how spiritual they are in practice.