Essay Questions

What is the answer to the question posed in the poem “Who Died on the First of July?”

A number of famous people who died on this particular date are mentioned in this short poem. The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe 1970’s music personality Wolfman Jack passed almost exactly a century part. Nostradamus shows up as a victim even though there is some disagreement as to whether he actually was able to live one day beyond. In 1974, Juan Peron succumbed and thirty years later was followed by Hollywood legend Marlon Brando. First and foremost among those people who died on this date for Alexie, however, is someone not at all famous: his mother, Lillian. By the end, the poem has become a memorial of the least-known life snuffed out on that date, joining those mentioned above as well Luther Vandross, Oliver Plunkett and a son of Bach. Lillian’s death of cancer in a hospital on the reservation went unnoticed by the rest of the world, but is now an event of historical context to anyone reading this book.

“Everything You Need to Know About Being Indigenous in America” turns out to be one of the shortest prose chapters in the book. What event does it describe?

In August 2015, a wickedly dangerous forest fire erupted on the land on which the reservation occupies The United States government charged an official with meeting with reservation representatives in order to arrange a town hall to give an update on the government’s response. Outrage erupted when the envoy announced that in the opinion of the United States Government, the fire presented no immediate threat to the members Spokane Indian community or the reservation itself. The outrage was directed not toward the threat of an uncontained fire in general, but rather one very specific condition at play within the overall risk potential. At the very time the official made this announcement the fire was already burning quite robustly mere feet away from an abandoned uranium mind.

Throughout the book, Alexie attributes several outlandish stories to his mother which eventually he mostly calls into question. How does he excuse the lies of his mother?

Alexie only gradually becomes aware that the wildly imaginative stories told by his mother are not always entirely or even partially true. He finally is forced to make a confession of sorts to the reader: “She manipulated us with her lies. She hurt our feelings. She exhausted us. But she never put us in physical danger with a lie.” That assertion by the author himself may well be as open to interpretation and debate as anything ever said by his mother. Ultimately, Alexie is able to forgive his mother with ardent adoration—“my mother was such a gifted liar that she would fool even us children”—for two reasons. One, of course, is that he is himself a professional liar; he gets paid to spin his extravagant fantasies into fiction. The other reason is that he has convinced himself—as a layman without the education and degree to back it up—that his mother was “an undiagnosed bipolar grandiose fabulist.” Which is psychological term for a condition some might mistake for being a pathological liar except that—according to the son—her pathology did not extend creating scenarios leading to genuine potential harm.