Just finished reading Sherman Alexie’s Flight. I was asked to read it for assessment of school use. The first chapter had me adamant that it was completely inappropriate. By the end I was thinking, “Well…maybe.”
Alexie is just so gritty. His characters are coarse and vulgar. They grate against sweet, prudish, slightly virginal English teachers. However, they also reflect a reality that a lot of our students know only too well. I’m not into censorship, but I don’t have to teach a book I don’t like either. That’s a nice thing about professional autonomy. Not having prescribed curriculum or literature means we have a lot of freedom to teach process and encourage analysis using literature that is particularly relevant to our teens. For some kids, this will be a powerful reflection of their world.
Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer from Washington State. His books explore his world and observations of the interaction of his two communities. He has challenging ideas to both and this book reflects them.
It is the story of Zits, a kid whose native dad left, whose white mom died, and who has been shuffled through the foster system. He has to come to terms with his identity, his abandonment, and his anger. The method is essentially a series of parables. Zits travels through time to inhabit the bodies of whites and natives from Little Big Horn to his father. Watching the ‘native experience’ through other eyes leads him back to the beginning, and gives him a chance to make different decisions in order to attain a different outcome.
Alexie is accessible as a Native writer. His young characters are funny, ironic, and believable, but they’re gritty. Their lives are hard. Their experiences have been horrible. Alexie doesn’t sugar coat the misery, but he forces the protagonist (and therefore the reader) to decide whether he will allow the past to rule his future or whether he will carve a new path.
The hopeful message is what wins me over. He has used the graphic language and rebellious attitude of the first chapter or two to grab his audience. The time travel is confusing enough to keep them curious. The ending is satisfying. We all want to believe that everyone can have a happy ending.
Shawn L. Bird 
V-GER heads off December 18, 2010
Tags: Star Trek, V-ger, Voyager
Do you remember Star Trek: the Motion Picture? (aka Star Trick: The Motionless Picture according to some SAIT nerds 20 years ago). V-Ger was a giant, living machine tracing through the universe trying to learn all that was learnable and return the information to its creator. Who? 20th Century humans from NASA, of course. V-Ger was actually a Voyager space probe, which had been travelling for 300 years collecting data.
This week, the real Voyager hits the edge of our galaxy and heads off into the universe. 30 years ago when they made the movie they were imagining this day. I remember it seeming impossibly distant, and yet, here it is. Science fiction being made real. I remember worrying about whether we really want to draw attention to ourselves… In 300 years will Voyager return having discovered or become a lifeform? or will some life forms have come to see what Earth is all about for better or worse?
What an amazing time we live in. Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner have been a strange part of it, as the visionary inventions of the tv show and movies are now part of our lives- from automatic doors to flip phones. Now V-Ger is off to places no human has been.
Bon Voyage…r
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