American Indian author to talk at UM

ORONO – Being an American Indian in the 21st century isn’t easy.

Just ask Sherman Alexie.

The internationally known poet, author and screenwriter has explored in many of his works the American Indian struggle to establish and maintain an identity in America. When he’s not writing, he takes his message on the road, offering “bare-knuckles lectures” across the country.

Alexie will be at the University of Maine on Monday, April 19, to deliver a talk titled “Without Reservations … an Urban Indian’s Comic, Poetic, and Highly Irreverent Look at the World.” He is scheduled to speak at 8 p.m. at the Maine Center for the Arts. The program is free and open to the public.

“He talks about reservation life in a very unconventional way. He’s very direct,” John Bear Mitchell, interim director of the Wabanaki Center on the Orono campus and a member of the Penobscot Nation, said Thursday. “Reservation people can directly relate to what he’s saying, but non-reservation and non-Native Americans also can relate at the same time.”

Wabanaki Center is among nine university offices and departments co-sponsoring Alexie’s visit.

The 38-year-old Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash. His decision as a teenager to attend a school off the reservation eventually led him to Washington State University in Pullman, where he stumbled into a poetry workshop and discovered his true calling in life.

Since then, he has written seven books of poetry, several collections of short stories and two novels, “Reservation Blues” and “Indian Killer.” He also produced and wrote the screenplay for the film “Smoke Signals,” based on a short story from his book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” The film garnered two awards – the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy – at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998.

Event organizers say they are excited to bring Alexie to Orono not just because of what he has accomplished, but because of what he can share with his audience.

“He kind of lays bare issues of the native community,” Maureen Smith, director of Native American Studies at UMaine and a member of the Oneida tribe, said in a press release. “I think it’s a very challenging role to be in. I think that’s what makes him so important.”

More information on the free event is available by calling the Maine Center for the Arts at 581-1755 or the Wabanaki Center at 581-1417.