The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Content Warning: This section references racism, genocide, and sexual harassment.

In the last 30 years, Alexie has won the American Book Award for his novel Reservation Blues, the National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the Odyssey Award for best audiobook featuring his narration, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for War Dances, and the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to authoring poetry, prose, and short stories, Alexie became a successful screenwriter and filmmaker with the production of Smoke Signals, a 1998 film based primarily on “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” the seventh short story in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It was the first feature-length film written, directed, produced, and cast by an all-Indigenous company, and it received critical acclaim, including the Audience Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Filmmakers’ Trophy.

Alexie’s warm reception on the writing stage swiftly ushered him into conversation with the authors who defined the first wave of the Native American Renaissance, a body of work that emerged in the late 1960s with writers like N.