Lone Ranger and Tonto: Review of the Chapters 1-11

List the letters that apply to each of the chapter titles after the title.

1. Every Little Hurricane ___________________

2. A Drug Called Tradition ___________________

3. Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian At Woodstock ___________________

4. Crazy Horse Dreams ___________________

5. Amusement ___________________

6. This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona ___________________

7. The Fun House ___________________

8. All I Wanted to Do Was Dance ___________________

9. The Trial of Thomas Builds-The-Fire ___________________

10. Distances ___________________

11. The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Don't Flash Red Anymore

A. Victor recounts a number of drunken episodes from his life and how drinking destroyed his relationships and led to an all-consuming despair. He ends the story by describing the day he decided to stop drinking.

B. Victor was five years old and his parents could not afford to buy him anything for Christmas.

C. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is put on trial for unspecified crimes, after he begins speaking following twenty years of silence. A man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs describes Thomas's behavior: "A storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth. Dangerous."

D. Thomas tells stories of white injustices to Indians from the nineteenth century, including an incident in 1858 in which Colonel George Wright steals 800 horses from the Spokane chief Til-coax. In this story, Thomas speaks as if channeling the voice of one of the ponies.

E. In a collage of scenes, Victor describes the differences between "Urbans," Indians who left the reservation to live in the city, and "Skins," Indians who stayed on the reservation. He also describes burning down houses because white people had inhabited them, dancing with Tremble Dancer, an Urban, and assorted dreams about Indians from the past.

F. Alexie introduces the themes he will develop throughout the book such as the relationship between the real and the imaginary, reservation poverty, and the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity. Victor is a fictionalized version of Alexie, as the author has admitted.

G. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is hosting the "second-largest party in reservation history." The first was the New Year's Eve party in the first story. Thomas, Junior, and Victor take a ride to Benjamin Lake, where they ingest an unspecified drug and proceed to have visions during which they earn their adult Indian names by stealing horses.

H. Events from the past frequently bleed into the present during this story, illustrating Victor's claim that "Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you."

I. In this story, Victor recounts memories of his father coming home drunk during the 1960s and listening to Jimi Hendrix play "The Star Spangled Banner." As a child, Victor would share in his father's drunken ritual, putting the song on the stereo as he walked in the house, and then curling up and sleeping at his feet after he passed out.

J. In this very short story, Victor relates an experience he had with a woman at a powwow. He draws on the image of Crazy Horse, a famous Sioux warrior, to show how contemporary Indian men cannot measure up to the ideal of Crazy Horse. The woman Victor meets at a fry bread stand and seduces wants him to be something he is not. "His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse."

K. In this story, Victor and Adrian, reformed alcoholics, sit on their front porch, drink Pepsi, and discuss basketball and the reservation's rising star, Julius Windmaker, who, like Victor and other rising stars before him, eventually succumbs to alcoholism.

L. Victor recounts that his father's love of Hendrix played a role in the breakup of his parents' marriage, as did his alcoholism and desire to be alone.

M. Arnold and Adolph are quarreling during a New Year's Eve party when Victor is nine years old in 1976. The weather forecast is for a hurricane, and the narrator surveys the bizarre behavior of many of the Indians on the reservation, many of them drunk and angry, recalling some wrong that had been done to them. The story also contains a flashback to when

N. The story ends with the two having a similar conversation about a talented young Indian girl named Lucy. Adrian and Victor hope that she can develop her talents and not begin drinking.

O. In this story, Sadie and Victor play a prank on an old drunk Indian called Dirty Joe, putting him on a carnival ride when he passes out. A security guard chases Victor, who runs into the Fun House and sees his image distorted in "crazy mirrors."

P. After learning that his father has died in Phoenix, Arizona, Victor decides to retrieve his belongings and his ashes. Thomas Builds-the-Fire offers to give Victor the money to make the trip if he can go with him.

Q. At the end of the story, Victor offers Thomas some of his father's ashes.

R. In this character sketch of his Aunt Nezzy, Victor recounts an episode during which a mouse crawls up his aunt's leg, and her son and uncle mock her.

S. Nezzy becomes fed up with her son and her husband's ingratitude, and leaves the house to swim naked in Tshimikain Creek, refusing to leave even when her husband and Victor plead with her. At sundown, she leaves the creek, but she also knows that her life will be changed as a result of the day.