I found Alexie's "The Powwow at the End of the World" a rather sad and interesting poem. He talks about how he is "told by many of you how I must forgive" and agrees to do so after different impossible events happen and lead to one another. Though he never mentions what he is being asked to pardon, it reminds me of our Loewen reading for this week. Chapter four in Lies My Teacher Told Me is entitled "Red Eyes." One of the main points of this chapter is that "No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them" (129).

I think that Alexie could possibly be saying that many people (whites) are asking the Native Americans to forgive and forget what happened in the past to his ancestors, but he is refusing until "I am dancing with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world."

My theory was only strengthened when I did a little bit of background research on the Grand Coulee Dam, which is the first of Alexie's proposals: "...I must forgive and so I shall after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam and topples it." The Grand Coulee Dam was built on the Columbia River amidst much controversy. In the end, it caused massive flooding, which displaced thousands of people including Native Americans who had been hunting and fishing on their ancestral lands there for countless years. The creation of the dam also prevented the migration of salmon and other fish to their upstream spawning grounds. The dam is the largest electric power-producing dam in the United States, and therefore severely unlikely to be torn down ever.

What Loewen is saying is that we must tell Native American history as it happened, instead of from our ethnocentric white European standpoint. He quotes a historian named Christopher Vecsey who said "We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge" (134). He merely wants to restore truth and equality to how history is taught. It is but a small way to right at least a few of the wrongs of the past, as well as prevent future wrongs of a similar kind.

What Alexie is saying is that he will not forgive wrongs that have never been righted, so much so that unless a woman can push over the Grand Coulee Dam and eventually lead to a salmon leaping into the night air to throw a lightning bolt at his own feet (an impossible event), he will not forgive until the world ends and he can happily celebrate with his tribe.