Stateless in Seattle  Maya Jaggi is gripped by Sherman Alexie's
collection of short stories about the Native American
experience, Ten Little Indians Ten Little Indians by Sherman
Alexie Buy Ten Little Indians at  Ten Little Indians by Sherman
Alexie 243pp, Secker & Warburg, £12  Each age, Fergus Bordewich
wrote in Killing the White Man's Indian , has "imagined its own
Indian: untameable savage, child of nature, steward of the
earth, the white man's ultimate victim". In his stories and
poetry, novels such as Reservation Blues (1995) and screenplays
such as Smoke Signals (1998), Sherman Alexie has with engaging
humour and acuity tilted at the self-serving myths of nobility
or stoicism projected on to Indians (not "jewel-on-the-forehead"
but "bows- and-arrows"), a term he prefers to Native Americans.
These nine stories all centre on Spokane Indians in Washington
state, "salmon people" rather than warriors, here seen not on
the "rez", but in urban guises. The setting is mainly Seattle, a
city transformed 30 year