Reservation Love Song

Sherman Alexie published the lyric poem “Reservation Love Song” in an early 1992 collection of poetry and short stories called The Business of Fancydancing. The ironic, satiric poem is ultimately a sincere ode to the hardships of Indigenous people and their ability to form meaningful bonds amid disenfranchisement. As with most of Alexie’s work, “Reservation Love Song” doesn’t sugarcoat the lives of Indigenous people. Like Alexie’s well-known short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and his award-winning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), “Reservation Love Song” confronts the disquieting aspects of life on a reservation. Alexie is a part of the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribe and grew up on the Spokane Reservation in Washington, so he has witnessed reservation life first-hand. Aside from personal experiences, Postmodernism informs the poem through its playfulness, blend of high and low culture, and emphasis on the individual experience. What also shapes the poem is the number of Indigenous poets who began to gain greater visibility near the nineties. Alexie credits one poet in particular, Lovelock Paiute tribe member Adrian C. Louis, for pushing him to write poems like “Reservation Love Song.