What You Pawn I Will Redeem

In literature, an anecdote is a brief story recounted within the broader narrative. Jackson shares several over the course of “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” either in conversation with others or while speaking directly to the reader. By and large, these anecdotes tend to involve his family; one story, for instance, concerns his grandmother breaking several ribs on her way home from a powwow, while another recounts how his grandfather—a tribal cop—was fatally shot by his brother while intervening in a domestic dispute.

Alexie’s incorporation of these anecdotes into the frame narrative reflects a broader interest in the relationship between storytelling and Native American history. Jackson explicitly associates storytelling with cultural and racial identity, saying, “[W]e Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers” (Part 1, Paragraph 4). What Alexie suggests, however, is that this affinity for storytelling is not simply a matter of (for example) the strong oral tradition present in many tribes; rather, it is also a result of the alienation many contemporary Native Americans feel from their past. With its undertones of heroic myth and legend, Alexie’s story implies that narrative is one of the ways in which it’s possible to recover or redeem something that has been lost or broken.