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| Sherman Alexie speaking on behalf of the MFA Creative Writing Program |
We were up in Santa Fe last night -- well, up at the IAIA, which is not quite in Santa Fe but outside town up on a ridge with a spectacular view of the Jemez and the Sangres and the Ortiz Mountains and the pageantry of Mother Earth and Father Sky all around. There were storms gathering in the south. It would be quite an evening.
We were attending a fundraising event for the new MFA program in Creative Writing that the IAIA had launched last year with 32 students in attendance. The entertainment featured the stylings of Sherman Alexie, American Indian Writer of Stories and Books and Poems and Screenplays and Such, now officially a Professor of Higher Learning at one of the highest profile Indian Schools in the whole wide world, the school where every Indian Writer and nearly every Indian Artist he's ever met has gone to at one time or another. This is the top of the Indian Educational Pyramid. The very Pinnacle of Indian Achievement. His comment about being selected to serve as one of the faculty of the MFA Program at IAIA?
"It took you long enough."And we were off to -- or maybe through -- the races in several senses of the word. This Privileged Indian, Sherman Alexie, was going to give a talk, not so much for the Anglos who'd paid the cost of admission (perhaps a hundred of us or so) but "for the Indians" in the room, another fifty or so, mostly students in the MFA program for whom the paid attendees were providing the money for scholarships. (For the record, though one of the Chés is an Indian, we paid the price of admission, and will probably wind up paying a good deal more in the by and bye.)
Not every Indian is a rich Indian like Sherman Alexie. How rich is Sherman Alexie? He told us. He's so rich, his house in Seattle has got two garage doors, one for his wife and one for himself, and both open and close with these little electric gizmos they keep in their cars. Note, their cars. They each have one. They're that rich! Ha! He uses and IPad when he speaks! He's that rich!
Of course, many non-Indians wouldn't see those things as emblems of wealth at all. These are things that are basic to a (White) middle-class lifestyle. No doubt you can live without them, but why would you if you didn't have to?
Oh.
