This is a poem of high irony, brilliant in the way it lays out all of the stereotypes depicted in US films, television stories, and elsewhere-some blatant, some subtle and complicated.  The poem is a painful reminder of how the United States has at one and the same time decimated native peoples and their culture while exploiting those people and that culture for its own gain.  It is a commentary on stereotyping, loss of identity, and loss of a people.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and film writer. He is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian and grew up on an Indian reservation in Washington state.  His work focuses on  relationships between Native Americans and white Americans and on Native American life within a white power structure.  Alexie's writing is consistently humorous and ironic.