The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Stories 1-11

Reading Check

1. New Year’s Eve (“Every Little Hurricane”)

2. Benjamin Lake (“A Drug Called Tradition”)

3. The drums (“Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”)

4. Reservation University (“Crazy Horse Dreams”)

5. Basketball (“The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore”)

6. Dirty Joe (“Amusements)

7. A trailer (“This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”)

8. She dances. (“The Fun House”)

9. Watch television (“All I Wanted to Do Was Dance”)

10. Two (“The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire”)

11. Television (“Distances”)

Short Answer

1. His father doesn’t have any money for presents. (“Every Little Hurricane”)

2. Victor laments that he and his generation have never had any real wars to fight. (“Because My Father Always Said He was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”)

3. He fears “Elevators, Escalators, revolving doors. Any kind of forced movement.” (“Crazy Horse Dreams,” 40)

4. The narrator refers to the white tourists gawking at Sadie and Victor sitting with Dirty Joe. (“Amusements”)

5. Victor travels to Phoenix to retrieve his father’s body. (“This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”)

6. She signed a permission slip disguised as a paper that proved her tribal status for the BIA. (“The Fun House”)

7. They are mostly men of color—four Black men, one Chicano man, and one white man from a small town. They all represent marginalized people, either by race or socioeconomic status. (“The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire”)

8. The Skins are the tribal members who lived on the reservation when the Ghost Dance worked, and the Urbans are the tribal members who survived in the cities and returned to the reservations. (“Distances”)

Stories 12-24

Reading Check

1. James (“Jesus Christ is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation”)

2. Grandfather (“A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Revolt”)

3. An it-is-a-good-day song (“A Good Story”)

4. Simon (“The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue”)

5. Coyotes (“Imagining the Reservation”)

6. Terminal cancer (“The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor”)

7. Fifth (“Indian Education”)

8. 7-Eleven (“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”)

9. The television (“Family Portrait”)

10. Sean (“Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show”)

Short Answer

1. James’s parents die in a house fire. The narrator catches James when James’s father throws him out the window to save him. (“Jesus Christ is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation”)

2. He goes to a bar and drinks for the first time. (“A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Revolt”)

3. He skips a field trip to a baseball game in Spokane. (“A Good Story”)

4. Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is described as a weapon for survival. (“Imagining the Reservation”)

5. Making fry bread and helping people die. (“The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor”)

6. He assumes Junior has been drinking because “these Indian kids…start drinking real young.” (“Indian Education”)

7. A nightmare in which he sees tribal and white soldiers at war, which escalates to terrible atrocities, such as soldiers playing polo with a decapitated head. (“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”)

8. Because Norma is so good at saving people, and Victor needs rescuing more than anyone else Junior knows, aside from Lester FallsApart. (“Somebody Kept Saying Powwow”)

9. He says the relocation programs sent tribal members to the cities where they got “swallowed up” and lost. People back home would often assume they had died. (“Witnesses, Secret and Not”)

10. He is waiting for his brother Joseph to return. Joseph was captured as a POW when his plane was shot down. (“Flight”)