Dan - Week 6 PAP 3 - "Evolution" by Sherman Alexie

 In his poem “Evolution”, Sherman Alexie symbolically expresses the continued exploitation of Native Americans in American society through the use of the famous Wild West character Buffalo Bill and a pawn shop on the reservation, ultimately demonstrating how Native Americans have been stripped of many of their rights and belongings.

Alexie immediately begins by telling the reader about “Buffalo Bill’s… [new] pawn shop on the reservation,” which is significant because Buffalo Bill was a famous actor and notorious personality in the late 1800s who glorified the battle between Wild Westerners and American Indians, and offensively misrepresented Indigenous traditions and practices in his widely-known roadshow, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West”. Alexie wastes no time in describing how fast the “Indians came running in with jewelry [and] television sets” and all other sorts of valuables. Buffalo Bill accepts all that “the Indians have to offer” and stores everything in a “cataloged storage room,” which is symbolic of the way that Buffalo Bill - and other major white figures of popularity and authority at the time - had complete and utter dominance and control over the Native American population. Soon enough, the Native Americans are “pawn[ing] their hands, saving their thumbs for last,” then “their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin,” and finally when there is only one Indian left and he has pawned everything but his heart, Buffalo Bill “takes [it] for twenty bucks.” By transitioning from the pawning of their valuable personal belongings to their literal body parts, Alexie is showing the reader how Native Americans have not only been stripped of their physical traditions and practices but of their mind and soul and sense of being, something that can never be given back. 

The poem concludes with Buffalo Bill closing his pawnshop and opening a brand new museum in that same place called “The Museum of Native American Cultures” and “charges the Indians five bucks ahead to enter.” Alexie decides to use a massive form of irony here, as Buffalo Bill has collected every possible belonging from the Natives, and is now charging money to other Native Americans to come to see the very culture, tradition, and life that Buffalo Bill himself ruined.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/evolution-4/