Alcoholism In Every Little Hurricane By Sherman Alexie

In the story “Every Little Hurricane” by Sherman Alexie, Victor, a nine year old boy, awakes one night to a New Year’s Eve party which his parents were hosting for family and friends. He describes the chaos he witnesses that surrounds him in the Spokane Indian Reservation. He is stuck in this cultural ‘hurricane’ of economic depression which leads to poverty, alcoholism, and violence. This depression starts because of the economic decline and the poverty on the reservation. Victor resides in a HUD house which is a settlement project. “White settlement and cultural encroachments, com-modification, commercialization…” is where the main economic problems started that caused this recession among the natives. (Slethaug 4). For an example, when

Victor sees the Indians continuously drink alcohol to mask the emotions and the hard ships they have to endure. Victors’ father would drink vodka on a daily basis. The alcohol is like “a wall of water, a reservation tsunami. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki” (Alexie 6). Victor watched as the alcoholism descend over the Natives at their New Year’s Eve party. While Victor laid in bed restless, he felt as though he was being smothered by the depression as everyone continued drinking. He crawled out of his bed on a search to find his parents. He cried while asking people where his parents were until he found them passed out in their bedroom. Kissing them goodnight he could taste the alcohol and cigarettes on their skin and wondered if he laid there long enough, would he get drunk as well and be able to fall asleep.

Because of the economic depression, and with the influence of alcohol, the Natives then became violent and began to turn on their own kind. During the party Victors uncles, consumed with alcohol, begin to physically fight. “He could almost smell the sweat and whiskey and blood” (Alexie 3). This happens as everyone stood around and watched “they were all witnesses…for hundreds of years Indians were witnesses to crimes of epic

By the end of the night Victor’s aunt had been shoved down the stairs by an unknown woman, breaking her arm. The man that fell asleep on the stove, drunk, was set on fire. Victor explains how the hurricanes would destroy homes and leave their contents scattered. How memories where not destroyed but forever altered. This hurricane is the economic depression the white settlers had opposed on the Natives which altered the traditions and morals of the Spokane Reservation. “Victor’s own hurricane may seem small by comparison with those that have enveloped Natives across America since the arrival of whites, but it is equally devastating, and he shares the same sense of destruction and loss” (Slethaug