The culture and identity of the story “War Dances

“War Dances” by Sherman Alexi has a theme about the patrimony of the Native American Indian culture and the narrator’s struggle in relation to that identity. This story shows the perspective of the narrator and what it means to be human. He struggles with his dad dying a “natural Indian death” from alcohol and diabetes just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor.
In the story “War Dances” the narrator portrays the life of an American Indian who has lost his father, “my father, a part-time blue-collar, worker, dies of full-time alcoholism in March 2003.” (Page 611) He also is dealing with a mysterious brain tumor that he concerns himself with death. “I had to stare at a tombstone with my name on it” (Page611). The narrator is pessimistic with the idea of death, his father’s death, and now maybe himself. In the story he travels through a lonely hospital in search of a blanket for his father who is cold, but instead runs into an irritated, unhelpful nurse who makes this difficult. After collecting “the world’s biggest coffee filter” better known as a hospital blanket the...