Sherman Alexie on Not Being "The Kind of Indian That's Expected"

Since the election, Sherman Alexie’s been getting death threats. He got so many leading up to his commencement speech at Washington’s Gonzaga University in late May that he considered canceling his appearance. “I’m a Commie liberal brown dude,” he told me on a sunny June day in Seattle, where he’s lived for the last 20 years. “I don’t believe them, but it still creates such fear — like with the candidates dropping out of races because of death threats. I don’t think it would happen to them, and I don’t think it’s going to happen to me. But I do think that a brown-skinned liberal activist is gonna get assassinated. Five minutes earlier, Alexie was talking about his new memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, which had just come out that morning. His face had appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday arts section, with a photo of him looking reflective. A friend texted him, “You look like Javier Bardem’s having a bad day.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/sherman-alexie-is-not-the-indian-you-expected?utm_term=.etpvDExzv#.xhQMv7zxM