Reservation Blues

About Reservation Blues

Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues (1995) is a magic realist novel set on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State, following a Spokane Indian rock band called Coyote Springs that forms after the legendary Robert Johnson arrives on the reservation carrying his cursed guitar. The novel blends Indigenous mythology, blues music history, and dark comedy to explore poverty, alcoholism, and the persistence of colonial damage on reservation communities, while its characters — Victor Joseph, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Junior Polatkin — continue from Alexie's debut story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Darkly funny and deeply sad, the novel won the Murray Morgan Prize and the American Book Award.