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Dustin Johnson

Andrea Malouf
ENGL 2610
12/2/2016
Power in Crazy Horse Dreams
In Michel Foucaults book,The History of Sexuality, he states that Power is everywhere;
not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere (History of
Sexuality 93). This is especially true for Sherman Alexies short story Crazy Horse Dreams.
Using various theoretical pieces, predominantly Michel Foucaults, I illustrate that power is a
pervasive presence throughout this short story. This presence of power entrenches itself in the
Indian powwow setting, the Crazy Horse legend, as well as between the two main characters:
Victor and the girl.

Alexies use of an Indian powwow for this storys setting allows a backdrop to be formed,
a backdrop that ties together the historical power struggles of Indians and the two main
characters. In Ann Axtmanns dissertation, Dance: Celebration and Resistance, she defines
the contemporary Indian powwow as a transcultural performance in which the dancing body
expresses the cultural, psychic, and material survival of Native America. This dancing body has
emerged from power relations inherent in the process of colonization (1).
In the seventeenth century, European travelers documented dances that served as intertribal unification. Tribes would dance together before a war to unite against a threatening tribe or
they would dance together after war to form an alliance (104-105). Dances would shift in
meaning and usage with surrounding influences of European settlers. In Foucaults book,
Discipline and Punish, he states, the body is also directly involved in a political field; power
relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry
out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (25). The power relations would use the
ceremonial dancing body to encourage political harmony between tribes. French would teach
and enact dances with warring tribes to unite them together. As Americans began to claim

territories as their own, Native dances became antagonistic and confrontational but slowly
shifted to welcome peace between the nations.
According to Michel Foucault, power relations demand certain number of points to be
established. His first point states:
The system of differentiations that permits one to act upon the actions of other:
juridical and traditional differences of status or privilege; economic differences in
the appropriation of wealth and goods, differing positions within the processes of
production, linguistic or cultural differences, differences in know-how and
competence, and so forth. Every relationship of power puts into operation
differences that are, at the same time, its conditions and results. (Essential
Works 344)
Native persecution from the United States, as well as Canada, would continue for
hundreds of years. These power relations and reactions against the systems of differentiations
would begin to shift as powwows became more popular for both the Natives and the nationstates. For these powwows, it is the aspect of dancing that plays a pivotal role (Axtmann
Performative Power 19).
For most modern powwows, fancydancing is the main event. It is an energetic dance by
young men and boys that dance in a freestyle fashion in order to keep up with the beat of the
music. The music increases speed, which increases the footwork by these dancers as well as
their various body movements (Dance: Celebration and Resistance 18-20). However, in Crazy
Horse Dreams, fancydancing is not experienced, but rather alluded to in third-person narrative.
The first time fancydancing is alluded to is when the girl envisions Victors hands moving over
her, fancydancers, each going farther away from his body (40). In this occurrence, there is
hope of a sexual encounter. The second mention of fancydancing happens after the romantic
spell has been shattered between Victor and the girl. Again, it is in the third-person when the girl
thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect
with each step (41).

Another element of power that plays out through Crazy Horse Dreams, is the legend of
Crazy Horse. The man himself does not have a hold on these characters, but the legend of the
manthe mythhas a powerful hold on both Victor and the girl. This hold that Crazy Horses
legend has over these character is illuminated by Michel Foucaults essay Lives of Infamous
Men. He states that:
In all legends, there is a certain ambiguity between the fictional and the real
but it occurs for opposite reasons. Whatever its kernel of reality, the legendary is
nothing else, finally, but the sum of what is said about it. It is indifferent to the
existence or nonexistence of the persons whose glory it transmits. (Essential
Works 162)
For the girl, the legend of Crazy Horse indifferently transmits ideals of how a man
should look and behave. This transmission even masks her reality with false appearances, as is
shown between her and Victor. When she is with Victor in her Winnebago, she gradually begins
to withdraw from Victor the more she realizes he does not match up to her ideal of Crazy Horse.
She begins to see that his hair was thinner, more brown than black. His hands were small.
Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse (40). She becomes disillusioned to her false
reality as Victors true appearance becomes more apparent to her. His appearance does not
match up to her ideal, causing her to distance herself from the man who she thought was Crazy
Horse (41).
Victor succumbs to the legend of Crazy Horse as well. Unlike the girl, who allows the
legend to transmit relationship ideals, Victor allows the legend to transmit personal ideals for
himself. In the last paragraph of the story, Victor is alone and sitting by a tipi. He has already
been rejected by the girl and is outside of her Winnebago watching the lights turn on and off. In
this moment he wished he was Crazy Horse (42).
For both characters, the legend of Crazy Horse is not explicitly stated, but rather
internalized. The thoughts are made known to the reader by the third-person dialogue narrating

their thoughts and grievances. For the girl, she will always be looking for Crazy Horse, but never
finding it. For Victor, he will always be wishing he was Crazy horse.

Power also plays out between Victor and the girl in ways that shifts from one character
to the other throughout the story. At first, Victor develops a power relation between himself and
the girl by resisting her strategy of wooing him into becoming her powwow paradise. According
to Foucault, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. Resistance
comes first, and power relations are obliged to change with the resistance (Ethics 167). This
is made clear when the girl is trying to get Victors attention in the beginning of the story. She
engages him with her opinion of his inability to get the Blackfoot waitress attention. But Victor
resists her and walks past her. She calls out to him, Too good for me? and he replies, No, Too
big (Alexie 38). He again walks away, intensifying this power relation between the two of them
by resisting her strategy.
Michel Foucault sees the word strategy being employed three ways: (1) the means
employed to attain a certain end (2) the way in which a partner in a certain game acts in regards
to the actions of the other and (3) to designate the procedures to reduce the opponent to give
up the struggle (Essential Works 167). For the girl in Crazy Horse Dreams, her strategy
involves the means of being persistent to achieve Victor as her powwow paradise. The way she
acts is by coyly chiding Victors quick-witted responses. She chides his inability to evade her, his
intelligent responses, his storytelling, and his inability to answer a question straight. This last
one is pivotal because it plays into her strategy of obtaining Victor when he retorts, Depends on
the question. She then ensnares him with the question, Do you want to be my powwow
paradise? (39-40). She obviously wins him over with this strategy because they end up going
back to her Winnebago to have sex.
It is in this scene that the resistance bounces back and forth between Victor and the girl.
At first, Victor is nervous and shakes as he touches her. Slowly, the girl begins to be
disillusioned with her aforementioned ideal of Victor being her Crazy Horse. She begins to see

him for who he really is and begins to pull away, to resist. As she begins to pull away and resist
Victor, Victor begins to see her in a more powerful state. He acts surprised because she was
the most enormous woman he had ever seen she was more beautiful than he wanted (4041). They both develop a resistance to each other and become hostile and repulsive towards
one another.
This resistance ends up changing the strategy for the both of them. Instead of attaining
sex as their certain end, they instead try to attain the end of getting away from one another
since neither of them match up with their ideal partner. They essentially say no to each other,
and to Foucault, To say no is the minimum form of resistance a decisive form of resistance
(Ethics 168) Since they decided to say no to one another, they end up acting aggressive and
fractious towards one another until they both end up splitting ways, wishing to be or be with
Crazy Horse.

These two characters struggle with the power of each other, themselves, and with
folklore, all while being immersed in a setting that is rooted in struggles for and of power. Power
is everywhere, especially throughout every page of this short story.

Works Cited
Axtmann, Ann Marguerite. Dance: Celebration And Resistance : Native American Indian
Intertribal Powwow Performance. , 1999.
Axtmann, Ann. Performative Power in Native America: Powwow Dancing. Dance
Research Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2001, pp. 722. www.jstor.org/stable/1478853.
Dixon, Mary. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas Great Plains Quarterly,
vol. 27, no. 1, 2007, pp. 3954. www.jstor.org/stable/23534300.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage
Books, 1995. Print.
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. London:
Penguin Books, 2000. Print.
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: New
Press, 1997. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others. Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print.
Young, G. A. (1981). Powwow Power: Perspectives on Historic and Contemporary
Intertribal Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (303018244).
Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/docview/303018244?accountid=14677

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