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Sherman Alexie is one of few writers who have noticed the cultural significance of basketball among Indian youth on reservations and its potential as a literary element. In the poems, “Defending Walt Whitman,” “Why We Play Basketball,” “Father and Farther,” and “Victory,” the Spokane poet effectively presents basketball as a platform for the recall and reinvention of the past, linking it to the present, and, more significantly, for the empowerment of Native Americans. In the poems, basketball is deployed to portray harsh conditions, poverty, depression, and dysfunctional family, on the reservation where the poet’s memory of his childhood is closely associated with complex feelings of his father as well as his people. Yet Alexie goes further to articulate a belief in hope for the future even in the current situation in which Native Americans have struggled and are still struggling to survive and continue. Through the resonating description of a game of basketball, the poet ultimately shows his poetic ambition to overcome the literary influence of Walt Whitman for the survival and continuance of Native American in the future, as evident in “Defending Walt Whitman.”
