Nick Sneider
Mrs. Delgrego
English
9/15
Evolution or Degeneration?
The poem Evolution by Sherman Alexie is an interesting depiction of the way the white
people oppress the Indians. The motivation for stripping the Indians of their culture was greed.
Not just greed for land and wealth, but greed for power. In dominating a group of people, power
is gained over that group. This is the type of power the buffalo bill wanted. The title of this poem
is Evolution, yet it’s not a tale of evolution at all. It’s a tale of Buffalo Bill (symbol of the “white
man”) taking culture away from the Indians. He even preys on the suspicion most Indians are
alcoholics, and opens up his pawn shop across the street from a liquor store. Something about
this poem that doesn’t make sense is after he takes the culture from the Indians, he doesn’t hide
or destroy it, he preserves it.
The definition of evolution by dictionary is: any process of formation or growth;
development.This poem is about stripping the Indians of their culture and preying on their simple
minds. I don’t understand why the author would title the poem Evolution. Usually when a person
evolves, they gain something or progress to somehow a different level. An intern evolves into a
business man and gains money. A JV player on a sports team moves to Varsity and gains
playing time. We literally evolved from cave men and women to the humans we are today, we
gained new physical structures and smarts. In these examples, and plenty more, there is always a
gain. It’s rare when someone loses everything and evolves into something more beneficial or
greater than before. This story was not one of those rare occasions. A better title about a story
where Indians are repeatedly taken advantage of and mistreated might be Degeneration, but
certainly not Evolution.
The fact that a man would open up a pawnshop knowing the Indians are desperate for
money is sad in itself. It’s sad that the store is open 24/7 and will buy anything with no regard for
what the Indians are actually selling. But what’s really adding insult to injury is how Buffalo Bill
uses the alcoholism to his advantage. He opens the store right near a liquor store. An alcoholic
will do pretty much anything for a drink, even if it means selling a head-dress that took 20 years
to make. Buffalo Bill knew he could get them to sell anything and everything just because of
how poor they were in the first place, but even more so for the alcohol. How could a story titled
Evolution show an alcoholic degenerating back to his or her state of want every time they sell
something to alcohol? It’s even worse that Buffalo Bill put it there on purpose.
The weirdest part of this whole poem is not that he’s taking the culture away. But how he
keeps it preserved in a museum. Isn’t it logical to think that if he wanted to take it so badly why
would he want to keep it and show anyone? He went through a lot of trouble to set up a store in a
strategic position in order to to snag the culture of Indians. After he takes everything, he puts it in
his own museum and charges the Indians to go see it! It’s almost as if he wanted to say, “Haha,
you fell for it.” By taking their culture he took their identities. They can walk into that museum
with nothing but 20 bucks as if they weren’t even Indian.
Buffalo Bill did not strip the Indians of their money, they have none. No he took away
their identities, the only thing they had left to take. He didn’t help to evolve the Indians, instead
he kept them degenerates. Degenerates without identities. There is no evolution here, only
degeneration and power gained by Buffalo Bill. Without the Indians identities there was nothing
to keep them from fading from the world with only a few museums to preserve their culture, and
that is exactly what happened.