What You Pawn I Will Redeem

Despite its straightforward plotline, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” is in some ways a difficult story to categorize. Jackson is a matter-of-fact, unsentimental narrator, and the story doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, as when Alexie describes Junior “passed out [...] covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else’s vomit” (Part 3, Paragraph 2). At the same time, an air of mystery or magic surrounds several of the story’s key events and figures, and the underlying plot structure echoes the quest narratives common to folklore and mythology worldwide. Jackson himself highlights these parallels, saying at one point, “I want to win [the regalia] back like a knight” (Part 15, Paragraph 74).

This combination of realism and romance in part reflects the allegorical nature of much of the story’s action. While it’s possible to take Jackson’s quest to recover his grandmother’s regalia at face value, his journey calls to mind a much broader story about the ways in which indigenous peoples have responded to and been impacted by the European colonization of the Americas. Jackson’s homelessness, for instance, is heavily symbolic; he lives close to the lands his ancestors once inhabited but that they were largely dispossessed of as a result of the United States’ westward expansion throughout the 19th century. Likewise, the theft of the ceremonial regalia recalls the many (literal or figurative) thefts Native Americans experienced as a result of European colonialism—not just the loss of life and territory, but also the loss of traditional culture via measures like the Indian boarding school system, which took children from their reservations and families in order to “civilize” them. Jackson’s desire to reclaim his grandmother’s regalia therefore speaks to a more general longing to connect with a vanishing cultural heritage.

His unlikely success in this endeavor is in keeping with the story’s fairytale underpinnings: In traditional quest narratives, the hero tends to be rewarded with a happy ending. At the same time, both the happy ending itself and the story’s broader tendencies towards fantasy and romance speak to one of its central ideas—namely, that what is bad can be “redeemed” and turned to good. This theme plays out in several ways over the course of the story, but it also operates on a stylistic level, as Jackson (and Alexie) finds or creates meaning out of the depressing realities of racism, homelessness, and other plights. The fact that this meaning takes the form of a kind of myth is even more significant in light of what Jackson says about the importance of mythmaking to many Native American cultures (Part 1, Paragraph 4). In a sense, then, it’s not only the recovery of the regalia but also the story of doing so that allows Jackson to resurrect (at least in part) his grandmother and her culture.