By adopting Blues music, Alexie is also acknowledging the shared history of African Americans and Native Americans at the hands of white men. Grassian further argues that Alexie was reclaiming the Blues music for the Native Americans as he suggests that the Blues were actually created by horses (whom Big Mom taught to sing) when after the slaughter of the horses "the song" [they sang] "sounded so pained and tortured that Big Mom could never have imagined it before the white men came" thus Grassian stating that "the blues originated with the colonization of the land and its people".3.
The lyrics of the first song Reservation Blues (chapter one) also refers to economic and social disadvantages Native Americans faced. The opening line emphasizes (assuming that in accordance with Blues musical lyrics, 'dancing' often was a euphemism for sex) the loneliness as felt by Native Americans as a result of fractured family and community life on the Reservations (not one of the main characters has grown up through functional happy childhoods, Victor being abandoned by both his parents, Junior losing his parents, and as an indirect consequence his immediate family of younger siblings, to drink driving, whilst Thomas and Chess/Checkers both live through alcoholic abuse by their fathers). The following line "It's been so long since someone understood" refers to the inability of some Native Americans and non-Native Americans alike to understand Native American culture and traditions. Certainly Alexie writes that these have "been forgotten by most of the tribe" and that "Most Indians don't follow those rules anymore." Also Alexie writes that "Indian women had never paid much attention to him, because he didn't pretend to be some twentieth century warrior" which again compounds this notion of loneliness but primarily seems to allude to the confusion of Native American culture, in that the Indian women are seeking out a westernized stereotypical Native American man (and also that there must be Native American men who accept and fulfil this pretend role) whereas the traditional Spokane tribe were salmon fishermen.
