It all started with the death of the penguin leader. With his death, his minions were left to fend for themselves. Without his guidance and autocratic rule, his penguin minions grouped together into tight bands of roving mercenaries. These penguins would stake out territory in the human facilities known as “zoos.” Here, the penguin mercenaries would spend their spare time recuperating after missions and planning future ones.
One of these mercenary penguin bands was sent in to eliminate a competitor of one of their clients. The target was a female Siamese cat named Ella. Ella was muscling in on their client’s market – the manufacturing and supply of canned cat food. Upon receiving the orders, the penguin band immediately began preparations for the strike. It was decided to use their most basic and preferred method of assassination – sniping.
A pair of penguins was dispatched to undertake the mission. One penguin was the shooter, the other was the spotter. The sniper unit took up position in an apartment building adjacent to Ella’s office. Their equipment could be disassembled in seconds and stashed in briefcases. They had an unmarked white van parked in the back of the apartment building to make their escape. Basically, these penguins knew what they were doing.
However, Ella’s cat-like instincts warned her of the upcoming attack. She escaped via a back entrance, and now she works from home. She now works for the Mirthquakes publishing company under the pseudonym of “Dawson Wu.”
Indian Killer is a novel that reveals and explores the double lives of Native Americans; they live in the everyday “white man’s” society and their own native society. Society concurrently discriminates against them, yet expects them to join the mainstream culture. In the book, John is pressured by his well-meaning parents, his friends, and his school as a child to adopt the “white man” ways. While none of these groups of people blatantly demanded John to renounce his Native American heritage, the fact that the Native American culture is different than the mainstream everyday culture was pressure enough. To further explain this, imagine the high school pressure to conform and be accepted by one’s peers. John’s ethnicity set him apart from others, so he was an outsider to begin with. To fit in, John let himself be “assimilated” into mainstream society.
Even though during high school, when John tried to fit in, he was still seen as different. “She’s a gorgeous white woman and you’re an Indian, right? Don’t you watch the movies? Don’t Indians always want to fuck white women?” (Alexie 77). This quote is said by one of John’s white high school friends to John (in reference to his adopted mother). It shows how John is stereotyped against as an Indian even by those who recognize him as having been absorbed by mainstream society.
Native Americans live a difficult life due to the way they are perceived by the rest of society. On viewpoint sees them as nomadic hunter-gatherers living off the land, while the conflicting viewpoint sees them as just another part of the general public. It is hard for Native Americans to occupy both worlds, as Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer reveals. John feels trapped between the two w