Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation

My Interpretation

I based my brochure off of the short story Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation written by Sherman Alexie. The Spokane Indian Reservation is located in a barren wasteland in Washington State. If you travel there, you will see first hand examples and effects of racism, and poverty on an Indian reservation. You will also see the striking differences between life on a reservation and life in middle-class America. Most of the adults are unemployed alcoholics who hang out all day and play basketball. This is probably due to the fact that the United States government forced the Indians to live on reservations with no real means of supporting themselves.

For the brochure, I chose a picture of an Indian Reservation because it represents the type of area that the Indians have to live in. Inside the brochure, I have a picture of Sherman Alexie. He is the author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It is a semi-autobiographical book in which most of the short stories are about Sherman Alexie's life while he was growing up. He is a Spokane Indian. I also put a picture of an Indian child. The Indian child represents James who was adopted by the narrator. The picture of the Nativity scene represents spirituality. I chose this picture because the author created parallels between the lives of Jesus Christ and James. Both were born around Christmas day and both had mothers who were virgins. Christ died so that we could be saved and James' birth saved the narrator. He did this by giving the narrator a reason to live. The people on the Spokane Indian Reservation had to deal with racism and poverty everyday. This probably caused the narrator to become an alcoholic. Spirituality, represented by James, is what eventually saved the narrator.