The short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse was published for the first time in 2017. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Apex Magazine Reader’s Choice Awards as the best short story of the year.
Jesse Turnblatt is a particular tourist guide as he offers his agency’s customers virtual tours that provide Native American experiences. A serious problem is that tourists expect what they see in movies and are disappointed if Jesse offers something different, even if more authentic. When you have a wife, a loan to pay and a boss who controls you, you just have to give your customers what they want. One day a customer shows genuine interest but the situation becomes complicated in unexpected ways.
Rebecca Roanhorse takes the reader into a future where tourism can be practiced virtually but this can lead more than ever to tours based on fakes. Jesse Turnblatt is a Native American who works as a tour guide but hates his job because he’s forced to implement clichés about his people in his virtual tours instead of authentic experiences. The most obvious theme from the beginning is that of the Native American forced to disavow parts of his culture to satisfy tourists, who are typically white people and have expectations based on stereotypes they saw at the cinema or on TV.
Jesse is forced to work that way to make a living for his family and pay a loan but he doesn’t like it and his wife Theresa thinks it’s degrading, starting with the fact that he pretends that his last name is Trueblood because it sounds more Indian. All this can make it seem like a story that shows the attitude of ignorant white people seen from the point of view of someone who was discriminated by them and that’s true but the science fiction element is not just a frame.
In a story based on virtual reality, the second-person narration helps the reader to walk in Jesse’s shoes and at the same time get into his virtual tours. Together with the science-fiction element it allows to participate in some way in the protagonist’s progressive loss of identity, also blurring the boundaries between the physical world and the virtual world.
The result is that at the beginning of “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” everything seems pretty obvious but going forward the situation becomes more complex. The details are important to fully appreciate the twists and especially the metaphoric ending for a short story that’s full of food for thought.
