“I wonder where all the Skins disappeared to”—when you read this line from “Pawn Shop,” it clearly implies that he’s wondering to what place all the Indians went, but if you read it aloud, it could sound like he’s wondering where the Indians went too. Which he also does, as in the next scene he’s “searching the streets” for them until he arrives at a pawn shop. Pawn shops are not generally viewed in a positive light—they are places where people sell things they no longer want, or when people down on their luck sell their valuables out of necessity. Thus it hurts the narrator to see something so precious, a “heart beating under glass,” remain unwanted, wasting away in such an undignified place.
If “Pawn Shop” is a mourning of sorts, then “Crow Testament” is a stand-up comedy. Stanza 3 has a particularly comedic line when Crow, on commenting that Crow God looks like him, says “Damn…this makes it so much easier to worship myself.” The repetition of “damn,” not used in the Christian sense of being condemned to suffer in hell, but rather used as slang for surprise, also adds humor throughout the poem. While the poem is funny, the actions portrayed in the poem (injustice, war, alcoholism) are not. It’s not the first time pain and comedy are juxtaposed, but I don’t think Alexie uses humor as a coping mechanism to hide pain. While “Pawn Shop” openly shows raw emotion, “Crow Testament” uses humor to help heal and portray pain in a different way.
On a side note, it’s also interesting to see Christianity and Native American culture juxtaposed in “Crow Testament” as well. Since crows are trickster figures in some Native American cultures, I thought the pale horse was another Native American symbol, but it seems to be a Christian reference. In the Revelations, there are four horsemen of the apocalypse riding different colored horses: white, red, black, and pale. The last horseman, Death, rides the pale horse. I took stanza 7 to mean when Crow arrives as a harbinger of death, none of the Indians panic because “they already live near the end of the world.” Perhaps Alexie is commenting on the nearing death of Native American culture, and how Native Americans have already accepted that fate.
Both “Pawn Shop” and “Crow Testament” approach different kinds of pain in different ways. The pain in “Pawn Shop” is no less in magnitude, and arguably greater, than the pain in “Crow Testament,” but the incident that the pain stems from in “Pawn Shop” is small. It’s not land theft or the imposition of Christianity or war, but the appearance of a Native American possession in a pawn shop. From experience, big things don’t always hurt us because they’re not necessarily personal. A lot of times it’s intimate events that end up breaking our hearts.