| 999 Trickster Mimetics and Native Sovereignty in Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won 2014 The American Studies Association “The Bomb Was like the Indians”: Trickster Mimetics and Native Sovereignty in Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won Sara Spurgeon The critical interpretation of native figurations is a theory of irony and survivance. —Gerald Vizenor M artin Cruz Smith is most well-known as the author of Gorky Park (1981) and the best-selling series of Arkady Renko novels that have followed it. 1 Spoken of as a writer of intellectual, “literary” thrillers whose ethnicity is generally unmarked in reviews, Smith is rarely acknowl- edged as a native American author concerned with the global implications of colonialism, race, and native sovereignty. Some background may be helpful to readers unfamiliar with Smith. He was born on November 3, 1942; his father, John Calhoun, was a white jazz musician, and his mother, Louise Smith, Pueblo, 2 Yaqui, and Spanish, was a jazz singer and Indian rights activist. His parents met at the 1939 World’s Fair where Smith represented New Mexico. 3 After their marriage, the family moved frequently as Smith’s father played at various nightclubs, mainly in and around Albuquerque and El Paso, before settling in Philadelphia where Louise Smith established her own singing career. Although his parents hoped that their son would pursue a career in music, Martin studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania instead, earning a BA in 1964. After graduation, he traveled in Europe before returning to the United States and writing for several publications in Philadelphia, including the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News where he developed a reputation for covering stories about organized crime, police corruption, and dirty politics. In 1967 he moved to New York and worked for a company called Magazine Management, editing and nearly single-handedly writing, under a series of pseudonyms, their men’s magazine, For Men Only. Magazine Management fostered a number of exceptional young writers, including Mario Puzo and Jimmy Breslin, but the company fired Smith in 1969 when he refused to in- troduce sexualized content that he describes as “pretty unpleasant stuff about