Do we like Sherman Alexie?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Many women allege misconduct and he has admitted harming people, and the record is too thin to credit much real good in return.
Sherman Alexie is one of the big names of modern Native American writing: poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist and filmmaker, with about two dozen books to his name. His best known is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. For years he was the writer teachers and librarians reached for first.
Then, in early 2018, it came apart. Anonymous comments under a School Library Journal post about harassment in children's publishing named him, and the author Litsa Dremousis tweeted that by her count there were now over 20 women accusing him of harassment. Nothing was proven in a court, so all of this stays alleged, but it snowballed fast.
On 28 February 2018 he put out a statement saying he had done things that harmed other people, and added “I am so sorry.” He didn't address any specific complaint, said he had no recollection of threatening anyone or their careers, and accused Dremousis of a vendetta and “outright falsehoods”. So it's a partial apology: harm admitted in general, some accounts disputed.
A week later NPR reported that it had spoken to 10 women, three on the record, who described behaviour from inappropriate comments to unwanted advances. The fallout was swift: the American Library Association said he had chosen to decline its Carnegie Medal for his memoir, his publisher postponed the paperback at his request, and the Institute of American Indian Arts renamed a scholarship that carried his name.
On the harm test, the search came up thin. We found nothing from him on trans people, migrants, vaccines or climate, and no record of him campaigning against any group, so we're not scoring harm there. Fair warning though: we couldn't open his full interviews, so this is a gap in what we read rather than a clean bill.
Nothing recent has broken lately. He went quiet for a while, popped up in April 2020 on a big Facebook powwow broadcast and the group's own organisers apologised afterwards, with one journalist who had reported on the allegations calling his appearance “an aggressive act”. By late 2024 he was publishing on Substack under his own press, so he hasn't vanished, just moved off the big stages.