What Zits learned in his travels

In Sherman Alexie’s Flight, the protagonist, who calls himself Zits, travels through space and time by taking control of other people's bodies. Zits, as a young Native American who seems to hate society, learns about himself and the world while his consciousness is traveling across history. Though Zits assumes the bodies of many different people, each one is connected and says something unique about how Native Americans have been treated since European colonization.

After waking up in the body of an FBI agent from 1975, Zits learns about how much Indians had been systematically abused by law enforcement. Zits, as Hank Storm, is forced to mutilate the dead body of a young Indian man. Zits relates himself to this boy, thinking “He’s a kid. Like me”(Alexie, 53). He has a realization that the Indians have been treated terribly, and that he is just like the others who have been tortured or killed before. Zits had only ever heard about the terrible acts taken against his people, but now he only had more reason to believe that an Indian boy like him could never survive in such an awful society.

Later, Zits wakes up in the body of Gus, a soldier who tracks down Native Americans to kill. Zits would never try to kill other Indians, but Gus’s instincts force him to lead an American army into an Indian camp. At the village, Zits continues to see how deeply his people have been oppressed, even so many years ago. Zits takes responsibility for the death that the army will wrought upon the Natives, remarking that “I ride with killers, so that makes me a killer”(Alexie, 90). Seeing such mass slaughter of Native Americans hurts Zits. He doesn't want to kill anybody, even protecting some of the young Indian children. Throughout this section of the book, Zits is fighting against his instincts as Gus to kill his own people. After becoming the person who hunts down Natives for others to kill, Zits sees even deeper into the society that went on to oppress him hundreds of years later.