The short story "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie tells of a homeless Indian named Jackson Jackson who comes across his grandmother's regalia, which is gear that she used in powwow dances, in a pawnshop. Jackson explains that it's been missing for 50 years, it's important, and he wants it back. The pawnbroker tells him that he'll sell it back for 999 dollars and he'll give Jackson 24 hours to come up with the money. The rest of the story describes Jackson's quest for the money. In fact, he acquires money and then spends it several times.
First of all, the pawnbroker gives Jackson and his friends $20 to get started. They take the money to a 7-11 store and use it to buy liquor.
Next, Jackson goes into the Real Change newspaper office, and the kind Big Boss gives him 50 newspapers for free. Jackson manages to sell five newspapers for $5 and throws the rest of them away. With $4 he buys four MacDonald's burgers and eats them.
Jackson then takes the $1 he has left and $1.50 he finds in his friend Junior's sock, goes to a Korean grocery store, and buys a cigar and two scratch lottery tickets. One of the tickets wins another ticket, and this third ticket wins $100. He gives $20 back to the Korean grocery clerk who he claims to be in love with and so leaves the store with $80.
The next stop for Jackson is Big Heart's Indian bar in South Downtown. He spends the $80 for 80 shots of bad whiskey and shares the whiskey with everyone in the bar.
A policeman named Officer Williams gives Jackson $30. With that money, Jackson takes three Aleut Indians for breakfast at Big Kitchen in the International District. They have a big breakfast that leaves Jackson with $5.
Jackson takes the $5 back to the pawnshop and gives it to the pawnbroker. The pawnbroker thinks about it and decides to give Jackson his grandmother's regalia. Jackson then puts the regalia on, goes out on the sidewalk, and starts dancing.
At the beginning of the story, the pawnbroker gives Jackson twenty dollars. He is supposed to raise more money, so he can purchase his grandmother’s powwow regalia which had been stolen. He and his friends had visited the pawn shop with only five dollars among them.
The trio uses the money to buy three bottles of alcohol at 7-Eleven.
Later in the day, Jackson sells 5 newspapers from Real Change for a dollar each. He uses four dollars to buy a meal of cheeseburgers at McDonald’s, so he now has one dollar. He borrows one dollar and fifty cents from the still sleeping Junior so that he has a total of two dollars and fifty cents. He uses all of this money to buy “two scratch lottery tickets” and a cigar at the Korean grocery store. He wins a free ticket that, when scratched, wins him one hundred dollars. He gives twenty dollars out of the one hundred to Mary, the Korean woman behind the register. He then spends all of the remaining eighty dollars on drinks for himself and others at the Big Heart.
He is thrown out of the Big Heart, a drunken mess a little after two in the morning. At around 6 a.m., he meets Officer Williams, who gives him thirty dollars. He spends twenty-five dollars on breakfast for himself and the three Aleuts at the Big Kitchen, and he gives a five dollar tip to the waitress. He takes the remaining five dollars to the pawnbroker, who surprisingly gives him the powwow regalia even though the money is less than the required nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.
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