Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

[rsadelle]

I have to stop reading books without knowing anything about them ahead of time. I knew that a lot of people liked Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but I didn't know it was going to break my heart pretty much from the first page.

The book is about Junior and what happens the year he decides to leave the reservation school and go to Reardan, a small-town white high school twenty-two miles away. Junior is a cartoonist, and the book also includes his cartoons, from artist Ellen Forney. In a lot of ways, the book is ultimately hopeful. Junior navigates his way into life at Reardan, makes friends there, and reconciles with his best friend on the reservation. But it's not an easy road. Probably the most heartbreaking part was this:

Jeez, I've been to so many funerals in my short life.

I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals.

That's really the biggest difference between Indians and white people.

A few of my white classmates have been to a grandparent's funeral. And a few have lost an uncle or aunt. And one guy's brother died of leukemia when he was in third grade.

But there's nobody who has been to more than five funerals.

All my white friends can count their deaths on one hand.

I can count my fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, penis, butt cheeks, and nipples, and still not get close to my deaths.

I kept being reminded of a video (I think) I've never seen but have read descriptions of. The video is of black men and white men talking about racism, and one of the white men doesn't believe the PoC experience, and they keep pushing, and eventually he says something like he can't believe it because he can't live with the idea that our world can be like that. I felt like that guy reading this book. The first couple of times Junior talks about what it means to be Indian and poor, I felt myself resisting it. I don't want to believe that our world can be like that. Once I noticed myself resisting, though, I was able to let go of it and listen to Junior tell me his story.

I listened to Empires' "Spit the Dark" (acoustic version at their MySpace or download Howl with the album version I was listening to from their website) on repeat the whole time I was reading the book. (Yes, I'm the kind of person who will listen to one song on repeat for hours and hours and hours.) The lyrics that catch my ear are "I will guide you in the night" and "will you join me?" I also read the vision statement of To Write Love On Her Arms yesterday. Both of those things were in my head, and by the time I got to the end of the book, I felt opened up and full of love. It reminded me that one of happiness commandments is Love.

On a more intellectual note, part of why I wanted to read this is that one of the characters in the paranormal mystery novel I'm writing is Native American and grew up on a reservation, and one of the things I'd like to do someday is write a prequel novel that tells her story. This book certainly gave me a lot to think about.

My instinctive white privilege/child of a social worker response to the issues of alcoholism and poverty was to think, "How could this be fixed?" And then my anti-racism resources reading/family support/strengthening side kicked in and said, "This is not your place to come up with a solution." I'm still left curious about what the perspectives of Native Americans are. The conclusion the book comes to is that what Junior has to do to break the cycle is to leave the reservation. If everyone leaves, what happens to the culture? Do other people have other solutions or is this the accepted solution? I don't expect anyone reading this to answer my questions, but they're certainly something I'll be thinking about to direct more of my reading.

In a different intellectual direction, the book design is awesome. If you're at all interested in books, I suggest taking a look at this for the design alone, even if you don't ultimately read it.

Comments

[bulliciosa.livejournal.com]

Part of me really feels like you missed the point. Although your questions are presented as rhetorical, I still want to address some of them.

"This is not your place to come up with a solution." / "The conclusion the book comes to is that what Junior has to do to break the cycle is to leave the reservation. If everyone leaves, what happens to the culture? Do other people have other solutions or is this the accepted solution?"

In my mind, the practical solution isn't about hand-wringing and fretting because that's counter-productive. Start here (http://delicious.com/starkeymonster/forcluelesswhitepeople) and familiarize yourself with Racism 101. We (white folks) can't undo the crappy actions of our ancestors, but we can actively work together with POC as allies. How so? Here (https://edgenet.edgewood.edu/whiteprivilege/being%20a%20strong%20white%20ally.htm) are (http://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/hdouts/raible.htm) a few (http://resistracism.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-model-of-the-white-ally/) places (http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?ar=674) to start (http://www.antiracistparent.com/2008/01/18/ask-arp-how-to-be-a-strong-ally-to-kids-and-parents-of-color-at-school).

[sanguinity]

:: We (white folks) can't undo the crappy actions of our ancestors... ::

There's a lot more going on than just "ancestral" wrongs. Andrea Smith's Conquest does a very thorough job documenting current systemic and governmental violence against American Indians, and how that manifests. (She comes at it from an explicitly woman-centric position, which I like, too -- instead of violence against men being the "true" violence against Indians, and violence against women being some random add-on, she takes the approach that violence against American Indian women is a central method of anti-Indian violence.)

This is a rec for the OP, too: Smith not just documents the violence, but discusses particular strategies for combatting it. (If you have any interest in the women's anti-violence movement in general, Smith is a must-read.)

[rsadelle]

Thanks for the rec! It sounds interesting, and I'm adding it to my to-read list.

[bulliciosa.livejournal.com]

There's a lot more going on than just "ancestral" wrongs.

Indeed there is and I'm embarrassed for not addressing that as well. *pulls pants back up*

Thanks for the recommendation. :)

[rsadelle]

Hmm, yeah. I see that what didn't make it out of my head and into my post was the connection I was thinking about around ally behavior. The traditional social services model is "You have a problem and I (the social worker) am going to fix it" where the family support/strengthening model is "What are your strengths and how can I support you in using them to get to where you want to be?" (I worked for a family support training program for six years, so the concept is pretty well rooted in my head for social services ideas.) What I was thinking about with "This is not your place to come up with a solution." is that people/groups have the right to direct/design their own solutions and the privileged support should come in the form of support for those solutions, not "fixing."

I'm also writing these for my own LJ and crossposting here, and, obviously, anything for my own LJ, whatever the topic, is All About Me. I'll have to think about how to better edit for crossposting so it's more about the book and less about me.

[sanguinity]

If you poke around a little, you ought to be able to find interviews and essays in which Alexie discusses whether or not one should/ought to leave the reservation. I'm pretty sure you're grossly oversimplifying his position.

Re what happens to "the culture" when people leave the reservation, and the different ways Indians feel about and respond to that, a relevant term you want to keep an eye out for is "urban Indians". The federal government had a relocation program during the '50s and '60s in which they tried to move enormous numbers of Indians off-reservation and into cities; there are a number of organized urban Indian communities that date from then.

(You should probably also keep in mind that quite a few reservations are amalgams of unrelated tribes; there's already been huge cultural and language shifts that come from multiple tribes having to share a single societal structure.)

Re "the expected solution," there's no such thing: not a hive mind. But that should become clear if you keep reading Native authors.

[rsadelle]

Hmm. I found the ending to very clearly say that the only way for Junior to break the cycle is to leave, and that Rowdy will never leave and never break the cycle. I'll poke around and see what else Alexie has to say - and I know that just because that's the character's solution doesn't mean it's everyone's solution or even that author's only solution. (We actually had an interesting discussion at my writing group this week about writing things that don't necessarily/fully reflect our own politics.)

Thanks for the ideas of directions for more reading - I know there's no hive mind, and part of what this book made me interested in was what the other perspectives out there are.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Alexie's books present a wide variety of relationships to the reservation and urban Indian communities (or lack of community)--I don't think he has an answer to the problem. I'd definitely recommend reading Reservation Blues and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and then reading Indian Killer if you're going to read more Alexie.

[rsadelle]

Thanks for the suggested reading order!

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

You don't have to read Reservation Blues first (although it was his first novel)--any of the short story collections are good, too. The Lone Ranger and Tonto... is, iirc, the one the movie Smoke Signals was based on. The main thing is not to read Indian Killer until you've read some of his other books--I found it very interesting and worthwhile to read, but it's quite different.

Alexie's one of my favorite authors, and very versatile--so I wouldn't generalize too much about his beliefs from any one book.