The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN-10: 0-316-01368-4

Why read this book

Read what an American Indian thinks it’s like to be an American Indian. No, they didn’t all die a hundred years ago, and no, they aren’t all rich from casino profits. They still suffer tremendously from the loss of their land and their culture. It ain’t pretty, but you owe it to them to know more about it.

Plot summary

Arnold Spirit Junior is a 14-year-old Spokane Indian. He’s grown up on a reservation – the rez – in eastern Washington state. High school starts badly. In a scene reminiscent of Little Man’s first day in first grade in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, when Junior’s geometry teacher passes out the textbooks, Junior finds his mother’s name on the inside cover from when she used the book 30 years earlier. Junior loses it and throws the book fiercely at … his teacher. Junior’s not a bad kid, and he didn’t really mean to hit the teacher. He was just pissed. And he got suspended for a week, during which the very same geometry teacher visits him at home and lays it all out: Junior, you’re smart, the reservation is going to kill you, and you have to get out as soon as you can. Junior is smart. The next day he gets his dad to take him to the white town 22 miles away and he enrolls in the white high school.

It’s a big move. None of the white kids pay any attention to him for months, and everybody on the rez thinks he’s a traitor, including Rowdy, his best friend, the toughest guy in his class, the guy who protects Junior when everybody else is picking on him. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. Junior had “water on the brain” when he was born. He had major brain surgery when he was just a baby. He had seizures for years. He still looks a little weird. So he gets beat up a lot. But Rowdy has always protected him, and now Rowdy hates Junior’s guts for leaving the rez.

Except Junior hasn’t really left the rez. He still lives there with his parents, hitchhiking back and forth to school. It’s a tough life, but there’s some good things, too. The white kids at his new school gradually figure out that Junior is a pretty cool guy. A beautiful white freshmen girls gets kind of interested in him, and one of the brainy white kids realizes that Junior is more interesting than most of the other kids in school, and they all realize that Junior is a pretty good basketball player. So this story is about how Junior deals with his people on the rez hating him for leaving and the white folks kind of liking him and how a young Indian boy honors the history and the reality of being an Indian while moving onward into a world bigger than the rez, which, after all, has always just been a big Indian prison.

Critical evaluation

The Absolutely True Diary is a bold book. Junior is a bold narrator, letting us know that he masturbates and he enjoys it and he doesn’t feel guilty because everyone does it and everyone enjoys it, for example. It’s a bold book because Sherman Alexie doesn’t pull any punches about the way alcohol has destroyed so many Indian lives. It’s bold because it isn’t a story about an Indian kid getting treated badly by his white classmates. There aren’t many villains in this book, just a lot of alcohol and history. It’s a bold book because it directly expresses some harsh realities but puts them in the mouth of a narrator who is so engaging that we can accept those realities as realities rather than sloganeering. Take these brilliant true statements:

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

That’s really the biggest difference between Indians and white people (p. 199).

My dad was trying to comfort me. But it’s not too comforting to learn that your sister was TOO FREAKING DRUNK to feel any pain when she BURNED TO DEATH! (p. 205)

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps (p. 216-217).

Roxburgh (2005) says that effective use of causality is a key to good literature, young adult or otherwise. In The Absolutely True Diary, Sherman Alexis makes causality a theme. As tragedy mounts on tragedy during the story, Arnold can’t help but think that his abandonment of his reservation is the cause of it all. Look at his sister Mary, who had lived in the basement for years until, inspired by Arnold leaving the reservation, she met a Montana Indian at a casino, moved back to Montana with him, married him, and died with him in a horrible fire. How can Arnold not think that he caused this misery? Alexie makes a bold statement when Arnold realizes that it’s okay to have dreamed of a bigger world despite being an Indian:

I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belong to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. … of cartoonists … of chronic masturbators … of teenage boys … of small-town kids … of Pacific Northwesterners … of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers … of poverty … of funeral-goers … of beloved sons … of boys who really missed their best friends (p. 217)

Alexie has given teens a marvelous model of someone who can honor the person history has made of him and also transcend that history to be who he needs to be for himself.

About the author

According to a recent New York Times article, Sherman Alexie has called The Absolutely True Diary “an extremely faithful recounting of his experience growing up poor on the Spokane tribal reservation in eastern Washington State” (Konigsberg, 2009). Like Arnold, Alexie is a Spokane Indian who was born with hydrocephalus, grew up on the rez, left it to attend high school in the nearest white town, and was a pretty good basketball player (Alexie, 2009). The Absolutely True Diary, which won the National Book Award for young adult literature in 2007, was Alexie’s first young-adult novel, but he was already well known as the author of 18 volumes of poetry and fiction.

In an interview with young-adult author Rita Williams-Garcia, Alexie responded to a question about “the story decision that you are most proud of” in The Absolutely True Diary:

I suppose I’m most proud of telling the story in first person. I worried that my highly autobiographical novel would be just thinly disguised memoir if I wrote in the first person. And I was equally worried about writing yet another first-person YA novel, featuring yet another highly sensitive protagonist. So, yes, I did write an early draft in the third person, but that narrative distance created an emotional distance as well. And I realized that I was afraid of the first person because I was afraid of my own history. I’m not a fearful person, onstage or in my books or anywhere else, so I was nearly debilitated by my fear. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish the book (Williams-Garcia, n.d.).

Genre: Life is hard, American Indian

Curriculum ties

United States History – This novel would bring both an updating and a reality check to the topic of American Indians in United States history. Indians drop out of the traditional narrative in the late 1800s, and this novel could help make the connection between then and now. History teachers could use this novel to explore the legacy of the genocide of American Indians.

Book-talking ideas

• Read from the first chapter, where Arnold introduces himself. His first-person narration should capture the interest of potential readers. Show examples of the cartoons that are embedded in the novel.

• Read excerpts from the section about the first basketball encounter between Reardon (white) High and Wellpinit (Indian) High (p. 142-146). This section will catch the interest of the sports fans without revealing the resolution that occurred during the second encounter between the two schools.

Reading level/interest age

The reading level, the directness of the narrative, and the cartoons in the book make it accessible to middle school students, and the emotional intensity makes it compelling to older teens.

Challenge issues

The only sex in the story is the enthusiastic endorsement of masturbation (p. 25-26). The themes are very political, and the criticisms of both whites and Indians could be a problem for some people.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Inform the challenger that the book won the National Book Award for young adult fiction in 2007, one of the highest literary honors in the United States.

• Remind the reader that the book is largely autobiographical. It is an authentic and important expression of Indianness in the United States today.

Why I chose to read this book

Every librarian and English teacher whom I asked for recommendations on young adult literature mentioned this book. I am especially interested in multicultural literature, and I think that recognition of the genocide of Indians in the United States is one of the most important unacknowledged political/cultural issues in our society today.

References

Alexie, S. (2009, March). Official Sherman Alexie biography. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.fallsapart.com/biography.html

Konigsberg, E. (2009, October 20). In his own literary world, a native son without borders. The New York Times. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/books/21alexie.html?_r=1

Roxburgh, S. (2005, Winter). The art of the young adult novel. The ALAN Review, 4-10. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v32n2/

Williams-Garcia, R. (n.d.). 2007 National Book Award young people’s literature winner interview with Sherman Alexie. National Book Foundation. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2007_ypl_alexie_interv.html