“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” (2007) by American writer Sherman Alexie tells the story of Arnold Spirit, a 14-year-old boy from the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state. He goes to an all-White high school – thus the “part-time Indian” of the title.
It won a National Book Award and yet is banned by some schools. It is that good. But it seems to be one of those books more liked by English teachers than, you know, actual teenagers. I laughed and I cried, but my son thought it was forgettable, my nephew thought it was boring.
Everyone I know of who likes the book is a Gen X-er, like Alexie himself, not a Millennial. The action is set in 2007, but is based on Alexie’s memories from a generation ago, circa 1980.
It is banned by some schools – apparently because parents do not like how it talks about masturbation and boners.
Is it “absolutely true”? It is a work of fiction, but Alexie says it is about 78% true. It is semi-autobiographical. He did become a basketball star in high school, for example, like in the book, but he was also raped by a priest, which is not in the book. He did go to 42 funerals by age 14, but he did not throw a book at a teacher (he threw it against the wall instead).
He pictures the reservation as a place of poverty with high rates of substance abuse and violence. It is, above all, a place of hopelessness that eats away at your soul that is hard to rise above and escape. A prison without bars. On the other hand, family ties are stronger than among Whites.
He pictures his White high school as well-funded. Whites are largely accepting and enlightened. At first they call him names and stereotype him, but in time they come to accept him, especially after he:
- gains the respect of the (White) class bully,
- goes with one of the popular (White) girls, and
- becomes a basketball star (on a team with an Indian mascot).
To join the White Club you must be willing to throw your own race under the bus. Arnold Spirit does that by playing basketball against his old reservation high school team, the Wellpinit Redskins. His coach said he did not have to, but when he did, his coach respected him all the more.
When he defeated his old reservation high school, he looked to see if his father was cheering. He was not. He was not even looking at him. Instead he was all quiet-faced, looking at something else: the reservation team in their moment of defeat.
By the end of the book Arnold sees his future as living among White people. He makes light of his ties to his tribe by comparing it to his ties with other “tribes”, like:
- the tribe of chronic masturbators,
- the tribe of teenage boys,
- the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers,
- the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
He calls this “a huge realization”.
See also:
- The White Club
- Millennials
- Compare and contrast:
- Growing up Native American
- Growing up Latino
- Lorene Cary: Black Ice – a Black girl goes to a White boarding school. Not as well written, but way more profound than Alexie.
- Gene Yang: American Born Chinese
- Growing up Nezua
- Korean adoptees
- Suey Park
- Racializing Native Montana – a bit on identificational assimilation.
- A Lesson Before Dying – “no true man would desert his people.”
- Chief Wahoo – an Indian mascot
My wife and I attended a Sherman Alexie talk at Stanford. I will never forget when he said “You guys genocided us. [long pause] And you never apologized.” You could hear a pin drop. There were hundreds of people there. Then he said “I say you guys ’cause we’re a democracy.”
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I’m reading a good book right now that goes into this:
Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (Nation Books)
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[…] “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” (2007) by American writer Sherman Alexietells the story of Arnold Spirit, a 14-year-old boy from the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state. He goes to an all-White high school – thus the “part-time Indian” of the title.It won a National Book Award and yet is banned by some schools. It is that good.Continue reading… […]
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[…] Source: abagond.wordpress.com […]
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The story in this book reminds me of my friend’s life story. He is Navajo and he is the living biproduct of a white man raping a Native woman on a reservation in the Southwest. As a baby, his young mother put him up for adoption and he was quickly adopted by a well-off upper middle class couple residing in a very white suburban area on the East Coast. His adopted parents also adopted a black boy and a Mexican girl around his age group. All of his siblings were also rescued from sad situations.
My friend spent his whole life growing up in a 80-90%+ affluent white suburban environment where the only minorities he often came in contact with also were adoptees being raised by white families. Although my friend could easily pass for full blooded caucasian since he is half-white as the product of white rape and the fact that Native Americans are statistically insignificant on the East Coast, he grew up very conflicted about his mere existence being Native American and the living product of white rape in a very white environment where covert racism and extreme segregation were the status quo. He hated white people for years for what they had done to Native Americans but was completely conflicted because he was saved from a rough life on the reservation by a well off PC white family. He later visited his birth family and lived around them for a couple years on the reservation as an adult and was taken aback by the rampant poverty, hopelessness and alcoholism he saw his birth family living in there. He, himself, became an alcoholic in his 20’s. This is understandable seeing as he was so emotionally conflicted with his upbringing and background.
But even today, he still resides in that same very white area he lived in since an infant. He attends very white AA meetings in the area where there is a huge young people fellowship and he dates white women almost exclusively. Everyone from his AA sponsor to his adopted parents to his girlfriends have all been white. It is almost like whites are his savior. But he had no choice in this as he was adopted by whites and raised in an all-white area which he had no choice. We are all products of our environments first and foremost.
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I read this book as a teenager and liked it a lot. I was born in 1992.
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Interesting how you bring up how Millennials didn’t like this book. Though I haven’t read this, it sounds very interesting and I would like to check it out. As a Millennial myself, I think that we’re a very weird generation. I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” back when I was in high school, and most of the kids sympathized with the villainous Nurse Ratched over Jack Nicholson’s or Will Sampson’s characters.
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@ Benjamin
Nurse Ratched? Wow.
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holy crap @Benjamin : high school children NOT sympathising with the rebel or the Native guy who broke free???
the mental shackles develop younger and younger these days
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I took a Native American Studies class where the prof showed this documentary
Navajo Talking Picture (1985)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244675/
where a Navajo young woman raised in LA and only speaking English goes back to the reservation to make a documentary on her grandmother. The doc is really honest in showing how she doesn’t fit in culturally at all. The prof was criticizing her in class for not knowing that Navajos like her own grandmother don’t like people who jump around and talk loudly, etc. etc. That prof was a white woman and for the most part she did a really good job as a white ally in the class but when she was criticizing that woman I was upset. Nobody chooses to not be able to relate to their own grandmother and people and to not be able to speak their own language.
Where I’m from, Sacramento, there are a lot of urban Indians and I don’t see a lot of shame and trying to be white. I see people talking openly about being Native American, even if they could “pass for white”.
Thoughts about what SanFranpsycho415 said:
In the book I recommended above, one author mentioned a Native American young woman from the local rez who was murdered by her white boyfriend and his friends because she was pregnant and he as an upper middle class white didn’t want a “half breed” child.
In another NAS class I took, the prof did a lot of personal activism and she and her husband were taking care of a Native American foster baby to try to combat the violence of Native Americans being raised by whites going back to the boarding school system. That’s an example of activism that all PoC can do for children in our own cultures.
God though especially while reading this book I just get pounded with all the choices that PoC have to make in having and raising children that white people don’t. What language to speak to them, having to revive lost languages, blood quantum type issues, what to teach them about dealing with the world, etc. etc.
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@Speak Out,
Could you let us know all the different types of ethnic studies courses (or research papers) you did? It seems like you have taken quite a few.
Do you think there is any chance of getting any of that material into a general educational curriculum?
I, for one, felt a huge void going to school. It is one reason I picked various topics to read about going back to High School. For example, I read a couple books by Nathan Glazer when I was 15 in the late 70s. It was then that I got the idea of the expansion of whiteness in the USA. I also read a lot about racial assignment between blacks and whites.
And I always felt this void about learning about Native Americans in US history and contemporary politics and what happened to them.
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“Seattle Author Sherman Alexie Once Again Makes Banned Books List”
http://kuow.org/post/seattle-author-sherman-alexie-once-again-makes-banned-books-list
Listen: “Marcie Sillman talks with author Sherman Alexie about his novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” and its place on the American Libraries Association list of most frequently banned and challenged books.”
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@jefe
I wanted to be an Ethnic Studies professor, so I pretty much picked all my college classes with that goal in mind. By the end of uni I realized that I don’t have the personality to succeed in academia and that EthSt people are horribly corrupt, at least at my uni. Interestingly Native American activist Lauren Chief Elk and other Black and Indigenous unaffiliated women are speaking out against this same corruption in academia lately on twitter, saying that academia is a site reproducing settler colonial violence.
The classes are worthwhile, though, and I think it is good for future public school teachers to major or minor in EthSt and then provide access to all this info to the next generation. I remember in the class on mixed race people in the U.S. there was a young woman who I think got to take the class for free as part of a program for public school teachers, and the prof brought in this local public school teacher one day to talk to us about how he teaches the children about difference.
I had a Black public school teacher back in the early 90s who separated us into 2 groups for MLK day, and then made us in the “non-white” group stand in the back and was mean to us for a while. Afterwards she asked us how that made us feel.
One of the most influential classes I ever took was with the NAS prof I mentioned above who had the foster baby. She taught Native American values as well as subject matter through her example, and so she acted differently than any other teacher I had had. For example, we watched a video and were supposed to turn in a page of notes on it. I didn’t have many notes and when she returned my paper graded it just said, “It’s ok for this time but next time try to write more”. And right before the tests she would go over all the material covered so we could do well, because it wasn’t about competition or punishment but that she wanted us to know the information. And she was always trying to empower us. When we were trying to get a NAS prof from a UC to give a talk at our community college, she explained stuff to us like when you have a guest speaker you go out to meet them and carry their stuff for them and have water for them, and I think this was because she understood what it’s like to be a 1st generation college student and not know anything like that. And at the end of the class she told us all that she would be happy to write a letter of recommendation if we ever needed one, again because I think she understands that asking for a rec is scary for 1st gen students. Another time she had a flyer about a college meeting for Xicano and Native American students and faculty, and told us we should go because it’s good to meet people. So we went as a class, and the meeting was organized and run by Mexican American male professors who introduced themselves and then went on with the meeting not even realizing that any Native American faculty were there and that they were leaving her out, and she just stepped out right away and introduced herself. And she was always bringing candy for us or having us bring food for potlucks and work on group projects doing activism for Native Americans. I think the group projects doing activism for others is a really good idea that could help whites deal with white guilt issues in the new EthSt classes in CA.
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“Half Breed”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/13/1089778/-First-Nations-News-Views-Living-in-two-worlds-An-Overdue-Apology-rally-against-racism
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“Dark Girl, Light Girl – Labels To Forget”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/30/1360132/-Dark-Girl-Light-Girl-Labels-To-Forget
“When I was four years old my family moved to Waco TX. My father was only a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force at that time. His rank was not high enough for him to qualify for the limited base housing. My dad’s heritage is Native American. His straight black hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, and reddish brown skin announces his heritage. My mother, whose heritage is also Native American, looks like her German Grandfather. Her skin was very pale, her hair was light brown, and her eyes were green. Her Native Heritage was not evident.
We rented a cute litle house on Norma St. I remember the name of the street because my mother’s first name was Norma. Unfortunately, my family immediatly attracted attention. The local residents assumed that a white woman, my mother, was married to an Indian, my father. In pre-1960 Texas, interracial marriage was not popular. Our house was egged. Someone beat my father with a baseball bat. We received threats. The other children in that neighborhood were not allowed to play with me. Of course, I didn’t understand why any of this was happening. Like a child will, I assumed that there was something wrong with me.
The Air Force moved us into Base Housing, in order to assure our saftey. Our home was a duplex located at the end of one of the runways. Even on a military base, the bias against Native Americans and interracial marriage flourished. Most other children were not allowed to play with me. Many of them bullied me. I learned to be happy playing by myself. My pesonality, which had been very extroverted, changed.
My first grade teacher had a deep prejudice against Native Americans. I spent most of the first grade wearing a dunce cap, while seated on a stool in the corner. Needless to say, I could not do well under those circumstances. I also had some form of dyslexia, and couldn’t learn to read or spell. Instead of trying to help me, my teacher made fun of me. She allowed my classmates to bully me, and make fun of me. In fact she encouraged it. When I tried to tell my parents about how I was treated, they both thought I was exaggerating.”
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