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

Frankly, I don’t read a lot of YA fiction anymore because, in these days where the ultra-woke censors cancel anyone who doesn’t follow their ludicrous rules to the letter, I think a lot of it is trash. That said, I am a rabid opponent of censorship, even of the words of those who do not blink while censoring others themselves, so if young people want to read trash (and who hasn’t read trash at some point in their lives), so be it. Book banning (in this case from the conservative right) is the reason, really, that I picked up Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in the first place. I’ve read Alexie before, and I’m a fan. So why, I wondered, was this National Book Award Winner being yanked out of some public school libraries. And now, after having read the book, I still wonder why.

The “part-time Indian” referenced in the novel’s title is a fourteen-year-old boy whose family has lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation for generations. It is the only life Arnold Spirit, Jr. has ever known, but the bright teen is about to make a decision that will forever change the lives of him and everyone in his family: Junior decides to move to the all-white high school in the small town about twenty miles from the reservation. To say that this doesn’t go over well with his friends on the reservation, especially with his best friend Rowdy, is an understatement. Overnight, Junior becomes known to one and all as an “apple,” red on the outside and white on the inside.

It doesn’t help that Junior feels completely out of place in the new school or that he is largely ignored there. Being ignored at first seems like a blessing, and then not. 

Junior is a nerd who, because he was born with hydrocephalus, commonly known as “water on the brain,” has had plenty of time to indulge in his favorite hobbies: reading and drawing his own cartoons. He knows that he is one of the smartest people in the reservation high school, but he’s not at all sure whether he’ll be able to compete in his new school. What he discovers is that not only can he compete academically, but that he is also one of the best basketball players there. 

Watching Junior win the acceptance, and enduring friendship, of a group of young people who previously only knew American Indians via the stereotypes passed down to them from their own parents and grandparents is heartening, but the revelations Junior makes along the way about himself, his family, his tribe, and life on the reservation are heartbreaking ones. Among Junior’s observations are these:

“Considering how many young Spokanes have died in car         wrecks, I’m pretty sure it’s my destiny to die in a wreck, too. 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.”

“Reservations were mean 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. I wept because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the rez. I was the only one with enough arrogance. I wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world.”

Bottom Line: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian explores the emotional reality of life on a reservation, and how pressures from the reservation community can potentially keep some people tied there forever despite their wishes to carve out a different life for themselves in the wider world. Peer pressure can be the most crushing pressure of them all, and Junior has to struggle mightily to escape the pressure from his friends to stay where he is just like almost all of their older brothers and sisters have always done. Sherman Alexie, through Junior, shows the rest of us what that must feel like.

A few dozen (I haven’t counted them) cartoons are interspersed throughout the novel, cartoons that Junior uses to express his feelings about what his happening to him at the moment. They are very well drawn, and readers learn much from the cartoons about Junior’s emotional response to his new status as a “part-time” Indian. Ellen Forney, in collaboration with the author, produced the art work — and it contributes much to the reader’s understanding of what Junior Sprit is experiencing. 

Sherman Alexie