Sherman Alexie Indian Conflicts

“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, written by Sherman Alexie, is a novel describing a 14 year old’s journey throughout high school. In the story, Junior, the main character, is faced with multiple obstacles in his life: Hydrocephalus, poverty, and the target of bullying. Despite the world being against him, Junior’s multiple traits helps him greatly when it comes to the adversity that accompanies his migration from the Wellpinit Reservation to Rearden.

Before reading this book, I honestly knew little about Native American. I knew that many lived on reservations, but I knew nothing about those reservations. By being brutally honest, Sherman Alexie provided incite to how the everyday life of a teenage Native American is like. This book opened my eyes to the problems that Native American’s face, that I was in the dark about before.

“When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible,” according to Brené Brown, a scholar, author, and public speaker. Junior, the main protagonist of the novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie, tries to find a place to truly belong to throughout the piece. However, Junior shifts between two different societies in the book; Wellpinit, the reservation Junior lives on, and Reardan, the school in a mostly-white neighborhood outside of Wellpinit that Junior attends. While Junior is a part of both communities, by the end, Junior belongs

Arnold felt “half Indian” in one place and this always made him “fe[el] like a stranger”. In another place he felt like he was “half white” he felt as if he was too Indian for Reardan because “more than half” “graduat[ed]” and moved on to “college “ where as Arnold’s family hadn’t even “gone near a college”, he also felt too white for Wellpinit as he attended a white school in a white town. We see that he feels as if he belongs in neither place, thus will lead to Arnold self limiting, and stopping him from making the right decision and taking a step forward to his goals.Sherman Alexie shows us the affects in not belonging and proves to us the value of

Throughout the book “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, the author uses various symbols, motifs, and themes to explore life on a native American reservation, through the eyes of a teenager named Arnold or Junior. Through the book, Junior’s identity developed due to his circumstances. The book presented the various issues a young teenager living on the Spokane Indian reservation due to his intersectionality, of being poor, native American, male and heterosexual. The author presents various serious issues through a comical way, but still makes the reader actively rethink stereotypes.

“Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend” author William Feathers would acknowledge and I have realized that I've lost a valuable friend after perusing The Absolute True of a Part-Time Indian. Sherman Alexie’s novel is a journey through the mind of a writer as he attempts to chronicle his daily life. This autobiographical depiction of life on a reservation is bleak but hopeful yet also heartrending and uplifting. This novel discusses about Arnold Spirit or Junior, a member of the Spokane Indian Tribe, that decides to attend a school filled with white kids. As Junior struggles to create a scintillating future for himself he finds himself impacted by racism and depression but the hardships he faces aren't enough to make him lose hope.

In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Education, he conveys the theme of identity through events in Victor’s, the main character, education experience as an Indian. This reveals how humans experience conflict when it comes to their race. Victor went to a school in his reservation where he suffers throughout his years because of who he is on the outside, an Indian. Kids would fight him and always knock him down. They called him names like Junior Falls Down, Bloody Nose, Steal-His-Lunch, and Cris-Like-a-White-Boy. Teachers insult and give him unfair treatment like make him stand in class with books in each hand, gives him a more difficult test than the other students, and take away his artwork because it was inappropriate for having an Indian in the portrait; however, one teacher sees beyond Victor’s race. This teacher believes he should be a doctor, so when Victor grows up, he can heal people and make his people proud. Alexie uses the problems a character face because of it’s race throughout the person’s life to illustrate the theme of identity.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian of Sherman Alexie is a series of life events of a fourteenth-year old Indian boy Junior who lives in Spokane Reservation. He decides to leave the reservation to attend high school in Reardan, which is considered as a controversial action of him. This leads to that everyone in the rez including his best friend Rowdy looks at him as a betrayal of his tribe. Nevertheless, Arnold has made such a good decision on leaving the rez since there were so many issues which he has to face with. More than that, his decision brings impacts not only for himself, but also for his own family and the tribe.

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian captures the life of Junior, a young boy who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in poverty. Junior describes the unique experience of killing his own dog because of his family’s financial status through a bitter and helpless tone. This tone appeals to the audience’s feelings of compassion and guilt towards Junior’s life in order to demonstrate what life can genuinely be like in poverty as an Indian on the Reservation.

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian explores several complex and difficult topics through the viewpoint of Arthur, a Spokane fourteen year-old Native American living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Arthur encounters countless problems when he decides to leave his school on the reservation and go to an all-white school in Reardon. Poverty, alcoholism, and the consequences of choosing a better life are only some of the challenges Arthur confronts with cartoons, language and hope. Alexie successfully achieves his purpose of informing the audience about a life filled with poverty, alcoholism, and its consequences through rhetorical

In The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Sherman Alexie offers his autobiographical depiction of reservation through the lens of metaphor to reveal the small segment of his life in a creative way. The genre of the book is creative nonfiction and consciously written for the young-adult readers to spread awareness about the social problem in the community of the Native Americans. The title of the book represents the dual identity in the life of main character because he was travelling in-between the borderlines of Native American and white culture. Alexie presents the character of Junior as a self -reflective image of his survival and the endurance of his own past. Likewise, the title of the book also fulfills the purpose of the overall themes in the novel.

In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman uses “Community and ‘homing in”; “Land and Nature”; and “History” to make the historical adolescent novel a part of American Indian literature. “Community and ‘homing in” is used when Junior leaves the reservation for a better future, and in return the reservation resents Junior for leaving the reservation and becoming “White-washed”. Alexie uses “land and Nature” to create liminal spaces when the protagonist of the story, Junior, feels conflict between the dominant race and that of the inferior. Afterwards, “history” is used by Sherman by showing generational references in order to provide the reader a point of view through the eyes of a young Native American boy from a reservation.

This is seen through the eyes of the main character Arnold Spirit Junior. He is a Native American boy who was born "with water on the brain" and therefore is known to seizures. As a result of this, he has to be very careful in how he lives his life. Despite this fact, he is able to live a normal life on a Native American reservation in Wellpinit in Spokane, Washington. He decides to go to school in Reardon because he wants to make something of himself. He suffers great hardship and tragedy during his freshman year in high school at Reardon. His father is an alcoholic and cannot always be relied on for support. He lives with his family and they have barely enough to live on from day to day. Both his older sister Mary and his grandmother pass away not long after each other. The two women were extremely close to him and he has trouble accepting their deaths. They were his confidants and people that allowed Arnold to be himself when he was around them, giving him advice, and loving him for who he was. This feeling of tragedy and heartbreak shows the novel's ability to make the reader feel more connected to the difficulty of Arnold and his suffering. It makes us feel like we are there with

Arnold is a Native American teenager living on a reservation in Spokane. The choice that transforms his life is his decision to go to school off of the reservation. He makes this decision through a conversation with his teacher Mr.P. In this conversation the theme of “One choice can transform you” begins. We see this with a quote

    In order to have hope for his future Arnold had to leave the reservation in order to have a brighter future for himself instead of being confined to stay on the reservation and undergo the same circumstances as many of his friends and family have.Arnold’s teacher gave him motivation to leave the reservation and to live out his dreams and to not let any of his talents go to waste.Mr.P who was Arnold’s elderly teacher addressed how in his younger years of teaching that him and many other teachers then were “trying to kill the indian culture”(35) by trying to make them let go of everything that made them who they were. He apologized to Arnold and suggested that he get away from the reservation because he feels that Arnold has so much potential that he does not want him to become stuck like his sister was in the beginning of the book.Arnold finds it difficult to do this but he knows that this decision would be best for him and he decides that he wants to move to Reardan,the rival school, which was supposedly the better school compared to Wellpinit because of the better funding and support they received.