The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

When I got to the part of having the flu where I could open my eyes for a bit, I lay in bed and read some children's books. The first one was Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because I've been seeing recommendations of it everywhere and my friend the Lass particularly wanted me to read it.

Despite having grown up hearing stories from great-aunts and great-grandmothers about "our Indian blood" (in the south, this was often an attempt to gloss over "our African blood") and having been raised in a midwest city next to Trail of Tears State Park, where the Cherokee Princess Otahki died, I've never gotten particularly interested in Native American culture, aside from what everyone learns in school or from reading Mary Oliver and Louise Erdrich. I know just enough to be amused when I find out that a friend's child is in a school band called the "Marching Braves." And I'm always bemused to read about instances of prejudice against "Indians," which is a main feature of Alexie's book.

It seems that in the American west, there must actually be some prejudice, especially concerning reservations and casinos. To try to understand that, I found myself thinking about moving to Middletown, Rhode Island in the 1980's, when I remember encountering a kind of prejudice I'd never even heard of--against the Portuguese. The Portuguese?! At first it struck me that these folks had whirled a globe and chosen someone to pick on at random. Then I began to see some of the tensions between people whose families were brought to the area to fish or a living, and people who came to the area for other, often less desperate, reasons. It still seems strange to me, but if I close my eyes and squint a little I can see some of why it might have started.

The interesting part of this book, for me, is not how downtrodden the main character, Junior, is, or even how he deals with adversity. It's how he refuses to see through the narrow lenses offered him by the "Indian world" or the "White world." Although I'm not a fan of cartoon illustrations in general, I did like one picture with the caption "boys can hold hands until they turn nine." It seems to me the opinion of an extraordinarily gentle--perhaps extraordinarily hard-headed--boy; when I ask 19-year-old college students how long boys can hold hands, they generally tell me that it's not allowed after the age of 6, when the boys go to first grade.

Especially after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, featuring a British schoolboy who gets special powers from a 50-year-old school book, I don't sympathize with Junior's anger when he gets a geometry book that's 30 years old and belonged to his mother. If it was a History book, maybe I'd understand, but geometry hasn't changed that much in the past century. Yet this is the perceived "unfairness" that gets Junior out of the reservation school and into a nearby small-town public school where the children learn more. One of Junior's new classmates is a "genius farm boy" named Gordy, who tells him to look at the small high school library (3,412 books) and consider that "if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish." When Junior asks what his point is, Gordy elaborates: "the world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know." What redeems Junior as a character, at least for me, is that he's eager to learn. He befriends people who at first seem "racist" to him, and he learns enough about himself to start showing his best side to people, rather than always pushing them away.

Perhaps because this is a book for children, the type of Indian Junior identifies with is not well delineated. He tells stories like this one:
"Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.
Gay people were seen as magical, too.
I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.
Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!
My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.
'Jeez,' she said. "Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?'
Of course ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.
Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.
But not my grandmother.
She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?"

This story, with its unspecified "kinds" of "Indians" reminds me of the response a friend of mine once got when he correctly identified the home country of a visiting student as Cameroon. The student was so grateful to be recognized that he blurted out "most Americans...you think that all of Africa is one small village!" Rather than "the Spokane Tribe," which is mentioned, most of Junior's musings seem to be about generic "Indians" as if all Native Americans were from one small tribe.

In the part of the midwest where I grew up, a game children sometimes play is reciting how many different countries their ancestors came from, and the child who can remember the longest list without being suspected of making them up on the spot wins. I wasn't terribly good at the game; usually only getting in three or four from my mother's side and the same from my father's. How good would you be at this game?