Sherman Alexie has been one of my favorite authors for some time now and his latest work, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” is poetry in motion. Alexie was born in Spokane, Washington and is of Spokane and Coeur d’Alene heritage. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, about 50 miles northwest of the city of Spokane. This novel is loosely based on his childhood and tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school.

Junior is one of, if not THE first to leave the rez and faces extremely harsh treatment from both the White students at his new school, as well as his own Spokane people who despise him for “turning his back on them.” The book is both hysterically funny and heartbreakingly painful. It runs the gamut between examining the internalized oppression that has plagued & destroyed Indigenous communities in the United States, to the incredible love and strength that Alexie’s people still maintain and possess because of their familial love and connectedness.

(Here is Alexie speaking about his novel…) 
 

Rife with hilarious & poignant cartoons about family life, basketball, friendship, young love, racism & childhood, this book deeply affected me. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” has caused me to look deeper into my assimilationist behaviors as someone who is of Native heritage (Mohawk/Iriquois) but does not “appear” so. Because of my ethnic background and ethnically ambiguous appearance, I have spent much of my life working to prove my “Asianness” to those who would question it, at times forgetting that my identity and ancestry is much more complicated and important than what appears on my surface. I am also fully aware that the mission of White Capitalist Genocide against indigenous people is to “breed-out,” Native folks and decimate their livliehood, culture, traditions and beliefs. To deny my own blood (whatever “percentage” that may be) is to allow another indigenous person to be destroyed and disappear forever.

While I was not raised “Indian,” and maintain certain privileges because of my “mixed,” status, fair skin and ethnic ambiguity, I refuse to simply deny a fundamental part of my being because people tell me I don’t “look Native.” I have been told before “Colin, you’re not a real Asian.” “You’re not White, Chink.” “You know you’re not Black right?” “Oh, you’re not Mexican?” (Note: The people who say these things to me are generally White.) I have been told what I am and am not my entire life, and this book (among many others) has reminded me that nobody knows who you are better than yourself. With no road map to guide us, ethnically ambiguous people (regardless of their racial makeup) and people who refuse to stay in the confines of their “category” may feel lost at times, but if Alexie and others like him continue their revolutionary works, maybe someday we’ll have a mahf*ckin GPS system. Holla if ya hear me.

Trying to go the RIGHT direction,
C

“It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.”

-Sitting Bull