Set in 2006, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a semi-autobiographical novel by Sherman Alexie. Although based on the author’s childhood, True Diary is a work of fiction.
14-year-old Junior (Arnold Spirit, Jr.) lives in Wellpinit, Washington, a small town on the Spokane Indian Reservation, known to residents as “the rez.” Junior describes the rez as “located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.”
Junior was born with too much cerebrospinal fluid in his brain, and the consequent brain damage has resulted in numerous complications, including:
Due to Junior’s physical challenges and speech impediment, people on the reservation regularly beat him up and refer to him as a “retard.”
On the first day of his Freshman year of high school, Junior’s so excited about learning geometry that he opens his textbook to kiss it. As he leans in, he sees “Agnes Adams” written on the inside cover. Agnes Adams is Junior’s mom.
With horror, Junior realizes that the book he’s holding is at least thirty years old. To him, the fact that his tribe is so poor that students have to use the same books their parents did is the “saddest thing in the world.” He feels his hopes for the class, and for his life, evaporate.
Without really understanding why, he suddenly hurls the textbook across the room, hitting his teacher in the face and breaking his nose. Consequently, Junior’s suspended, the first time he’s ever gotten into trouble at school.
Junior doesn’t realize it at the time, but this moment of anger signals his refusal to accept the poverty, alcoholism, and poor education that his fellow Spokanes take for granted. The teacher whose nose Junior has broken is angry with Junior, but he also understands, better than Junior does, the feelings behind Junior’s anger. He advises Junior to leave the reservation, and Junior decides to transfer to Reardan, the rich, redneck, racist farm town where the white kids go to school.
Through Junior’s story, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian touches on the themes of racism, identity and belonging, the importance of dreams, poverty, alcoholism, and friendship.
Junior’s old geometry teacher, Mr. P, can’t be too upset with Junior for breaking his nose. Mr. P, who’s white, still feels guilty for beating his students in the early days of his teaching career. All the teachers had been taught to “kill the Indian to save the child,” to beat all of the Indian’s culture out of him. Mr. P feels like he deserves to be smashed in the face with a book. He wants more for Junior than the reservation can give him. Junior needs to venture out into the world, even though he’ll encounter persistent racism there.
Junior’s the only Indian at Reardan, aside from the school mascot. Racism, both subtle and outright, is rampant at Reardan. A few of the jocks pick on him. They never try to fight him—Junior suspects that even though he’s nerdy, he’s an Indian and, therefore, viewed as a “potential killer.” Instead of fighting him, they call him names like “Chief,” “Tonto,” and “Squaw Boy.”
One day, an older jock named Roger asks Junior if he wants to hear a joke: “Did you know that Indians are living proof that n*iggers fuck buffalo?”
Junior has never heard anything so racist. He punches Roger in the face.
Junior suddenly feels brave. He thinks maybe this is the pivotal moment in his life when he tells the world that he’s no longer willing to be a human punching bag. He later realizes that he’s earned Roger’s respect by punching him.
As Junior starts to find his footing at Reardan, he starts hanging out with Penelope, the most popular girl in school. Junior knows that she’s only “semi-dating” him because she’s tired of being perfect, and dating an Indian gives her a blemish, with the added benefit that it pisses off her racist dad. Junior doesn’t mind that Penelope is using him because, as he sees it, he’s using her, too. Penelope is his way into the social scene at Reardan. Once he starts dating Penelope, he becomes relatively popular.
As he struggles to fit in at his new school, Junior feels like he’s split in two: He wakes up as an Indian (Junior) and arrives at Reardan as a nobody (Arnold).
He doesn’t feel like he belongs on the reservation, either. Many Indians think you become as good as white if you aspire to a better life, and Junior faces many people on the rez who think of him as a traitor for going to school outside the reservation.
Junior makes it onto Reardan’s varsity basketball team, and he finally starts to feel he’s found his tribe. As the team enters the reservation for their first game against Junior’s old high school, Wellpinit, Junior can hear the Wellpinit fans chanting. It takes him a moment to realize they’re chanting “Ar-nold sucks! Ar-nold sucks!” They’re making a point of calling him by his Reardan name, Arnold, rather than his reservation name, Junior.
When the team walks into the gym, the fans go silent. Then, all at the same time, all the spectators in the stands turn their backs on Junior, displaying their contempt towards his new identity. Junior’s angry, in part because he thinks that if his community had been this organized when it came to educating its children, he might still be there. Thinking about this irony makes him laugh, the sole sound in the gym. In a show of support, his teammates join him, and they laugh their way to the locker rooms. But Junior’s fellow tribe members don’t let up—a fan throws a quarter at Junior, leaving a gash that requires stitches, and Junior’s former best friend, Rowdy (who plays for the reservation team), knocks Junior unconscious within minutes of Junior’s return to the game. Reardan loses by 30 points.
Later in the season, Junior’s eager for Reardan’s rematch with Wellpinit, even though he feels like the “Indian scout who led the U.S. Cavalry against other Indians.” This time, Reardan destroys the reservation team, and Junior ecstatically compares himself and his team to David, who knocks out Goliath with a stone. But then he realizes something: Reardan isn’t David, the underdog; Readan is Goliath, the giant, the team with all the advantages.
Junior’s teammates drive their own cars, carry their own cell phones, have parents with good jobs, and will go to college. In contrast, more than one kid on the Wellpinit team probably didn’t eat breakfast. Two of them have fathers in prison. None of them will go to college, and Rowdy’s father will beat him for losing the game.
Having spent most of his life as the underdog, Junior’s now ashamed of his privilege. He continues to feel like only a part-time Indian.
Junior eventually realizes he’s in the company of millions of Americans who’ve “left their birthplaces in search of a dream.” He’s a member of the Spokane tribe, but he’s also a member of many other tribes, including:
Understanding that his world is bigger than the Spokane and that he’s a member of many different tribes, Junior knows he’s going to be okay.
Junior says that most people think the worst thing about being poor is being hungry. He acknowledges that sometimes, he and his family go upwards of 18 hours without eating because they don’t have the money for food. But Junior always knows that eventually, one of his parents will come home with KFC. And KFC tastes even better when you’re hungry.
For Junior, the worst thing about being poor isn’t hunger. It’s the inability to save his best friend, his dog Oscar. When Oscar gets sick, Junior begs his mom to take Oscar to the vet, but the family doesn’t have the hundreds of dollars needed for the operation. Junior’s father shoots Oscar to put him out of his misery. Bullets only cost two cents.
Junior sometimes wants to blame his parents for their poverty, but he knows he can’t. He knows his family’s poverty is not his parents’ fault, and he knows they dreamed of more. But no one on the reservation realizes their dreams. They don’t get the chance. They’re too poor. And that creates a cycle that’s hard to escape.
Poverty doesn’t make you strong or perseverant. Poverty just “teaches you how to be poor.”
Mr. P tells Junior that the only thing that white teachers and Indian parents are teaching reservation kids is how to give up. If Junior stays on the rez, his hope will be snuffed out. Mr. P tells Junior to take his hope and find others who have hope. And the further Junior goes from the hopeless reservation, the more hope he’s likely to find. This is how Junior ends up at Reardan.
Reardan presents Junior with strength to chase his dreams.
Penelope and Junior have ambition in common: They’re both dreamers who feel trapped in their small towns. Penelope’s dream is to study architecture at Stanford; Junior’s dream is to become a famous artist. They both want to create beautiful things, and they bond over that dream.
In the second basketball game against Wellpinit, the Reardan coach admits that Wellpinit’s team is better, but that Reardan has more heart. He then announces Junior will be starting and he’ll be guarding his friend Rowdy, who is much bigger. Junior is terrified, but his coach keeps telling Junior he can do it. He realizes that this simple sentence, “You can do it,” is one of the most powerful sentences in English, especially coming from an adult.
One day, Junior comes home from school to find his mother crying. Junior’s older sister, Mary, has gotten married to a Flathead Indian she’s just met at the casino and has moved to Montana. No one in Junior’s family has ever left the Spokane Reservation for good.
At first, Junior’s worried about his sister. But then he realizes that his sister is trying to live her dreams. In high school, she’s dreamed of being a professional writer, but after graduation, she’d moved into the basement, stopped writing, and had become a recluse. Junior sees that, now, she’s living the romance novel she always wanted to write. The move proves to Junior that Mary’s spirit hadn’t died.
Soon after her marriage, Mary and her husband die when their trailer burns down. Junior’s devastated, but he’s still inspired by her. She pursued her dreams. She never reached them, but it was the bravery of the attempt that mattered. Junior sees that, like his sister, he’s also making the attempt, and it also might kill him, but staying on the rez also would have killed him. Junior clings to his dreams, and this is a key to his survival.
Junior’s family doesn’t have money for presents at Christmas, so his father does what he always does when there isn’t enough money for something: He takes what they do have and gets drunk. He’s gone from Christmas Eve until January 2nd.
When he gets back, he’s so hungover that he can’t get out of bed. Junior goes into his room to say hello, and his dad apologizes about there being no presents at Christmas. Junior tells him it’s okay, but it isn’t. He realizes that he’s once again trying to protect the man who repeatedly breaks his heart, but he also knows how much his dad loves him and how hard his dad tries.
Junior’s world is filled with deaths caused by alcohol. Junior’s grandmother dies when she’s hit by a drunk driver. The best friend of Junior’s father, with whom Junior is close, dies in a drunken fight over a bottle’s last sip of wine. Junior’s sister is drunk when she dies, which is why she doesn’t wake up in the heat of the fire.
The day of Mary’s death, Junior’s mother is curled up on the couch, and Junior knows that she’s “now broken and that she’ll always be broken.” She pulls Junior to her and tells him that he better not ever have a drink of alcohol. Before he can respond, she slaps him. Then she slaps him again, hard, two more times. He promises not to drink, and she stops slapping him, but she doesn’t let him go. She cries and holds him like a baby for hours, soaking his hair and clothing with tears.
Rowdy is Junior’s best (human) friend. (Junior’s best friend is his dog, Oscar.) Junior considers Rowdy to be the “most important person in [his] life,” even more important than the members of his own family.
Rowdy is the toughest kid on the reservation. He’ll fight anyone—girl or boy, child or adult, human or dog. He even throws punches at the rain. When Junior tells Rowdy that he’s transferring to Reardan, Rowdy is so upset that he ends up punching Junior and giving him a black eye. Rowdy and Junior become rivals on the basketball court and sworn enemies for the rest of the school year.
One day, Junior approaches the Reardan “class genius,” Gordy. They eventually bond over their mutual love of learning. Junior thinks Gordy is weird, but he also thinks he and Gordy have a lot in common. Junior believes that, just like he is, Gordy is lonely and terrified. While they don’t become best friends, they start to study together, and Junior finally has an ally at Reardan.
For the first half of the school year, Junior attempts to hide his poverty from his Reardan classmates. When he doesn’t have the money to pay for Penelope’s meal after the winter formal, Roger, the jock who’d told the racist “buffalo” joke, offers to loan him money. Penelope later aks Junior if he’s poor. Junior’s tired of lying and tells her that he is and that he was also lying about his dad picking him up from dance. He admits that usually, he either hitches a ride or he walks, and the thought of Junior walking the 22 miles home makes Penelope cry. Before Junior can stop her, she asks Roger to drive Junior home. This is the first of many nights that Roger will drive Junior home from school.
Junior realizes that while he’s been preoccupied with Penelope’s looks, she’s actually been concerned about him. This realization makes him feel shallow. Junior sees that when you’re honest with people, those people can turn out to be pretty incredible.
After the school year ends, Junior’s at home watching TV when there’s a knock on the door and Rowdy enters. Junior, surprised to see him, says, “I thought you hated me.” Rowdy acknowledges that he does, but that he’s also bored. He asks if Junior wants to shoot some hoops.
Rowdy says he was reading a book about how “old-time” Indians used to be nomadic. He thinks that Junior is the only true nomad on the reservation, and that’s pretty cool. This makes Junior cry. Rowdy, dry-eyed, is unperturbed. He just tells Junior to make sure to send him postcards as he travels the world.
Junior knows that what Rowdy says is true: he’s a nomad. Junior hopes that, someday, his tribe will forgive him for leaving, and that, someday, he’ll forgive himself.
Junior and Rowdy play a game of one-on-one. They play for hours, until the moon is high in the sky, and they don’t keep score.
Set in 2006, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a semi-autobiographical novel by Sherman Alexie. Although based on the author’s childhood, True Diary is a work of fiction.
Throughout, Alexie’s narrator, Junior, refers to the Spokane tribe as “Indians” rather than “Native Americans,” “American Indians,” or “Indigenous Peoples.” We’ve followed suit to remain faithful to the narrator’s voice.
A note on organization: The Absolutely True Diary is comprised of short, unnumbered chapters. We’ve organized these chapters into larger thematic sections for ease of reading.
A unique feature of this book is the illustrations. Junior loves to draw cartoons (“words are too limited”), and his comic depictions of his life say as much about his personality as his narration does. We’ve woven into the summary some of the content and opinions expressed in these cartoons, but you might find it valuable to refer to the book to see how the illustrations deepen its themes of identity, poverty, and art as a means of finding your purpose.
14-year-old Junior lives in Wellpinit, Washington, a small town on the Spokane Indian Reservation, known to residents as “the rez.” Junior describes the rez as “located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.” Reservations like Spokane’s were created in the image of death camps. Junior speculates that the government hoped Indians would go there, die out, and disappear. But the Spokane tribe didn’t disappear, and now tribe members stay of their own free will. They’re born on the rez and they die on the rez. No one ever leaves.
The rez is characterized by the poverty and alcoholism of its residents. But the rez is also an extended family—everyone knows each other and comes together in times of need.
This doesn’t mean that life on the rez is always peaceful. As happens in communities where everyone knows everyone else’s business, disagreements are frequent, and there are unofficial rules for handling conflict and defending your honor.
Spokane Rules of Fisticuffs
You have to fight anyone who insults you.
You have to fight anyone you think is going to insult you.
You have to fight anyone you think is thinking about insulting you.
You have to fight anyone who insults your family, anyone you think is going to insult your family, or anyone you think is thinking about insulting your family.
You shouldn’t fight a girl unless she insults you or someone in your family.
If an adult beats up your mom or dad, you have to fight that person’s son or daughter.
If one of your parents beats someone up, that person’s child has to fight you.
You have to fight the kids of people who work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
You have to fight any white kids who live on the reservation.
You have to throw the first punch if you’re in a fight with someone stronger than you. (It’s the only punch you’ll have the chance to throw.)
The person who cries first is always the loser.
Narrator Junior was born with too much cerebrospinal fluid in his brain, which he initially describes as a brain drowning in grease. But because this makes his brain sound like a big French fry, he decides it’s more poetic to say that at birth, he had “water on the brain.”
At six months old, Junior had a surgery in which the extra fluid was sucked from his brain. His doctors predicted he’d live as a “vegetable” if he didn’t die during surgery, but he survived with only relatively minor problems relating to his brain damage. These include:
The extra teeth cause particular problems. When Junior’s teeth get so crowded he has trouble closing his mouth, he goes to the Indian Health Service. The Indian Health Service only does this kind of work once a year, so Junior has to get all ten extra teeth pulled at once. Further aggravating the situation is the fact that the white dentist apparently doesn’t think Indians feel as much pain as white people, so he only gives Junior half the Novocain.
Junior’s large head also causes issues. Bullies on the reservation call him “Globe”: They grab him, spin him around, and put their finger on his head, saying, “I want to go there.” Due to Junior’s physical challenges and speech impediment, people on the reservation regularly beat him up and refer to him as a “retard.”
Junior spends most of his time at home drawing cartoons. There are many reasons he loves to draw:
Junior’s mother is an avid reader and can recite entire pages of text verbatim. She dreamed of going to college and might have become a professor.
Junior’s dad dreamed of being a musician. He has an amazing voice and plays the guitar and piano. He still keeps a high-school saxophone that he takes out to shine every once in a while.
But no one believed in their dreams. Junior’s parents come from a long line of poor people, and like most of the other Indians on the reservation, they couldn’t escape the cycle of poverty. Both are alcoholics and suffer from depression. When Junior’s dad isn’t out drinking, he sits alone in his bedroom and watches basketball games on TV. But he doesn’t cheer or boo or react much at all to what he’s watching.
Despite their poverty and struggles with depression and alcoholism, Junior’s parents are devoted to their son and encourage him to pursue his dreams, as we’ll see.
Mary’s family calls her Mary Runs Away because she’s so “crazy and random.” Mary’s former teacher, Mr. P, says she’s one of the brightest students he’s ever had. In high school, she dreamed of being a famous romance novelist, but after she graduates she “freezes,” and no one knows why. She doesn’t get a job or go to college. She spends most of her time alone in the family basement. Junior speculates that, like his parents, his sister is depressed.
Rowdy is Junior’s best (human) friend. (Junior’s best friend is his dog, Oscar.) Junior considers Rowdy to be the “most important person in [his] life,” even more important than the members of his own family. Rowdy and Junior were born on the same day in the same hospital, and they’ve been friends ever since.
Rowdy is the toughest kid on the reservation. He’ll fight anyone—girl or boy, child or adult, human or dog. He even throws punches at the rain. He got into his first fist fight when he was in kindergarten: A first-grader had thrown a piece of ice during a snowball fight, which made Rowdy mad. He punched the first-grader and two of the first-grader’s friends, and then he punched the teacher who tried to stop the fight.
Rowdy’s father is a mean drunk who beats him and Rowdy’s mother, so they both always have bruised and bloody faces. Rowdy spends most of his time at Junior’s house because it’s a “safe place.” Rowdy loves comic books, and not the “cool” ones. He likes things like Casper the Friendly Ghost, comics meant for younger kids. These are perfect for Rowdy because he has a juvenile sense of humor and he struggles to read on grade level. When Rowdy reads, his tough-guy persona disappears and he becomes childlike, laughing at all the dumb jokes. As does Junior, Rowdy pretends he lives inside these fictional worlds—they’re far better places to live than his real life.
Junior says that most people think the worst thing about being poor is being hungry. He acknowledges that sometimes, he and his family go upwards of 18 hours without eating because they don’t have the money for food. But Junior always knows that eventually, one of his parents will come home with KFC. And KFC tastes even better when you’re hungry.
Junior sometimes wants to blame his parents for their poverty, but he knows he can’t. He knows his family’s poverty is not his parents’ fault, and he knows they dreamed of more. But no one on the reservation realizes their dreams. They don’t get the chance. They’re too poor. And that creates a cycle that’s hard to escape.
Poverty doesn’t make you strong or perseverant. Poverty just “teaches you how to be poor.”
For Junior, the worst thing about being poor isn’t hunger. It’s the inability to save his best friend, his dog Oscar. When Oscar gets sick, Junior begs his mom to take Oscar to the vet, but the family doesn’t have the hundreds of dollars needed for the operation. Junior promises to get a job to pay the vet, but he knows that employment options for Indian boys are few: He’s too young to work at the reservation casino and there aren’t many lawns on the reservation to mow. Helpless, Junior lays next to Oscar for hours, petting him and whispering to him.
When Junior’s dad comes home, he gets out his rifle and bullets and tells Junior to take Oscar outside. At that moment, Junior simultaneously hates and deeply appreciates his father. Junior knows his father doesn’t want Oscar to suffer. Junior sees that his dad is crying, and Junior knows that he can’t blame his father for the poverty that’s forcing them to end Oscar’s life this way. Vet visits are costly, but bullets only cost two cents.
When Junior takes Oscar outside and tells him that he loves him, Oscar seems to understand what’s happening and looks relieved to be put out of his misery. As Junior’s dad prepares the rifle, Junior runs away as fast as he can, but he can’t outrun the speed of sound—so he hears the shot that kills his best friend.
After Oscar’s death, Junior wants to disappear into a hole and stay there forever. But Rowdy tells him that no one will notice that he’s gone, so he might as well stay.
Every year over Labor Day weekend, the Spokane Tribe has a powwow. It includes singing and dancing, food, alcohol, gambling, and lots of drunken fighting. Junior doesn’t want to go because the weakest Indians always end up getting beat up, and he knows he’ll be an easy target, but Rowdy says he’ll protect Junior and convinces Junior to go with him.
Once there, Rowdy wants to find some bootleg whisky. On the way, Rowdy trips on a tent pole and smashes into a minivan, injuring his face and shoulder. Junior doesn’t handle the situation well:
Mistake #1: Junior laughs. This makes Rowdy mad, and he pushes Junior to the ground. But Rowdy realizes he can’t actually hurt Junior because Junior is his only friend. So instead, he lets Junior go, grabs a shovel, and starts destroying the van, denting doors, knocking off the rearview mirrors, and smashing the windows.
Mistake #2: Scared of both Rowdy and the thought of getting caught at the scene of the crime, Junior flees. But he runs right into the Andruss brothers, 30-year-old triplets who have a history of bullying 14-year-old Junior. They form a circle around Junior and push him toward one another, calling him names like “Hydro Head” and “Hydromatic,” uninspired puns based on Junior’s brain disorder, hydrocephalus. Then one of them knees Junior in the testicles.
The Andruss brothers walk away laughing, and Rowdy finds Junior lying in a ball on the ground. After checking to make sure Junior’s head is ok, Rowdy concocts a plan for revenge. He and Junior wait outside the Andruss brothers’ tent until the drunk brothers return at 3 a.m. Rowdy sneaks in and shaves off their eyebrows and cuts off their braids. Cutting off an Indian’s braids is one of the worst things you can do to him because those braids have taken him years to grow. Junior loves Rowdy for doing it, even while feeling guilty about loving him for it.
Junior loves to learn and is excited about being a freshman at Wellpinit High and finally getting to take geometry. His teacher is Mr. P, a white man who has a reputation for occasionally forgetting to come to class. This happens when he falls asleep in front of the TV at night. In these situations, a student has to go find him in the morning. It’s not unusual for Mr. P to come to school in his pajamas.
All the teachers at Wellpinit live on the reservation, even though they’re white. Junior divides the teachers into two categories: “liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders” and “conservative, white missionary saviors.” They all want to “save” their Indian students, all except Mr. P. He doesn’t seem to fall into either category.
Junior’s so excited about learning geometry that he opens his textbook to kiss it as a sign of devotion to the subject. As he leans in, he sees “Agnes Adams” written on the inside cover. Agnes Adams is Junior’s mom.
With horror, Junior realizes that the book he’s holding is at least thirty years old. To him, the fact that his tribe is so poor that students have to use the same books their parents did is the “saddest thing in the world.” He feels his hopes for the class, and for his life, evaporate.
Without really understanding why, Junior suddenly hurls the textbook across the room, hitting Mr. P in the face and breaking his nose.
Junior is suspended from school. This is the first time he’s ever gotten into trouble in his life. His parents tell him how disappointed in him they are and his grandmother just cries and cries in her rocking chair.
A week into his suspension, Junior is sitting on his front porch when Mr. P comes to visit. Junior apologizes for breaking his teacher’s nose. To Junior’s surprise, Mr. P says he’s sorry that the school suspended Junior. This makes Junior nervous—Why is Mr. P being so nice to him?
Mr. P tells Junior that even though hitting him with the book is the worst thing Junior has ever done, that he has forgiven Junior. Not only has he forgiven Junior, but he also feels he owes Junior an apology. Mr. P says that when he first started teaching on the reservation, he beat students. This was a common practice. All the teachers had been taught to “kill the Indian to save the child,” to beat all of the Indian’s culture out of him. Mr. P says he can’t apologize to all his former students, but he can apologize to Junior.
Then Mr. P tells Junior that he doesn’t want him to turn out like his sister, Mary. Mary was a star, a brilliant writer, who faded gradually until she became practically invisible, a recluse. Mr. P is determined that Junior won’t fade away. He tells Junior he’s the smartest kid in the school and that he deserves better than what the school can give him.
Mr. P tells Junior to say it out loud: “I deserve better.” But Junior can’t say it. How can he say it when he doesn’t believe it? At this point, Junior starts to cry. He’s baffled by this teacher, this white man, who’s telling him that he deserves the world.
Mr. P says he has one more thing to say to Junior, but Junior has to promise not to repeat it to anyone: “You have to leave this reservation.”
Mr. P is suddenly angry. He says that every white person on the reservation deserves to be hit in the face with a book, but that every Indian deserves it, too. The only thing that white teachers and Indian parents are teaching reservation kids is how to give up. Now it’s Mr. P who’s crying. He says that Junior threw the book because a small part of him refuses to give up. But if Junior stays on the rez, that part of him, that resilience, will be snuffed out. Mr. P tells Junior to take his hope and find others who have hope. To grow his hope, Junior needs to “multiply hope by hope.” And the further Junior goes from the hopeless reservation, the more hope he’s likely to find.
Junior’s excitement about school is ruined when he realizes that his school’s resources are the same today as they were when his parents went there. He feels like his community has given up on him. Think about your own educational experiences and sacrifices you’ve made to achieve your goals.
After reading about Junior’s first day at the reservation school, do you see any similarities in your own educational background? Can you identify any aspects of your education that you’ve taken for granted? What are they?
Mr. P tells Junior, “We were supposed to kill the Indian to save the child.” Have you ever felt that you needed to hide, subdue, or “kill” parts of your culture or identity to get ahead in the world or fit in somewhere? What was the situation, and what were the consequences? If you could go back in time, would you do anything differently?
When his parents get home, Junior asks them, “Who has the most hope?” His parents look uneasily at each other, unsure of how to answer, but when Junior asks again, they say, at the same time, “white people.”
Junior knew they’d say that. Now he knows for sure where he and his hope need to go: to Reardan, the rich, redneck, racist farm town where the white kids go to school.
For a kid on the rez, saying, “I want to go to Reardan” is like saying, “I want to fly to the moon.” No one leaves the reservation, certainly not to go to another school, and certainly not a white school. But Junior’s parents put up little resistance. Even though Junior’s dad once got pulled over in Reardan three times in one week for DWI (Driving While Indian), Junior’s parents know Reardan is one of the best schools in the state. They suggest he wait until the following school year, but Junior insists that if he doesn’t start the following day, he never will. Junior’s parents agree. It’s as if they’ve been waiting for Junior to ask to go to Reardan. Like Mr. P, they see their son’s potential and don’t want him to end up drunk and impoverished like the rest of the Indians on the rez.
The next day, Junior walks to his old school to tell Rowdy that he’s switching schools. Rowdy is alone on the playground because all the other kids are afraid of him.
Junior wants to tell Rowdy that he loves him, but he knows that boys aren’t supposed to say those kinds of things to each other and also that Rowdy would hate it, so he gets straight to the point and tells him that he’s transferring to Reardan.
At first, Rowdy thinks Junior is joking, and he doesn’t think it’s funny. When Rowdy realizes Junior is serious, he mocks him and says he’ll never go because he’s too much of a “wuss.” Although Junior knows Rowdy well and, therefore, should know better, Junior makes two critical mistakes at this moment:
Mistake #1: When Rowdy turns away, upset that Junior is leaving, Junior touches Rowdy’s shoulder. Rowdy shoves him and calls him a “retarded fag.” This makes Junior cry. Then, to Junior’s surprise, Rowdy starts to cry, too. The fact that he’s crying makes Rowdy so mad that he starts screaming at Junior, accusing Junior of always thinking he’s better than Rowdy.
Mistake #2: Junior tries to explain that he doesn’t think he’s better than anyone and touches Rowdy again. In response, Rowdy punches him. At that moment, Junior knows that his best friend is now his worst enemy.
Junior shows up for his first day at Reardan with a black eye and a swollen nose from Rowdy’s “good-bye punch.” Before Junior’s dad drops him off, he tells Junior to remember that the white kids are no better than he is. But they both know that’s not true. Junior knows that they both understand they’re Indians losers “living in a world built for winners.”
As Junior waits for the building to open, the other kids stare at him—he’s the only Indian at Reardan, aside from the school mascot. Once in class, Junior meets blonde, blue-eyed Penelope, the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. As the teacher calls roll, Penelope asks Junior what his name is. When he tells her, she starts laughing and telling her friends, and Junior realizes that they’re laughing at his name. It’s never occurred to him that he has an unusual name. On the rez, if you walk into a store and call out for “Junior,” seventeen guys and three women will answer.
Things get worse for Junior when the teacher, still calling roll, calls him by his “name name,” Arnold Spirit. Penelope angrily turns back to him and accuses him of giving her a fake name. He tries to explain that his name is both Junior and Arnold, feeling, as he does, like two different people: On the rez, he’s Junior; in Reardan, he’s Arnold.
(Shortform note: This section includes a quote from the book that uses the N-word. We’re using the word itself because this is a significant moment in Junior’s Reardan experience.)
Junior’s first days at Reardan are lonely. Most of his classmates ignore him. However, a few of the jocks pick on him. They never try to fight him—Junior suspects that even though he’s nerdy, he’s an Indian and, therefore, viewed as a “potential killer.” Instead of fighting him, they call him names like “Chief,” “Tonto,” and “Squaw Boy.”
Initially, Junior ignores them. He’s afraid that if he does get into a fight with these boys who are much bigger than he is, they’ll literally kill him. But this nonviolent attitude ceases when, one day, an older jock named Roger asks Junior if he wants to hear a joke: “Did you know that Indians are living proof that n*ggers fuck buffalo?”
Junior has never heard anything so racist. He feels the need to defend not only himself, but also black people, his fellow Indians, and buffalo. He punches Roger in the face.
Junior backs away and gets into position to continue the fight, but the group of jocks just stares at him, shocked. All Roger can say as the blood comes out of his nose is that he can’t believe that Junior has punched him.
Junior suddenly feels brave. He thinks maybe this is the pivotal moment in his life when he tells the world that he’s no longer willing to be a human punching bag. He tells Roger to meet him at the same spot after school so they can finish the fight, as per the fisticuff protocol on the rez, but Roger tells him he’s crazy, gets up, and walks away.
Junior’s bravery turns into confusion. He’s followed all the Spokane rules of fighting. So why are these boys ignoring him rather than defending their honor? Maybe the rules are different at Reardan? As Roger walks off, Junior calls after him and asks what the rules are. Roger, perplexed, responds, “What rules?” and continues to walk away.
Junior is now confused and terrified. He realizes that Reardan is like a different planet and he doesn’t know how to get back home.
The next morning, Junior’s dad’s best friend, Eugene, sees Junior walking to school and gives him a ride to school on his motorcycle. Roger sees them and approaches Junior after he gets off the bike. Junior’s scared, but to his surprise, Roger just compliments the bike and tells Junior that he’ll see him around. Junior realizes that he’s earned Roger’s respect by punching him.
Hoping to ride the wave of this good luck, Junior sees popular Penelope and says hello. She ignores him. When he says hello again, she sniffs, pretends she doesn’t know him, and then refers to him as the kid who doesn’t know his own name.
Junior dresses as a homeless person for Halloween, mostly because it’s an easy costume for him, seeing as most of his clothes are pretty ratty anyway.
Penelope also comes to school dressed as a homeless person. She compliments Junior on how truly homeless he looks, and Junior returns the compliment by telling her she looks cute, which annoys Penelope. She’s not trying to look cute. She tells Junior she’s protesting the country’s treatment of homeless people. She’s planning on collecting money instead of candy and donating it to the homeless.
Junior decides to impress Penelope by saying that his costume is also a political statement: He’s protesting the treatment of homeless Native Americans. He suggests they pool their money in the morning and send it to the charity together. Penelope isn’t sure Junior’s suggestion is sincere, but she agrees.
Back on the rez that evening, Junior collects a little spare change as he goes house to house in his homeless-man costume, and he even gets some encouragement from a few grandmothers who think he’s brave for leaving the reservation to go to a white school. But more often, he gets called names by his neighbors, who slam the door in his face. Many Spokane residents resent Junior for leaving the rez, seeing this as a betrayal of his Indian culture.
As he heads home around 10 o’clock, three kids in Frankenstein masks jump Junior, knocking him over, kicking him, spitting on him, and stealing his money. After they’ve left, Junior reflects that they didn’t beat him up too badly. Their goal wasn’t to put him in the hospital. They just wanted to remind him that everyone on the rez thinks he’s a traitor.
The next morning at Reardan, Junior apologizes to Penelope for not having the money. He tells her about the attack, and Penelope shows concern, asking where they kicked him. When Junior lifts his shirt to show her the bruises, she touches one and comments on how painful they look. Junior almost faints at her touch. Penelope feels sorry for Junior and promises to include his name when she sends in the donation.
After this intimate moment, Junior thinks he and Penelope will become close and that this will make him the most popular kid in school. But nothing really changes. Penelope continues to ignore him.
Junior continues to feel like he’s split in two: He wakes up as an Indian (Junior) and arrives at Reardan as a nobody (Arnold). No one talks to him or even looks at him. He eats lunch by himself and plays catch with himself during P.E.
On the plus side, Junior discovers that he’s smarter than almost everyone in the school. For instance, one day in geology class, the teacher marvels at how amazing it is that wood can turn into rock. Junior raises his hand, for the first time ever at Reardan, to correct his teacher, telling him that petrified wood isn’t actually wood.
Junior’s classmates are shocked that he’s bold enough to contradict a teacher, and the teacher is angry and indignant, telling Junior that if he’s so smart, he should tell the class how it works. Junior does, explaining that minerals take the place of wood molecules, so there’s no wood left by the time it has become “petrified wood.”
The teacher doesn’t believe Junior and mocks his shoddy reservation education, but Gordy, the class genius, raises his hand to confirm that Junior is right. Even the teacher knows that if Gordy says petrified wood isn’t actually wood, he’s right. The teacher thanks Gordy for sharing this interesting fact, ignoring Junior completely. Meanwhile, Junior thinks longingly of the days when he was treated like a human being and his teacher told him he was smart and deserved the world.
After class, Junior thanks Gordy for sticking up for him, but Gordy says he was sticking up for science, not Junior.
That night, Junior rides the bus to the end of the rez, where the line stops. As usual, he waits exactly thirty minutes for his father to pick him up, and when his father doesn’t show, Junior starts walking home. Often, Junior’s able to hitch a ride with someone, but three times, he’s had to walk the full 22 miles from the bus stop home.
We’re all members of multiple cultures. For example, you may belong to a family culture, school culture, regional culture, religious culture, and ethnic culture. Think about how your loyalty to these various cultures has affected how you view the world and the decisions you’ve made.
Why do the people on the reservation consider Junior a traitor?
Have you ever felt like you were betraying one of your cultures in order to seek a better life or have new experiences? What was the situation? What did you learn from it?
How could you apply these lessons to future situations in which you feel like parts of your culture are holding you back?
When Junior gets home the day he contradicts his geology teacher, he finds his mother crying. His sister has gotten married to a Flathead Indian she’s just met at the casino and has moved to Montana. She didn’t tell anyone she was going. She just called her mom from Montana to let her know she was married.
Since 1881, when the Spokane Reservation was founded, no one in Junior’s family has left, and now Junior’s parents have lost both their children to the “outside world.” Junior wonders if they feel like failures.
At first, Junior is worried about his sister. But then he realizes that his sister is trying to live her dreams. She’s living the romance novel she always wanted to write. This is a step up from isolating herself in the basement. The move proves to Junior that Mary’s spirit hadn’t died. She hasn’t given up. It’s a big deal for anyone to leave the rez, and Junior is proud of her. He also realizes that he’d shamed her by leaving first. His bravery had inspired hers.
Junior is himself inspired by his sister’s bravery. The next day, he approaches class genius Gordy, who says he’s too busy to talk to Junior because he has to go debug some PCs. Gordy’s mildly irritated because he prefers the “poetic” Mac to the PC. After Junior shrugs and says that “computers are computers,” Gordy sighs and asks if Junior wanted to talk to him or just bore him with tautologies. Junior doesn’t know what tautologies are, but he doesn’t want to let on that he doesn’t know and look like an illiterate Indian. But Gordy quickly gathers that Junior doesn’t know the term and teaches him that it’s a redundancy.
Junior asks if “Gordy is a dick without ears and an ear without a dick” is a tautology. Gordy says no, it’s not, but he thinks it’s funny and tells Junior he has a “singular wit.”
This is the inauspicious start of their friendship. Junior thinks Gordy is weird, but he also thinks he and Gordy have a lot in common. Junior believes that, just like he is, Gordy is lonely and terrified. While they don’t become best friends, they start to study together, and Junior finally has an ally at Reardan.
One day, Junior is shocked when Gordy tells him that books should give Junior a boner. Not knowing what to make of that, Junior runs with Gordy to the library, where Gordy demands that Junior marvel at all the books.
Junior’s unimpressed. It’s a small library. Gordy confirms that there are exactly 3,412 books (he’s counted), making it a relatively small library. But he points out that you could read one library book a day and it would take almost ten years to read every book in the room. Even small pockets of the world are full of potential knowledge.
This makes Junior think of his hometown, Wellpinit, and he realizes that even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant places are full of mystery. Junior finally gets Gordy’s point and is in awe, understanding that the more you learn, the more you learn that there’s more to learn. This is the idea that Gordy thinks should give everyone a “metaphorical boner,” his comical term for joy. Gordy teaches Junior that the hard work of learning can be joyous.
Rowdy usually spends part of Thanksgiving at Junior’s house, but he and Junior still aren’t speaking, and Junior misses him, so he draws a cartoon of the two of them as superheroes. He walks to Rowdy’s house to give him the cartoon and Rowdy’s drunk father opens the door. When Junior hands the dad his cartoon to give to Rowdy, the father looks at the cartoon and says, “You’re kind of gay, aren’t you?” He agrees to give Rowdy the cartoon, even though it’s “a little gay.”
Moments later, Junior looks up at Rowdy’s bedroom window and sees him holding the cartoon. When Junior waves, Rowdy gives him the finger, but Rowdy doesn’t rip up the cartoon, which gives Junior hope that maybe Rowdy still respects him, or at least his art, a little.
One day, Junior’s bored in class and asks to go to the bathroom. While he’s washing his hands, he hears the sound of someone retching in the girl’s bathroom next door.
He waits outside the bathroom to make sure the student is ok, and Penelope soon walks out chewing cinnamon gum, trying to cover the smell of vomit. When she asks him what he’s looking at, he tells her, “I’m looking at an anorexic.” She corrects him: She’s bulimic, not anorexic. There’s a difference. “Anorexics are anorexics all the time,” but bulimics are only bulimic when they’re throwing up.
This reminds Junior of the way his father always insists that he’s only an alcoholic when he’s drunk. He tells Penelope the same thing he tells his father when his father is drunk: “Don’t give up.” Junior thinks this advice is kind of corny, but it hits a nerve with Penelope, and she starts to cry. She tells Junior that she’s scared and unhappy but no one allows her to be scared and unhappy because she’s so beautiful and smart. As she tells Junior this, Junior contemplates the size of her ego, but he finds her self-confidence attractive.
After this incident, Junior and Penelope start hanging out and become “friends with potential.” Junior knows that she’s only “semi-dating” him because she’s tired of being perfect and dating an Indian gives her a blemish, with the added benefit that it pisses off her racist dad. Junior doesn’t mind that Penelope is using him because, as he sees it, he’s using her, too. Penelope is his way into the social scene at Reardan. Once he starts dating Penelope, he becomes relatively popular.
Penelope and Junior also have things in common: They’re both dreamers who feel trapped in their small towns. Penelope’s dream is to study architecture at Stanford; Junior’s dream is to become a famous artist. They both want to create beautiful things, and they bond over that dream.
Junior doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings for Penelope, so he emails Rowdy, even though he doesn’t expect to hear back. To Junior, Rowdy’s still his best friend, even though Rowdy hates him. Junior tells Rowdy he’s in love with a girl who’s white and doesn’t know what to do. Rowdy responds a few minutes later, telling Junior he’s just another Indian “treating white women like bowling trophies.”
Junior doesn’t find this advice helpful, so he turns to Gordy, asking how to make a white girl love him. Being Gordy, he decides to do some research. Days later, Gordy delivers his report: He has found an article on a young white woman whose disappearance in Mexico generated a lot of media attention. The same article points out that hundreds of Mexican girls have disappeared from the same area, but people don’t really pay attention to those disappearances. The general population cares more about white girls than any other group of people.
Junior doesn’t get how any of this applies to him. Gordy clarifies, bluntly telling Junior that it means he’s a “racist asshole like everybody else,” essentially what Rowdy said.
Junior continues to feel like a stranger no matter where he is: In Wellpinit, he feels half white; in Reardan, he feels half Indian. At school, he doesn’t correct classmates who assume that he’s rich because there’s a casino on the Spokane reservation. He uses the fact that all white people think Indians get free money from the government to hide his poverty.
Junior worries his charade will be exposed when he takes Penelope to the Winter Formal. He knows that his $5 won’t pay for much during the night, but he also knows that if he doesn’t take Penelope to the dance, someone else will. So he decides to wing it.
Because he doesn’t own a suit, Junior wears one of his dad’s polyester, bell-bottomed suits from the 70s. He expects his classmates to make fun of him, but Penelope makes sure to loudly compliment his “retroactive” suit as soon as he walks into the dance, and suddenly, disco is cool at Reardan.
As the end of the night nears, Junior thinks he has successfully hidden his poverty, but then Roger, the big guy he punched, and some other popular students decide it would be the coolest thing in the world to drive to a Spokane diner for pancakes. Because Penelope is popular, she and Junior get an invite as well, even though they’re only freshmen.
Junior can’t pay for pancakes. But knowing that the jig is almost up, he throws caution to the wind and orders not only pancakes for himself and Penelope, but also toast, fries, orange juice, hot chocolate, and coffee.
Terrified at the prospect of being exposed, Junior feels sick and goes to the restrooms half-way through the meal. Roger comes in and hears Junior retching. Junior tells him that he’s feeling sick because he forgot his wallet at home and can’t pay for the meal. Roger tells him he should have said something sooner and lends him $40. Junior is grateful, and he can’t imagine what it must be like to be able to casually hand over that much money to a near-stranger.
At 3 a.m., Roger drives Junior and Penelope back to the school. Junior tells them his dad is on his way to pick him up, which is clearly not true. Junior and Penelope step out of the car for a private moment and Penelope tells Junior she knows Roger lent him money. She aks Junior if he’s poor. Junior’s tired of lying and tells her that yes, he’s poor. In response, Penelope kisses him on the cheek. She then asks if his dad is really coming to pick him up. At first, Junior insists that he is, but finally admits that he usually walks home or hitchhikes. The thought of Junior walking home makes Penelope cry, and before Junior can stop her, she asks Roger to drive Junior home. This is the first of many nights that Roger will drive Junior home from school.
Junior realizes that while he’s been preoccupied with Penelope’s looks, she’s actually been concerned about him. This realization makes him feel shallow. Junior sees that when you’re honest with people, those people can turn out to be pretty incredible.
Not long after, Junior’s sister Mary writes to him to tell him that she and her husband have moved into a trailer, the most beautiful home ever. She still can’t get a job because she lacks experience, but she’s started to write a memoir. Mary is happy for the first time in a long time. Her memoir is about the nature of hope. She’s thinking of calling it “How to Run Away From Your House and Find Your Home.”
Although Junior doesn’t think he’ll make either the varsity or junior varsity team, he tries out for basketball anyway. There are 40 students competing for 24 varsity and junior varsity spots.
After running 100 laps around the gym, the team hopefuls play full-court one-on-one games so the coach can assess their skills. Junior is paired with Roger. Predictably, Roger easily steals the ball from Junior as he starts to dribble, then knocks Junior over when it’s Junior’s turn to play defense. The coach acknowledges that Roger’s much bigger than Junior and asks if Junior needs a break. Junior really wants a break, but knows that if he takes it, he’ll lose his shot at making the team. He has to prove his tenacity.
The next time Roger knocks Junior down, he jumps up and chases the ball, which has bounced into the stands. He grabs it and sprints back to the court, not even bothering to dribble, running like a fullback. By the time he gets 15 feet away from Roger, who’s ready to tackle him like a linebacker, both boys are screaming. Junior nails a jump shot, then Roger grabs the ball and takes it to the opposite end of the court. Junior stays with him and fouls him to keep him from making a layup.
Having seen enough, the coach calls them off the court, but he doesn’t seem bothered by their untraditional strategies on the court. Roger offers Junior his fist for a fist bump, and Junior knows at this moment that he’s going to make the team. He doesn’t just make the team—he makes varsity.
The first game of the season is against Junior’s old school, Wellpinit High. Junior is so nervous about the game that he vomits four times before it starts.
Not long before, Junior had told Gordy about how people on the reservation call him an apple: “red on the outside and white on the inside.” He says that many Indians think you become as good as white if you aspire to a better life. Junior has had to deal with people on the rez calling him a traitor or ignoring him since he started school at Reardan, but now he faces the unappetizing prospect of returning to the rez in the company of the very people he left them for.
When the Reardan bus pulls up to Wellpinit High, little kids throw rock-filled snowballs at them. As the Reardan team walks toward the gym, Junior can hear the Wellpinit fans chanting. It takes him a moment to realize they’re chanting “Ar-nold sucks! Ar-nold sucks!” They’re making a point of calling him by his Reardan name, Arnold, rather than his reservation name, Junior.
Junior’s coach asks Junior if he’s okay. When Junior says he’s not, his coach tells him he can sit this game out, but Junior refuses.
When the team walks into the gym, the fans go silent. Then, all at the same time, all the spectators in the stands turn their backs on Junior. Junior’s angry, in part because he thinks that if his community had been this organized when it came to educating its children, he might still be there. Thinking about this irony makes him laugh, the sole sound in the gym.
Rowdy, on Wellpinit’s basketball team, is the only Indian who hasn’t turned his back on Junior, but it’s not out of kindness. Rowdy is glaring at Junior as he passes a ball around his body. He looks like he wants to kill Junior and is tired of waiting. This makes Junior laugh even harder.
Junior’s coach starts to laugh with him, and then the entire Reardan team starts to laugh, and they laugh their way to the locker room. Once in the locker room, Junior starts to cry. The coach tells the team that crying is ok. It means you care. He advises the team, especially Junior, to use that pain to get mad and go out fighting.
Junior does get mad and he’s ready to play, but as he runs onto the court, someone from the stands throws a quarter that hits him on the forehead. Because he’s bleeding, he can’t play and has to go back to the locker room.
His dad’s friend Eugene, a newly-certified EMT, meets Junior in the locker room and tells him he’ll need stitches. Junior asks Eugene to stitch him up so that he can go back out and play. Eugene finishes in time for Junior to join the second half of the game. Almost as soon as he’s on the court, Junior steals the ball and runs for a layup, with Rowdy close behind him. Mid-air, Rowdy elbows Junior in the head and knocks him unconscious. As the ambulance takes Junior to the ER, the cops at the game try to restrain the Indian adults who have flooded the court to join the two teams, whose players are shoving each other.
The white referees are scared of the Indians, so to please them, they give Rowdy a technical foul for elbowing Junior, but they give the Reardan team four fouls for unsportsmanlike conduct. Wellpinit wins by thirty points, and the doctors say Junior is fine.
Junior’s family doesn’t have money for presents at Christmas, so his father does what he always does when there isn’t enough money for something: He takes what they do have and gets drunk. He’s gone from Christmas Eve until January 2nd.
When he gets back, he’s so hungover that he can’t get out of bed. Junior goes into his room to say hello, and his dad apologizes about there being no presents at Christmas. Junior tells him it’s okay, but it isn’t. He realizes that he’s once again trying to protect the man who repeatedly breaks his heart.
Junior’s dad tells Junior that he has a present for him now, which he’s been storing in his boot. Under the foot pad, Junior finds a wrinkled five dollar bill. He can’t believe that his father was able to keep himself from spending his last $5 on a bottle of whiskey and two more days of drunken bliss. Junior turns to thank his father for saving the money for him, but his father has already fallen back asleep.
Since being at Reardan, Junior has come to understand what good parents he has. Yes, his dad is an alcoholic and his mom is an “ex-drunk,” but they show how much they care about Junior with the sacrifices they make and the way they talk to him honestly and listen to him sincerely. This is more than many of Junior’s white peers can say. Junior notices that the parents, especially the fathers, of many of his classmates ignore their kids.
Conversely, on the rez, everyone knows everyone else. There might be problems on the rez, but everyone is close. It’s like a big family.
One day, Junior’s grandmother, Grandmother Spirit, is walking home from a local powwow when she’s hit by a drunk driver. She dies during surgery at the hospital.
In remembering his grandmother, Junior reflects on her gift of tolerance. In the past, Indians celebrated people who were different: people with epilepsy often became shamans because of the tribal belief that God gave visions along with the seizures; people who were gay were seen as both masculine and feminine, and therefore both warriors and caregivers—their dual roles gave them an elevated position in society.
According to Junior, this tolerance evaporated when white people and their Christianity brought prejudice to America. Now, Indians are as intolerant as any other race. But not Junior’s grandmother: She loved everyone. She’d even talk to homeless people, and if they were talking to imaginary friends, she’d talk to those imaginary friends too. She believed that the point of life was to meet new people, and she was consequently completely supportive of Junior’s decision to go to a new school. Her last words were a plea for her family to forgive the drunk driver who killed her.
Two thousand people attend the wake for Junior’s grandmother, moved to the football field to accommodate them all. None of them taunt Junior. This is a turning point in Junior’s relationship with the members of his community: People on the rez stop ignoring or bullying him. They witness the grief of his family, and in their sympathy, they seem to stop viewing Junior as the enemy.
A white man shows up at the wake. Junior recognizes him as a Spokane billionaire famous for his wealth. The man stands to speak, and everyone’s excited to hear how this white billionaire knew Grandmother Spirit. They’re all disappointed when he starts talking about how much he loves Indians. Too many white people come to the reservation to tell the people living there how much they love them. It’s patronizing, and it’s boring. What’s worse, this man is a collector. White people collecting Indian art and artifacts makes the Spokane “feel like insects pinned to a display board.” The thousands of Indians at the wake become uncomfortable as Ted the billionaire talks about his collection.
Ted tells the group that his collection includes powwow dance outfits. Everyone suddenly wakes up—it’s unusual for powwow outfits to leave the tribe. He says an Indian stranger sold it to him, and even though the billionaire knew that the item was probably stolen, it was so beautiful that he paid the man and kept it for himself. Years later, guilt prompted him to search for the original owner of the outfit. He’s found her: Grandmother Spirit. He asks any children of Grandmother Spirit to step forward so he can return the outfit.
Junior’s mom stands to meet the billionaire. He asks for her forgiveness, but she tells him there’s nothing to forgive—the outfit wasn’t Grandmother Spirit’s. It couldn’t have been. She was never a powwow dancer. In fact, when Junior’s mom looks at the outfit, she doesn’t think it’s Spokane at all. She tells the billionaire that the anthropologist he’d hired to research the outfit didn’t know what he was talking about.
Embarrassed, the billionaire hurries away, taking the outfit with him. For a couple of minutes, everyone at the wake is silent, not knowing what to make of this odd interruption. Then, Junior’s mom starts to laugh. Her laughter is contagious, and soon, all two thousand guests are laughing. They laugh for the rest of the wake, laughing and crying as they bury Grandmother Spirit.
In February, Eugene and his friend Bobby, both drunk, argue in a 7-Eleven parking lot over who gets the last sip of wine. Bobby shoots Eugene in the face, killing him. Once in jail (and sober), Bobby hangs himself.
Junior has no idea how to deal with his grief. He copes by reading lots of books and drawing lots of cartoons. He loses track of how many days of school he’s missed—fifteen, maybe twenty.
Junior wonders why God would make his family suffer so much. He finds his answer in the Euripides play Medea, which Gordy has shown him. In it, the title character asks, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?” This hits a chord. Junior suddenly understands his family’s grief and the suffering of his community on the rez: Indians have lost their native land. In fact, they’ve lost everything: their languages, their dances, their songs, and their relationships with each other. The only way of life they know is “how to lose and be lost.”
Junior’s so angry at this unfairness that he wants to kill God. He also thinks he’s cursed his family and his tribe by leaving Wellpinit to go to school at Reardan. He blames himself for his grandmother’s and Eugene’s deaths, and he thinks about leaving Reardan for good.
Somehow, Junior finds the will to get up one morning and go to school. As he sits down, his social studies teacher, Mrs. Jeremy, refers to Junior as her “special guest” and sarcastically remarks that she didn’t know he was still a student at Reardan (because he’s missed so many classes).
Junior’s enraged by this mockery. He asks her, “What did you just say?” His classmates are silent as Mrs. Jeremy continues to chide Junior for missing so much school, but Gordy breaks the silence, standing up and dropping his textbook on the floor. Following Gordy’s lead, Penelope stands up and drops her book. She’s followed by Roger and the rest of the basketball players. Mrs. Jeremy stands at the front in silence, flinching as each book hits the floor.
After this demonstration, all Junior’s classmates walk out of class, leaving Junior behind with Mrs. Jeremy. Junior starts to laugh at the thought that his classmates have left behind the person they’re standing up for. He compares it to hypothetical people who trample over baby seals so they can get to the beach and “protest against the slaughter of baby seals.” When Mrs. Jeremy asks Junior why he’s laughing, he tells her that he used to think everyone fell into tribes based on race. Now, he knows there are only two tribes: Assholes, and people who are not assholes. Then, he walks out of the classroom.
After this incident, Junior tries to survive his grief by focusing on the people and things that give him joy. He makes list after list of these things: People, musicians, foods, books, basketball players. Drawing cartoons of things that make him mad and making lists of things that bring him joy is his own private “grieving ceremony.”
To his surprise, Junior has become a good basketball player. In fact, he’s the best shooter on the team. He suspects it’s because people’s expectations of him have changed. On the rez, people see him as the bottom of the barrel. At Reardan, Junior’s coach and teammates expect Junior to be good, so he is.
The Reardan team has won 12 games in a row. They’re so good that the community compares them to the greats: Roger is the “new Joel Wetzel” and teammate James is the “new Keith Schulz.” But nobody compares Junior to a legend. It doesn’t even occur to them to compare a little Indian boy to a white player. To them, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Junior hopes that, someday, they’ll compare Reardan student athletes to him.
Junior’s eager for Reardan’s rematch with Wellpinit, even though he feels like the “Indian scout who led the U.S. Cavalry against other Indians.” After Wellpinit beat them so badly in their first game, Junior wants revenge. His particular goal is to embarrass Rowdy, the best player on Wellpinit’s team.
Before the game, the Reardan coach is honest with his players: The Wellpinit team is better than they are. However, Reardan has more heart. In a surprise move, Coach announces that Junior will be starting and that he’ll be guarding Rowdy all night.
This terrifies Junior. He’s much smaller than Rowdy and doesn’t believe he can prevent him from dominating the game. But Coach keeps telling Junior he can do it, and Junior starts to believe it. He realizes that this simple sentence, “You can do it,” is one of the most powerful sentences in English, especially coming from an adult.
During warm up, Rowdy and Junior try to ignore each other, but they’re sending “hate signals” across the court. Junior thinks that you have to love somebody a lot in order to hate them that much.
The players take their positions, and Rowdy laughs when he sees that Junior’s guarding him. The game has just started when Rowdy steals the ball. Junior knows Rowdy well, and he knows what Rowdy’s intending to do: Rowdy plans to dunk the ball, a dramatic opening move meant to embarrass Reardan in the first play.
Junior chases Rowdy down the court and does some quick calculating: Rowdy will probably start his jump 5 feet away from the basket; Rowdy can jump 2 feet higher than Junior can. So Junior makes the split-second decision to jump first. He and Rowdy rise together toward the basket, but, as if by magic, Junior starts to rise higher than Rowdy. It’s the first time in his life that he’s outjumped Rowdy. Mid-air, Junior steals the ball from Rowdy’s hands and observes the look of complete shock on Rowdy’s face. No one in high school basketball makes plays like this.
Junior lands with the ball and runs to the opposite end of the court, with Rowdy screaming behind him. Junior halts abruptly at the three-point line and head-fakes. Surprisingly, Rowdy falls for it, jumping in front of Junior as Junior patiently waits for him to pass. They make eye contact while Rowdy’s in the air, and Rowdy knows he’s made a stupid mistake.
Junior has time to stick his tongue out at Rowdy before swishing a three-pointer. Junior’s teammates, coach, and parents are ecstatic. In that moment, everyone knows that the game is already won.
After the game, Junior’s teammates lift him to their shoulders. Junior’s thrilled and searches the stands for his dad, who may be an “undependable drunk” but never misses a game. Junior finds him, but his dad isn’t cheering. Instead, he’s watching the Wellpinit team, who are dejectedly watching Reardan celebrate its victory. Reveling in Wellpinit’s defeat, Junior cheers, comparing himself to David, who knocks out Goliath with a stone. But then, still on the shoulders of his teammates, he realizes something: Reardan isn’t David, the underdog; Readan is Goliath, the giant, the team with all the advantages.
Junior’s teammates, drive their own cars, carry their own cell phones, have parents with good jobs, and will go to college. In contrast, more than one kid on the Wellpinit team probably didn’t eat breakfast. Two of them have fathers in prison. None of them will go to college, and Rowdy’s father will beat him for losing the game.
Junior escapes to the bathroom, vomits, and cries tears of shame. He wants to apologize to Rowdy for breaking his heart.
Later, after the season ends, Junior emails Rowdy to apologize for beating Wellpinit so badly. Rowdy responds, writing that Wellpinit will kick Reardan’s ass next season, and Junior will “cry like the little faggot” that he is. Junior’s delighted. He got a response from Rowdy! He emails Rowdy, “I might be a faggot, but I’m the faggot who beat you,” to which Rowdy replies “Ha-ha.” Junior’s thrilled that he’s communicating with Rowdy again.
Junior says the biggest difference between white people and Indians is the number of funerals they attend in their lifetimes. In Junior’s 14 years, he’s attended 42 funerals. 90% of the deaths were the result of alcohol.
One morning, the Reardan counselor pulls Junior out of chemistry class. When Junior asks her what’s wrong, she starts to cry. She tells Junior that his sister has passed away.
Junior refuses to accept this. When the counselor repeats that Mary is gone, Junior says, “I know...She lives in Montana now.” He knows this is idiotic, but he tells himself that if he doesn’t accept the truth, maybe it won’t be true. But he can no longer pretend when the counselor clarifies, “No, she’s dead.”
Junior runs out into the snow to wait for his father, who’s on his way to pick Junior up. Junior’s suddenly hit by the premonition that his father is going to crash because the roads are icy. The longer Junior waits, the more terrified he becomes. After a half hour, he’s convinced that his father has also died.
Junior’s on the verge of a breakdown when his father pulls up. Junior’s so relieved his father is alive that he starts to laugh, and he doesn’t stop laughing until they reach the border of the rez. Finally calmer, Junior asks his father how Mary died.
His dad tells him that Mary and her husband had had a party in their trailer. They passed out in the back, and one of the guests accidentally left a hot plate on, which eventually burned the trailer down.
Junior’s dad tries to console him by telling him that she was so drunk she didn’t even wake up. Junior doesn’t find it comforting that his sister was “too freaking drunk to feel any pain when she burned to death.” The absurdity of the situation sets him off again, and he laughs uncontrollably while his dad silently drives him home.
When they’ve parked, Junior’s dad starts to cry. He tells Junior he loves him, something he hardly ever says. They go into the house, which is full of dozens of family members eating their food. Junior’s mother is curled up on the couch, and Junior knows that she’s “now broken and that she’ll always be broken.” She pulls Junior to her and tells him that he better not ever have a drink of alcohol. Before he can respond, she slaps him. Then she slaps him again, hard, two more times. He promises not to drink, and she stops slapping him, but she doesn’t let him go. She cries and holds him like a baby for hours, soaking his hair and clothing with tears.
After Mary’s coffin is lowered at the funeral, Junior can’t stand to stick around any longer. He runs toward the forest, hoping to never be found, but he runs straight into Rowdy, who’s been watching the burial from a hiding spot. Rowdy’s crying. When Junior tells him it’s okay to cry and touches his shoulder, Rowdy swings at him, but he misses. When Junior taunts him for missing, Rowdy claims he missed on purpose, but Junior retorts that he missed because he can’t see through his tears. Rowdy never misses a punch, and rarely cries—once again, the whole situation seems so absurd to Junior that he starts to laugh uncontrollably. This makes Rowdy cry harder because he thinks Junior is laughing at him.
Junior doesn’t want to laugh. He wants to hug Rowdy. He feels like he needs Rowdy, and his behavior is pushing Rowdy away, but he can’t stop laughing.
Through his tears, Rowdy accuses Junior of killing Mary. He says she’s dead because Junior left the reservation. This makes Junior stop laughing. In fact, he believes he may never laugh again. Rowdy’s right. Mary only got married and left because Junior had already left the rez, and she couldn’t let him one-up her. Rowdy screams “I hate you!” three times, then runs out of the forest.
Junior doesn’t want to stay home from school the next day because staying home from school means spending the day with all his cousins, who will be drunk and unhappy. At school, his classmates hug him and gently punch his shoulder, silently communicating their sympathy. After a rough start, they now care about him. And Junior cares about them.
Junior believes that one of the most powerful sentences in the world is “You can do it.”
Why do you think Junior plays basketball better at Reardan than he did on the reservation?
Think of a time when someone’s expectations of you (high or low, positive or negative) affected your performance. What were the expectations? How did they affect you?
Who can you turn to in the future to set the bar high for you? If negative expectations hurt your performance in the past, what’s something you could do in the future to counter these negative expectations?
After living most of his life as a “David,” an underdog, Junior realizes that at Reardan, he’s playing for Goliath, the side with all the advantages. He’s suddenly ashamed of his privilege.
What are your privileges? Which ones do you tend to take for granted?
Should people who have a lot of advantages in a sport, or in life in general, feel ashamed of their privilege? Why or why not? If yes, what should they do about it?
As the school year comes to a close, Junior and his parents go to the cemetery to clean the graves. Junior’s mom tells him how proud she is of him, which is the greatest thing she could have said, as far as he’s concerned. He understands that he can be happy while still missing his sister.
Junior cries thinking about how amazing his sister was. She pursued her dreams. She never reached them, but it was the bravery of the attempt that mattered. Junior sees that, like his sister, he’s also making the attempt, and it also might kill him, but staying on the rez also would have killed him.
Junior cries for:
But Junior’s not alone in his grief, or his bravery. He’s in the company of millions of Americans who’ve “left their birthplaces in search of a dream.” He’s a member of the Spokane tribe, but he’s also a member of many other tribes, including:
Understanding that his world is bigger than the Spokane and that he’s a member of many different tribes, Junior knows that even through his grief, he’s going to be okay. But he also worries about the people he loves who may not be okay, like Rowdy.
After the school year ends, Junior’s at home watching TV when there’s a knock on the door and Rowdy enters. Junior, surprised to see him, says, “I thought you hated me.” Rowdy acknowledges that he does, but that he’s also bored. He asks if Junior wants to shoot some hoops.
After shooting in comfortable silence for a little while, Junior tells Rowdy he should go to Reardan with him in the fall. Rowdy responds by saying he was reading a book about how “old-time” Indians used to be nomadic. Rowdy thinks that Junior is the only true nomad on the reservation, and that’s pretty cool. This makes Junior cry. Rowdy, dry-eyed, is unperturbed. He just tells Junior to make sure to send him postcards as he travels the world.
Junior knows that what Rowdy says is true: he’s a nomad. Junior hopes that, someday, his tribe will forgive him for leaving, and that, someday, he’ll forgive himself.
Junior and Rowdy play a game of one-on-one. They play for hours, until the moon is high in the sky, and they don’t keep score.
Think about the theme of identity in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
What was the most important thing Junior learned by the end of his first year at Reardan?
Junior often feels like he’s two different people, and not fully either of them—he’s a part-time white student and a part-time Indian. Have there been times in your life when you felt different parts of your identity conflicting? What parts of your identity were those? How did they conflict?
When feelings of conflicting identities arise in the future, what lessons can you apply from Junior’s epiphany that he is a member of many tribes (the basketball tribe, the cartoonist tribe, and so on)?