The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances. Or choices. We’re just poor. That’s all we are. It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it. Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.” 

Junior outlines the inescapable cycle of poverty that exists on the reservation, largely as the result of years’ of oppression by White power structures. The damaging effects of poverty are not just material, but psychological, causing great strain on the mental health of those who are caught in its trap. For Junior, the cycle of poverty results in futility and hopelessness, as well as internalized racism: “you start believing you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian.” Poverty offers no room for possibility or imagining a different life; it only teaches you how to exist within the system, enduring its great burden.

“I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. Maybe more important than my family. Can your best friend be more important that your family?”

Junior loves Rowdy so deeply that at times this love prevents him from seeing Rowdy’s cruelty or violence fully, and it inhibits his ability to appreciate the ways they might be different. Junior’s question about whether a best friend can be more important than your family underscores the close bond he has with Rowdy and reveals his curious, questioning nature.

“If the government wants to hide somebody, there’s probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.” 

Junior’s assessment of his reservation reveals it to be a bleak, stagnant, joyless place. His use of “Important” raises questions about social hierarchies and power structures: who considers this reservation unimportant and why? The answers concern systemic oppression of Indians and racist, white power structures that seek to keep Indians marginalized and oppressed.

“My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don’t want their kids to be drunks.” 

While Junior and Mary Runs Away are similar in many ways—they’re both artists, they’re both smart, they both have big dreams—here, Junior articulates an essential different between them. Mary’s desire to “get lost” might be interpreted as a propensity toward self-destruction, whereas Junior’s running toward “something” might be interpreted as ambition and desire. Both children have the benefit of their parents’ love and support, despite their shortcomings.

“I don’t know if hope is white. But I do know that hope for me is like some mythical creature. Man, I was scared of those Reardan kids, and maybe I was scared of hope, too, but Rowdy absolutely hated all of it.” 

Junior interrogates his parents’ assessment that hope belongs to white people, and his curiosity and imagination allow him to envision hope as something else entirely—elusive, yes, but not necessarily belonging to any one race of people. Junior “fears” hope, but Rowdy “hates” both it and the Reardan students, illuminating a central difference between them. Junior’s fear is more complex than Rowdy’s hate; it allows for curiosity, possibility, and exploration. Rowdy’s hatred, however, closes him off entirely: he has no interest at all in the Reardan world. Ironically, it is Junior’s fear that allows him to find the strength and courage to attend Reardan; Rowdy’s hatred keeps him tied eternally to the reservation and hopelessness.

“I started crying. That wasn’t surprising at all, but Rowdy started crying too, and he hated that. He wiped his eyes, stared at his wet hand, and screamed. I’m sure that everybody on the rez heard that scream. It was the worst thing I’d ever heard. It was pure, pure pain.” 

Rowdy is frequently described as “tough,” and “mean,” but here, immediately after Junior announces he’s going to Reardan, Rowdy appears in a more vulnerable state. Rowdy’s tears over Junior’s departure demonstrate how deeply he cares for his friend, and his anger at his own emotions reveal a distinct contrast in how the boys process and understand the world. Rowdy’s painful howl isn’t in only in reaction to Junior leaving, but also represents the pain of all Indians in the face of injustice and oppression. The system is broken, rigged with the white schools and students set up to win time and time again against the Indians.

“I felt like two different people inside of one body. No, I felt like a magician slicing myself in half, with Junior living on the north side of the Spokane River and Arnold living on the south.”

Junior beautifully expresses the pain of his internal conflict, a strong theme over the course of the book as he seeks to articulate his identity. Junior quite literally feels like two different versions of himself, revealing a binary nature of thinking that makes it very difficult for him to feel like he belongs fully to either community; instead, he’s “Arnold” at Reardan and “Junior” on the reservation. Junior’s quest over the course of the book is to figure out how to reconcile these conflicting parts of himself or allow the conflict to exist as peacefully as possible.

“Eugene was a good guy, and like an uncle to me, but he was drunk all the time. Not stinky drunk, just drunk enough to be drunk. He was a funny and kind drunk, always wanting to laugh and hug you and sing songs and dance. Funny how the saddest guys can be happy drunks.” 

Alcoholism is pervasive on the reservation, so much so that Junior here is able to create categories for the different “types” of “drunks” he knows. While Eugene is a happy drunk, Junior final comments reveals that Eugene is also one of the “saddest guys,” revealing his ability to understand people’s inner worlds and pain. This discussion of Eugene’s relationship with alcohol also foreshadows his alcohol-related death.

“Ever since the Spokane Indian Reservation was founded in 1881, nobody in my family had ever lived anywhere else. We Spirits stay in one place. We are absolutely tribal. For good or bad, we don’t leave one another. And now, my mother and father had lost two kids to the outside world. I think they felt like failures. Or maybe they were just lonely. Or maybe they didn’t know what they were feeling.”

Junior probes beyond his relationship with his tribal community and considers the tribal relationship of his family community. For the Spirits, “tribal” is synonymous with static: to stay together, the family must stay in one place (an idea that Rowdy eventually challenges by the end of the novel). Junior attempts to understand what his parents are thinking reveal him to be a deeply empathic character, curious about the inner lives of others. He also recognizes his inner life with limitations.

“I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.” 

Junior reveals some of what he learned from Gordy about books and draws parallels between literature and life. As much as Junior seeks to understand each word in a book he reads, so he seeks to understand each moment in his life through writing in his diary—including the crass or the vulgar or taboo. The small moments in books, as well as in Junior’s life, deserve to be honored and understood.

“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.” 

thoughtfulness are on full display in this quote. While examining his father’s alcoholism and Penelope’s bulimia, Junior identifies pain as a universal experience and does not suggest that there is a hierarchy of that pain dependent on race and class. Rather, he suggests that pain is a unifying experience for humans, and both his father and Penelope are equally deserving of compassion.

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.” 

After revealing his poverty to his classmates, Junior is astonished by their kindness—Penelope cries for him, and Roger drives him home. This quote alludes to Junior’s awareness that he was keeping himself closed off from his classmates, and his loneliness may have been partially self-constructed.

“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

Here, Gordy explains to Junior one of the central tensions of life, spoken in his trademark professorial, academic voice. The moment is a metafictional moment in Absolutely True Diary, where Gordy appears to be explaining, with no subtext, one of the central themes in the book. Junior feels this tension strongly over the course of the book, feeling torn between his ambitions and desire to leave the reservation and his obligations toward and love of his reservation.

“Drunk for a week, my father must have really wanted to spend those last five dollars. Shoot, you can buy a bottle of the worst whiskey for five dollars. He could have spent that five bucks and stayed drunk for another day or two. But he saved it for me. It was a beautiful and ugly thing.” 

Junior’s father goes on a drinking bender at Christmas time, disappearing for a week and reappearing with five dollars squirrelled away in his boot for Junior. Junior acknowledges how difficult it must have been for his father to save those five dollars, and he sees his father’s love for him as “beautiful;” at the same time, the painful reality of his family’s poverty, and the inescapable nature of his father’s alcoholism, makes the gift “ugly.” Junior’s oxymoronic assessment of the last five dollars may be applied to many other moments in the book, as well.

“I mean, yeah, my dad would sometimes go on a drinking binge and be gone for a week, but those white dads can completely disappear without ever leaving the room.” 

Junior compares his father’s alcoholism to his white classmate’s emotionally absent father and complicates reader’s assumptions about a “good father” versus a “bad father.” Junior loves his father completely, which means loving his addiction as well, and he suggests that their relationship is more far stronger than some of his white classmates’ relationships with their fathers. The portrayal of Junior’s father as an extremely loving alcoholic is consistent with complex, often contradictory characters, that populate the pages of Absolutely True Diary.

“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 as judgmental and hateful as any white person. But not my grandmother. She hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?” 

Junior acknowledges homophobia and misogyny on the reservation, and the ways in which Indians, like White people, have the same capacity for judgement and hate. The loss of Indians’ tolerance, according to Junior, can be traced back to Christianity, which warped and twisted Indians’ views even as the community became marginalized. Later, Rowdy compares Junior to an “old-time Indian,” drawing a parallel between Grandmother Spirit and Junior.

“Do you know how many white strangers show up on Indian reservations every year and start telling Indians how much they love them? Thousands. It’s sickening. And boring.” 

Racism takes many forms in Absolutely True Diary, and here Junior shows his disgust for the White tourists who fetishize Indians for simply being Indians, a problematic way of thinking that is so commonplace Junior finds it “boring.” Racism here is more insidious and covert than, for example, Earl’s overt racism, as it masquerades as complimentary and kind rather than othering and reductive.

“And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean, but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.” 

At Grandmother Spirit’s wake, Junior revels in and celebrates his tribe’s ability to laugh, even at the darkest of moments. While it can be easy for Junior or outsiders to focus on the negative aspects of life on the reservation, Junior’s deep admiration and respect comes through in his astonished, impressed “dang, we knew how to laugh.” His assertion that “laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing” elevates the gravity of the moment, suggesting that their collective laughter is a collective expression of grief and loss as much as an expression of joy.

“‘I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,’ I said. ‘By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.” 

In this exchange with his teacher, Junior revises an earlier worldview he held, suggesting growth and maturation, a pivotal moment in his coming-of-age narrative. Ironically, the novel suggests these designations aren’t fixed; Gordy, for example, tells Junior he’s an “asshole” for fetishizing Penelope’s whiteness, though he consistently demonstrates compassion and empathy over the course of the book.

“It was more like I was in this small room, the smallest room in the world. I could reach out and touch the walls which were made out of greasy glass. I could see the shadows but I couldn’t see the details, you know? And I was cold. Just freezing. Like there was a snowstorm blowing inside my chest…As the coffin settled into the dirt, it made this noise, almost like a breath, you know? Like a sigh.” 

Junior uses a striking metaphor to describe the experience of watching his sister’s burial. While Junior often cracks jokes and stresses the importance of laughter, here he vividly represents his anxiety, grief, and confusion through vivid visual and tactile imagery. The personification of the coffin in the quote’s last line make death seem almost like a living, breathing character.

“I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. I realized that sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.” 

Junior’s paradoxical realization that he’s “not alone in his loneliness,” allows him to understand that he’s a member of a much larger community than he previously realized. His desire to leave home in search of a dream might even be emblematic of something American, and it aligns him with millions of others who live in the United States. His enumeration of many different tribes to which he belongs is a revision to his earlier thinking about the split between his previous binaries of “White and Indian” and “Assholes and Not Assholes” and allows for a sophisticated understanding of identity as multitudinous and shifting.

“But people forget. They forget good things and they forget bad things. They forget that lakes can catch on fire. They forget that dead horses can magically vanish and reappear. I mean, jeez, we Indians are just weird.” 

Junior’s language throughout the book varies: sometimes his writing is thoughtful and profound; other times, silly and gross. Here, he uses striking visual imagery to capture the mystery, beauty, and magic of the world around us, creating a rueful tone as he considers the nature of memory. He follows it with an abrupt, comic assertion that “we Indians are just weird” (224). This juxtaposition is typical of the novel and of Junior’s voice and Alexie’s writing.

“We were more than one hundred feet in the air. From our vantage point, we could see for miles. We could see from one end of the reservation to the other. We could see our entire world. And our entire world, at that moment, was green and golden and perfect.” 

Junior recounts the view from the top of the tallest pine tree with Rowdy, a moment where the reservation looks “green and golden and perfect.” This moment demonstrates both Junior’s immense love for the reservation, as well as the connection that he shares with Rowdy. They only reach the top of the tree because they climb together; their friendship, as much as the landscape, is what makes Junior’s world beautiful.