Part-Time Indian Recoveries

Recoveries and discoveries in The absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Through history, Native Americans have faced a lot of discrimination and difficulties and there has always been soldiers in confrontation with those struggles. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, written by Sherman Alexie, is a novel about a fourteen year-old Native American boy who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Junior has a number of physical problems due to the fact that he was born with a brain problem, called Hydrocephalus. Furthermore, he struggles with several social problems in his family, on the reservation, and in school. Each time he tries to solve these problems in different ways. Junior encounters many different forms of loss in

The greatest loss that affects the lives of the people on the reservation is death which is quite common. Junior explains, “We Indian have lost EVERYTHING. We lost our native land, we lost our language, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost” (173). However Junior’s family suffers from various complications such as poverty and alcoholism, they never stop supporting him, emotionally and mentally. This is the most significant factor that helps junior regain his hope after he is confronted with the death of his loved ones time and time again. The recovery of his emotional scars and regaining his hope through fighting to change his written destiny makes him call himself a warrior, a warrior in the way of

What makes each individual specific is identity and loss of identity which can be harmful. Junior carries around a lot of stress that he is losing his identity because he feels so much pressure from the people on the reservation and from the people in Reardan. Junior says, “traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job” (118). People at home call Junior an “apple” (132) because they believed that he looks like an Indian but he acts like a white person. He feels this difference too. He considers himself “red on the outside and white on the inside” (132). This contradiction between his feelings brings him a sense of loss of identity which makes him assimilate and redefine himself over and over again. Discovering new opportunities and fighting for a new future causes Junior to sacrifice many things, including the feeling of losing his identity which he faces throughout the story. He has to decide to let this feeling go or allow for it to remain with him and cause him to struggle with integrating himself. Therefore, he starts to realize that he “might be a lonely Indian boy” (217) but he is not “alone in his