Part Time Indian Analysis

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Stereotypes are dangerous. Within today's culture, it is very easy to get wrapped up in a single story mindset and a power struggle, only resulting in stereotypes and generalizations being created about different cultures. A single story is described by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as a story of one aspect of a single person’s life used as a basis for how everyone within that culture lives all of the time. This idea of a single story shows up all over the place including in the book Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi. The kids at Reardan School judge the main character, Arnold Spirit Junior, his first day attending a school that wasn’t on the Indian reservation. People need to create a balance of stories and tell them
In Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie the main character Junior is automatically judged as soon as he gets into school his first day at Reardan, the closest school off the rez. This teenage character is made fun of because of his skin color, background, abilities and culture. Arnold Spirit Junior has to overcome challenges with people assuming things about him because he is an Indian from the Spokane Reservation. This is partially because of the lack of knowledge Reardan has of the Indian population. They think the Indians are all just red colored, dangerous savages because of the single story that they were told growing up. They only knew about them from a cowboys and Indians standpoint, often told from the white cowboy’s perspective. He also struggles because his head looks a little big because he was born with water on the brain, causing slight delays in Arnold’s development. Arnold received many demeaning and belittling nicknames from the kids at school, all based on preconceived notions of his identity. Throughout the beginning of the book, and into the middle, Junior is trying to establish his intrinsic values to this new community of
Stereotypes and generalizations have become the easy way to justify the separation of races, classes, and genders. Creating these ideas about the cultures that are different than our own is a dangerous habit that must be broken by this generation so that our children can play in merriment without the fear of being misunderstood on a day to day basis. So as Adiche said in her TED talk, stories matter, and to only pay attention to specific stories of one’s life, is to overlook all of the other formative experiences of life. “The problem with Stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” I charge you, Millennials, to go listen to the stories that fill this world, so that we might better understand the amazing things happening around us each and every

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