The other day, I finished reading Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and let me say that I absolutely loved it. It has everything, and something that I think it extremely difficult to accomplish in text--a genuinely funny narrator. This is a first-person story of a 14 year-old Native American boy named Junior, from the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington. Junior goes through ups and downs as he transfers schools off the reservation, experiences death, and makes friends as well as enemies. This is a really fun book--I hope others have the chance to read it.
One of the central issues in this book that I think would resonate with students (more specifically, minority students), and that is the struggle the narrator goes through in determining his identity. He is split between being native and being white. Junior struggles with this, eventually finding a happy medium between his two worlds after enduring various (mis)adventures.
The problem is, Junior wants to go to an all-white school, and this makes all the people on the reservation think he wants to be white. This is something that many people in education have tried to counter: achieving highly in school, but still maintaining his cultural, racial identity. To me, this is one of the best things that students could take away from this book.
Of course, there are plenty of other things that kids could take away from this book, but to me, that seems to be the most obvious. What do others think? Are there specific ideas or questions explored in this book that you might emphasize over others in a classroom?
I loved this book, too, and think it will be a great way to bring up the subject of racial identity. I found it a little troubling, though, that most of his experiences on the reservation (especially after he had started at the white school)were negative. It definitely highlighted the bad sides of reservation life, but I guess I expected more affirmation of that part of his experience. I suppose it works as a criticism of the idea of reservations and the emotional impact such exclusion would have on a culture, though. Perhaps that would be another idea to explore in this book. It would be an engaging way to explore the history of Native Americans and the price they have paid for not taking on the European way of life.
ReplyDeleteThere were a few points in the book where it was made painfully clear that nobody on the reservation expected white people to understand the Native American culture, and that idea in itself could take up most of a day's discussion- why is it that we are content to accept the media's presentation of what it is to be Native American?