Kill the Indian, Save the Child
Thoughts on a novel about growing up Indian
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
The Stats
The book has appeared on the ALA’s (American Library Association) top ten challenged book list six times. For reference, it was only published in 2007. In the fifteen years since then, it has been challenged for profanity, sexually explicit material, and racism.
Guys, can I tell you what “sexually explicit” material is?
He says the words masturbate and boner. I think there may be a penis thrown in there. It’s a young adult book written from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy. I mean I was never a boy, but I’m married to a man who once was, and I went to school with a slew of them, and I have two brothers…let’s just suffice it to say that this is pretty PG compared to what many 14-year-olds are talking about (and doing). It’s nothing if not relatable for middle and high-school aged kids who are in the thick of this kind of talk.
Do you ever read something that just pisses you off?
I did while researching the various bans and challenges from school districts and the parents who brought them. Here’s one from 2014:
“this book is, shockingly, written by a Native American who reinforces all the negative stereotypes of his people and does it from the crude, obscene, and unfiltered viewpoint of a 9th-grader growing up on the reservation.”
That was from a challenge to the 10th grade required reading list at Skyview High School in Billings, Montana. Can I just say that I am 99.99999999% sure that the person who wrote that is not Indian. I can say that with confidence because they put “Native American” into the complaint, and if you didn’t know, that isn’t how American Indians refer to themselves. As is obvious from the title of Sherman Alexie’s book.
I just can’t stand this type of thinking. How in the world is this person supposed to tell an Indian man who grew up on a reservation about his own people’s behavior and stereotypes? He gets to tell his story because he lived it! And the worst part? The most offensive thing is not the bullying he has to endure. Not the racism he experiences when he starts going to an all white school. Not the poverty and constant humiliation both on the reservation and off. No. It’s the mentions (again, not graphic, in depth descriptions) of boners and masturbation.
Racism
The complaints are typically aimed at racist language in the book. These are experiences that the protagonist endures. The N-word is used in a racial joke against Junior during his first week at school. The kids on his reservation tell him he’s a white lover. His decision to leave the rez makes him half in and out of both worlds. He doesn’t truly belong anywhere. This story is a reflection of so many people’s experiences. I’ve heard it from half-black, half-white friends. Asian Americans who get asked where they’re from. California. But where are you really from? Adoptees whose own skin does not match their parents.
Rashida Jones tells a terribly sad story about riding in a cab from an airport. The cab driver, making casual conversation comments on all the “blacks” moving into the neighborhood. Rashida, who is half-black but looks like her white mother, told him that she was black. He tried to backpedal, but it was too late.
Where are the books for all the people who don’t feel like they quite fit in because of the way they look? This is one of them. And the kids who feel this way, who experience life this way, deserve to be able to read it. And the kids who might be the one to say something that would push an already isolated, lonely kid further into a corner through an ignorant comment, need to read it. To understand another perspective.
And now, on to the book.
When 14-year-old Arnold Spirit Jr, or Junior, decides to leave his school and attend an all-white high school in the farming community twenty miles outside of the Spokane Indian Reservation where he lives, he becomes a traitor to his tribe. Most devastatingly, he loses his best friend Rowdy.
Ever since he was a baby, all the cards have been stacked against him. He was born with encephalitis, or water on the brain, and forty two teeth, ten more than normal. As a result, his head is too big. He has brain damage, and is prone to seizures. He is near-sighted in one eye, and far-sighted in the other. He is skinny as a rail. And to top it all off, he has a lisp and a stutter.
Bullies terrorize him from the very beginning of his school days. They make fun of the way he talks, beat him up at the drop of a hat. He is a part of the Black Eye of the Month Club, as he calls it. He is afraid out in the world, comfortable only with his family, which includes his mother, father, older sister, and grandmother.
And then there’s his best friend Rowdy. Rowdy is a boy who was “born mad.” His father is an abusive alcoholic, and he takes out his anger on anyone who pushes his buttons, including Junior’s bullies. They become unlikely, fast friends. Rowdy defends Junior against anyone who would pick on him.
But when Junior starts ninth grade, he is confronted by the reality that in order to hold on to hope, he will have to leave the reservation, something that no one in his family has ever done. Encouraged by an aging teacher, a white man name Mr. P who worked in the early Indian schools, the stated goal of which was to Kill the Indian and Save the Child1, Junior decides to go to a nearby white school, Reardan.
His parents are afraid for him but supportive, scrounging up gas money to drive him the 22 miles each morning. Most evenings, he has to walk back or hitch a ride with a stranger passing by. It isn’t easy being the only Indian, and at first, he is an even bigger outcast at Rearden than he had been on the rez. At least there he had Rowdy.
But over time he builds up respect among the white kids in his school, eventually making friends with one the smartest kid in class, Gordy. He even ends up dating the beautiful white girl Penelope. He tries out for the basketball team and makes varsity. Despite Junior’s attempts at friendship, Rowdy becomes his greatest enemy, refusing to speak with him because of Junior’s betrayal. And he isn’t alone. The other kids call him names. The adults ignore him. Only his family supports his leaving the tribe.
The story covers the everyday tragedies faced by a poor, Indian kid who wants something different than the lives of his parents and friends on the reservation. Addiction, abuse, a myriad of deaths due to car accidents, drunken house fires and illness, all confront him with the differences between him and his Rearden classmates. Over time though, he sees the struggles the rich, white families and their children have. Bulemia. Loneliness. Kids are ignored by their parents.
In the end, he finds that he belongs not just to one tribe, but many.
“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.
And the tribe of cartoonists.
And the tribe of chronic masturbators.
And the tribe of teenage boys.
And the tribe of small-town kids.
And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.
And the tribe of poverty.
And the tribe of funeral-goers.
And the tribe of beloved sons.
And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.
It was a huge realization. And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.”
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
The Language
As an adult, I can’t help but love young adult fiction. Am I alone here? Maybe its the nostalgia of when I first started connecting with books. Really connecting with them. Or maybe it’s because this particular genre, coming of age novels, tend to be really good. Needless to say, I really enjoyed the narrator’s teenage boy perspective.
I liked the contrast between his childlike thoughts and reactions, and his profound adult-like observations. It was such a sentimental and, to me, realistic representation of how young adults view the world. It reminded me of my own limited, conscious intake of difficulties in my childhood.
It isn’t until later in adulthood that you can look back and realize the seriousness of certain events in your life. When you’re young and in it all, you don’t have the sharp analysis that hindsight (and therapy) can give you. But you’re not quite a child anymore at fourteen. You do have some insight. You are realizing that the world is unjust and big and overwhelming, and trying to make sense of it all. But you probably still think fart jokes are funny.
I’ll give you a few examples.
When describing his encephalitis, Junior says the following:
“My brain was drowning in grease. But that makes the whole thing sound weirdo and funny, like my brain was a giant French fry, so it seems more serious and poetic and accurate to say, ‘I was born with water on the brain.’”
Contrast that goofiness with this observation.
“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”
I have conversations with my own children that can swing between utter silliness (think poop) and old-soul level wisdom in the same paragraph. Reading this felt close to the way you think when you’re at that age, straddling childhood and adulthood.
Friendship, family, community.
At its core, this book was about the circles of people in our life. The people who love us, and who we love. The people who hate us, and who we hate. It’s about breaking out of a community that holds you back, and realizing all the beauty that the same little community you left behind held all along. Gaining perspective. Growing up. Forgiving your bullies and your friends who hurt you. Betraying your community to be true to yourself. Breaking out of what’s expected to chase what you want out of life. Leaving behind small-mindedness and prejudice, and embracing the truth about people.
“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
That’s a good enough quote to hang on my wall…if I did that sort of thing.
Some inspiration.
Like so many books I read, this one is wrought with references to how important books are, and it’s not a mystery as to why. Many of the authors of these banned books grew up poor. Some of them abused. They didn’t have nice clothes or opportunities that other children had. But they had stories.
In this scene, Junior is talking with his friend Gordy, a smart kid who already sounds like a college professor in ninth grade.
We ran into the Reardan High School Library.
"Look at all these books," he said.
"There aren't that many," I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town.
"There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here," Gordy said. "I know that because I counted them."
"Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said.
"Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish."
"What's your point?"
"The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."
Wow. That was a huge idea.
Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that meant Wellpinit, the smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery.
"Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn."
Paragraphs like this just hit my heart so deeply. Dripping with gratitude for the mystery of the world, the zooming in and out that a story can give you. The overwhelming perspective on the bigness of everything, then the sudden, microscopic inspection of one life, one thought, one event. It overwhelms me with a drive to learn. To read. To experience mysteries from as many places as I can. Isn’t it sad that we won’t live long enough to read all the books in the world?
On a positive note.
I got a little worked up reading about the challenges to this book. Honestly, I think it’s because the material was so not graphic. It was goofy actually. The idea that the word boner could make a parent want to throw the whole thing out had me upset. But then I read a few more paragraphs. The article was covering a book ban by a school board in Nome, Alaska. This one was included as a part of that ban (along with The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, The Kite Runner, and Catcher in the Rye). The removals were the result of a single parent’s complaint. One person.
Although many of the people in leadership show themselves to be spineless in the face of these challenges, I think it’s encouraging to know that it is not the majority of people who want to censor speech or learning. The majority of people want to hear stories. They want to tell them. Regardless of how sad those stories are.
As a good friend recently told me (and I’ve added my own spin), too many parents are refusing to teach their children to swim, and are instead focused on preventing them from ever going into the water. More accurately in this case, they want to prevent them from ever knowing about water. The effect, I think, largely backfires. And for good reason.
Many of these authors sell more books, make more money, and are included in huge student backlash when there are bans. Isn’t that good news? That there is innate resistance to shutting down free speech and ideas? I think it is. I think it’s very good indeed.
Loved this! Great job! 👏
These book reviews are so well-crafted and insightful. Thank you for taking the time to write these. I'm learning so much by reading your critiques and comments.