Arctic English UiT

Comparing cultures in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
By Helene Lundberg

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a novel written by Sherman Alexie, it tells us the story of an Indian boy challenging his own culture and transfering school to a not-Indian school. This text will compare the two cultures of the Indian reservation and what we are presented to at the town of Reardan outside the reservation.

Junior lives with his family at the Spokane Indian reservation, where he is seen as a retard, and bullied all the time. This reservation is generally poor, the health conditions are bad and they have a huge problem with alcohol (as you can read about in the previous post). The people living at the reservation seems to not do anything about it. Junior says that almost no Indians go to college or move out of the reservation, and the ones that do so are seen as traitors. For Junior the reservation is beaten at least twice a month, he only has one friend, and his father is an alcoholic. Juniors life also conatins a lot of funerals and deaths. During this one year we follow him in this novel, Junior experiences three deaths, and all of them by someone he was very close to. Family is the most important thing for Indians. Indians are people who seem to not have any hope for a brighter future, when asking his parents "Who has the most hope?", Juniors parents automatically says "White people". So Junior then finds the courage to transfer to Reardan high school, a school outside the reservation, at that school there is only "white" people attending.

In Reardan Junior disover that the people and the culture are different, they don't have the same unwritten laws as in the reservation. He is still being bullied, but after winnig a fight against the gang leader, he slowely starts to gain respect. People here are not as poor as the Indians, most of the students will contine to college and try to get a scholarship. After Junior makes the varsity basketball team, he also becomes more popular. He gains more selfconfidence because he also gets better at playing basketball. "Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good, so I wasn't. But in Reardan (...) they expect me to be good. And so I became good." (Alexie, 2007: page 180) The most popular girl in school sort of becomes his girlfriend and the coach is cheering on Junior and believes that he can become an all-state basketball player in college. But Junior also discovers that family is not as important in reardan as it is at the reservation.

Overall he starts to feel like he has a more hopeful and brighter future when he is more influenced by the white people, allthough he still lives with his Indian family. So there are both similar and different things about the two cultures he is living in.

Sources:
Alexie. S (2007) - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Hachette Book Group, Inc.