The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
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Read between May 13 - May 14, 2025
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But the Indian Health Service funded major dental work only once a year, so I had to have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day. And what’s more, our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain.
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If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it.
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So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me. I feel important with a pen in my hand.
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We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we’ve been lied to.
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My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.
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They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams.
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But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances. Or choices. We’re just poor. That’s all we are.
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It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it. Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
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You can’t teach at our school if you don’t live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors.
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When I first started teaching here, that’s what we did to the rowdy ones, you know? We beat them. That’s how we were taught to teach you. We were supposed to kill the Indian to save the child.” “You killed Indians?” “No, no, it’s just a saying. I didn’t literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren’t trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.”
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“The only thing you kids are being taught is how to give up. Your friend Rowdy, he’s given up. That’s why he likes to hurt people. He wants them to feel as bad as he does.”
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“This is a great thing,” he said. “You’re so brave. You’re a warrior.”
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but I was way smarter than 99 percent of the others. And not just smart for an Indian, okay? I was smart, period.
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I remember when people used to think I was smart. I remember when people used to think my brain was useful. Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.
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Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared.
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“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.”
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He not only tutored me and challenged me, but he made me realize that hard work—that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task—is joyous.
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There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.
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We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and I were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly:
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“Well, this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that’s racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They’re damsels in distress.” “So what does that mean?” I asked. “I think it means you’re just a racist asshole like everybody else.”
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And white people everywhere have always believed that the government just gives money to Indians.
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If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
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“Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”
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Yep, even the weird boys are afraid of their emotions.
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“You have to dream big to get big.”
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But it wasn’t okay. It was about as far from okay as you can get. If okay was the earth, then I was standing on Jupiter. I don’t know why I said it was okay. For some reason, I was protecting the feelings of the man who had broken my heart yet again.
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My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
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Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person. But not my grandmother.
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“Think of all the new people you’re going to meet,” she said. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. I wish I could go with you. It’s such an exciting idea.”
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At the hospital, my mother wept and wailed. She’d lost her mother. When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
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My grandmother’s last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love, and tolerance.
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“Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,” she used to say. “Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn’t touch the world with all of my senses intact?”
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And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean, but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.
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In one of his plays, Medea says, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?”
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I read that and thought, “Well, of course, man. We Indians have LOST EVERYTHING. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.” But it’s more than that, too.
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The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
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I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that’s what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew until I was scoring twelve points a game.
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“You can do it,” Coach said. “I can do it.” “You can do it.” “I can do it.” Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put
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together.
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He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could.
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I mean, you have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too.
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And you know what the worst part is? The unhappy part? About 90 percent of the deaths have been because of alcohol.
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Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians. And he didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the fricking booze.
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“Love and death,” my father said. “It’s all love and death.”
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Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps.
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I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
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And one day as he was riding, the horse trainer said that my son was “borrowing the strength of the horse until he could find his own.”
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There is nobody you can hate as much as somebody you used to love.