The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who has written extensively about the importance of children’s literature, talks about how books can be both mirrors and windows—mirrors in which readers can see themselves on the pages of literature and thereby know their existence in the world is valid and true, and windows into worlds they might never have imagined.

But I can’t blame my parents for our poverty because my mother and father are the twin suns around which I orbit and my world would EXPLODE without them.

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. Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe I just didn’t want to know. Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it.

“Come on,” I said. “Who has the most hope?” “White people,” my parents said at the same time.

I wanted to tell him that he was my best friend and I loved him like crazy, but boys didn’t say such things to other boys, and nobody said such things to Rowdy.

None of those guys punched me or got violent. After all, I was a reservation Indian, and no matter how geeky and weak I appeared to be, I was still a potential killer.

But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy.

“Listen,” he said one afternoon in the library. “You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm. It’s like riding a raft down a river. You’re just paying attention to the currents. Do you understand that?” “Not at all,” I said. “Yes, you do,” he said.

“No, not at all,” Gordy said. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

“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.”

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “What do Indians have to be so thankful for?” “We should give thanks that they didn’t kill all of us.”

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.