The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

And it’s not like my mother and father were born into wealth. It’s not like they gambled away their family fortunes. 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.

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.

If the government wants to hide somebody, there’s probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.

I don’t know if hope is white. But I do know that hope for me is like some mythical creature:

“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.”

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.

she kissed me. On the cheek. I guess poor guys don’t get kissed on the lips. I was going to yell at her for being shallow. But then I realized that she was being my friend. Being a really good friend, in fact. She was concerned about me. I’d been thinking about her breasts and she’d been thinking about my whole life. I was the shallow one.

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

“Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

In one of his plays, Medea says, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?” 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.”

What do you say to people when they ask you how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

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.

didn’t write Rowdy as a hero. I never intended him to be heroic. But he was not supposed to be a villain, either. He was meant to be a messy and contradictory human: