The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

But I was too broken. Instead, it was Gordy who defended me.

Haha

“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”

It became my grieving ceremony.

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals.

Sad

Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians.

Haha sad

Man, Miss Warren was a LAME counselor. She didn’t know what to say to me.

Haha

I suddenly worried that my father was going to wreck his car on the icy roads. Oh, man, wouldn’t that just be perfect? Yep, how Indian would that be? Imagine the stories I could tell.

Haha sad

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.

Where was Leo Tolstoy when I needed him?

Haha

It was, like, my mother had given me a grief shower, you know? Like she’d baptized me with her pain.

Haha sad

I had killed my sister. Well, I didn’t kill her.

But she only got married so quickly and left the rez because I had left the rez first.

She was only living in Montana in a cheap trailer house because I had gon...

She had burned to death because I had decided that I wanted to spend my l...

It was all my...

Yeah, doesn’t that make sense? How do we honor the drunken death of a young married couple? HEY, LET’S GET DRUNK!

If you’d given me a room full of sober Indians, crying and laughing and telling stories about my sister, then I would have gladly stayed and joined them in the ceremony.

But everybody was drunk. Everybody was unhappy. And they were drunk and unhappy in the same exact way.

Mom had packed a picnic and Dad had brought his saxophone, so we made a whole day of it. We Indians know how to celebrate with our dead. And I felt okay.

“Love and death,” my father said. “It’s all love and death.”

“Junior,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.” That was the best thing she could have said.

I love her. I will always love her.

I mean, she was amazing. It was courageous of her to leave the basement and move to Montana. She went searching for her dreams, and she didn’t find them, but she made the attempt.

But I was crying for my tribe, too. I was crying because I knew five or ten or fifteen more Spokanes would die during the next year, and that most of them would die because of booze.

Sad racism - but is that the primary reason?

I wanted them to get strong and get sober and get the hell off the rez.

Alexie's hope for his community - trying to make it come alive through story-telling.

But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps.

I wept and wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world.

The world where HOPE is allowed to live.

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.

An immigrant in his own country.

I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe

t...

t...

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t...

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We are ALL more than our immediate tribe, or prison.

The reservation is beautiful. I mean it. Take a look. There are pine trees everywhere.

that tall monster

Haha

chili

the nearby uranium mine made their radar/sonar machines go nuts,

Haha sad

The branches would not break.

Haha

now,

narrator

Haha

I would always love Rowdy. And I would always miss him, too. Just as I would always love and miss my grandmother, my big sister, and Eugene.

Just as I would always love and miss my reservation and my tribe.

Rowdy never really stops being a jerk. How did this jerk become so lovable?

I had been chronically bullied. I did have the grade school PTSD of a battered kid.

In 2016, what kind of foolish, impulsive, and risk-embracing idiot refuses to wear his seat belt?