Loser Indian or Winning...

Loser Indian or Winning…Wait, Who is Arnold?

         Who am I and where do I fit it?  One of the many struggles of being a teenager.  Is identify defined by heritage, by friends, or by how one acts?  Sherman Alexie tackles these questions in his book The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  Junior constantly struggles to find his identity and where exactly he fits in the world.  His struggles begin on the reservation and continue through to Reardan.  It isn’t until the second basketball game against Wellpinit that Arnold comes to grips with his identity.  In The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian when Arnold looks into the faces of the Wellpinit team he realizes that just because he’s out of the reservation doesn’t mean that he’s not still a Spokane; he discovers what his identity is.

         Due to his abnormalities Junior doesn’t feel accepted by the Indian community on the reservation; he sees himself as deficient compared to the rest of the Indians.  The drawing he makes of himself on page 5 shows how deformed he believes he is.  He calls even calls himself a retard and says that is the reason he is a member of the “Black-Eye-of-the-Month-Club” (4); a club in which the members get beat up at least once a month.  It is only when Rowdy promises to protect him that Junior even agrees to go to the powwow.  It is not that Junior does not appreciate the culture of his tribe; he believes that “the dancing and singing are great. Beautiful in fact.”  It is “all the Indians who aren’t dancers and singers” who will “most likely get drunk and beat the shit out of any available loser”, and Junior considers himself to be “the most available loser” (17).  Upon entering high school one of Junior’s biggest fears is that Rowdy will hang around the older guys and begin to pick on him too; he is so insecure inside his own community that he fears even his best friend will alienate him.  The lack of acceptance leaves Junior wondering exactly where he fits in and makes his decision to leave his impoverished to go to school at Reardan even easier.  Internally he was already removed from the reservation, so the act of physically leaving it wasn’t difficult.

         Although leaving the reservation was not an altogether difficult decision to make, it made Junior’s struggle with his identity more complicated.  When Junior first arrives at  Reardan, not only is he not accepted by the white people, he is now officially outcast by almost everyone on the reservation, including the one person he always relied on, Rowdy.  “They stared at me, the Indian boy with the black eye and the swollen nose, my going away gifts from Rowdy.  Those white kids couldn’t believe their eyes.  They stared at me like I was Bigfoot or a UFO” (55).  The reader’s get the first glimpse of Junior’s will-be split personality on his first day at Reardan. From the moment that Junior’s name is revealed to be Arnold Spirit, to the Reardan students and teachers he becomes Arnold but will remain Junior on the reservation; Junior reflects on this moment thinking “nobody calls me that.  Everybody calls me Junior.  Well, every other Indian calls me Junior” (60).  This separation between Junior and Arnold only become stronger the more time Arnold spends with the white kids of Reardan.

         Until he becomes accepted by the white community Arnold finds in very difficult to know how to act in a society that is so unlike the one he is used to; the rules of the reservation don’t apply in Reardan.  The rules of the reservation state that you must fight, for multiple different reasons, but you must fight.  When Arnold punches Roger at Reardan though, Roger doesn’t fight back.  Arnold had obeyed the rules of the reservation, “but these white boys had ignored the rules.  In fact they followed a whole other set of mysterious rules” (65-66).  Arnold’s attempt to follow the rules of white society leaves him denying the truth about his life on the reservation; he pretends to be just as financially stable as most of the kids at Reardan, hiding the fact that his family is poor and he often has to hitch rides to and from school.  Though Arnold becomes more accepted by the white society, he is still confused about who he is and where he fits into the world.  The drawing on page 182 illustrates this.  This drawing depicts him as a “white lover” devil in the Wellpinit gym and a celebrated angel in the Reardan gym.  This Indian boy feels he is more accepted in white society, but yet still isn’t sure that’s where he belongs; the thought bubble on both sides of the drawing reads “Who am I?” 

The acceptance and support that Arnold gets from the white society contrasted by the disdain he receives while on the reservation culminates around the second basketball game against Wellpinit.  He wanted to win, he wanted to prove himself, he wanted to beat Rowdy, he “never wanted anything more” (186).  After Reardan beats Wellpinit Arnold is hoisted onto the shoulder of his white teammates.  He is their champion.  He and his teammates “defeated the enemy”; they “were the David who’d thrown a stone into the brain of Goliath!”  After thinking this though, Arnold suddenly realizes that Reardan Indians are Goliath and that the Wellpinit Redskins were David, only this time David lost.  Arnold realizes that “those Indians”, the Wellpinit ones, were hungry and poor and lived sad lives with abusive fathers, and “that none of them was going to college” (196).  Arnold knows all of this because he lives on the same reservation as all of them; he is one of them.  He is Junior, the poor Spokane from Wellpinit.  Junior becomes ashamed of the fact that he so badly wanted revenge on them; he says, “I was suddenly ashamed of my anger, my rage, and my pain” (197).  At this point Arnold realizes that it is possible to be part of two different tribes; his identity doesn’t change depending on where he is.  He is and will always be Junior from the reservation, the difference is that he chose to make better of himself.

Whether he goes by Arnold or by Junior, he is the same boy.  The basketball game helped him to realize that being an Indian is part of who he is, but the time spent in Reardan helped him to see that it’s not all he is.  His identity isn’t defined by the people in the society around him; it’s defined by the choices he makes and the person he is.  He realized “sure, I was a Spokane Indian.  I belonged to that tribe.  But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants.  And to the tribe of basketball players” (217); and also to several other tribes.  All it took was one look into the mirror that was the losing Wellpinit team to open up his eyes to the fact that Junior and Arnold are one, and with that came his acceptance of himself for everything that he was.



Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 2009. Print