Ferrell-Horan 1

Elisabeth Ferrell-Horan

Professor Mary Huffer

Literature 650

14 April 2015

Postcolonialism and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”

by Sherman Alexie:

The Native American Soul Wound in Junior Spirit

In the novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, the

reader learns about the life and journeys of Junior Spirit, a Native American teenager from the

Wellpinit Reservation in Spokane, Washington. He grew up on the Reservation with his mother

and father and sister, Mary. He is also very close with his grandmother. Junior was born with

special needs; too much cerebral fluid in his brain, a stutter and lisp, eyesight problems needing

large black rimmed glasses as we soon learn, and, to make it all worse, he is a self described nerd

who is teased and bullied incessantly. He gets beat up almost every day of his life by fellow

Native Americans for any and every reason. He lives in extreme poverty and is surrounded by

alcoholism, drug addiction and violence. His school is admittedly designed for Indians like him

to fail and to give up hope.

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Alexie’s novel is written in epistolary form as Junior Spirit’s diary. It uses dark humour

and cartoon artwork by Ellen Forney to convey the extreme pain and suffering Junior endues in

his everyday life in a way that is tolerable and accessible for a white audience. This is a semi

autobiographical journal of Alexie’s childhood and teenage years. He, like Junior Spirit, knew

that if he stayed on the Reservation he would die. There would be no chance of success, no

chance of a good education or of finding hope. Alexie, like Junior, knew he had to leave the

Native American world and try to find hope in white society at the next town over at the white

high school of Rearden. This story is Alexie and Junior’s account of the journey that they take to

find escape from the soul wound in their Native American world that is due to the past

colonization of their society and the current postcolonial societal forces and circumstances and

find acceptance and hope in the privileged and affluent white world next door.

The discovery of America by white Europeans had a devastating effect on the Native

American population who had lived here for centuries. The subsequent colonization of the

Native Americans by the Europeans destroyed their societies and wiped out their culture and way

of life. They were moved to reservations and left to perish. Native Americans have never been

able to recover from the attempted genocide they endured. Their lands were taken, their people

were killed or died from illness such as European introduced smallpox and their entire way of

life wiped out. Colonialism can be connected through the history of the world in several ways;

the taking of the tangible and intangible possessions of native populations by white, western

government forces. One can imagine the similar violence and destruction of the Native American

way of life through Conrad’s description of colonialism in his infamous “Heart of Darkness”:
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“It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale… The conquest of

the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different

complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at

it too much”(Conrad, 1982:10, as quoted in Lazarus, 43).

In a postcolonial world on the reservation today, Native Americans still suffer from this

history in the form of a soul wound which their people still bear from the time of colonization.

The effect of the soul wound can be defined as:

"Historical trauma response has been identified and is delineated as a constellation of

features in reaction to the multi-generational, collective, historical, and cumulative

psychic wounding over time, both over the life span, and across generations" (345,

quoted in Johnson 226).

The soul wound of the Native Americans can be viewed through the lense of postcolonial

theory. This can be defined as the following:

“Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the the unequal and uneven forces of cultural

representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern

world order” (Bhabha 1994:171, 173, as quoted in Lazarus, 3).

In the case of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, Junior lives in a world

defined by the effects of postcolonialism. The white society that colonized his people destroyed

his world and his society. The following quote emphatically and emotionally sums up the

magnitude of the loss societies suffered due to colonialism:

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“I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot,

institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic

creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out”, and…. “I am talking about

millions of men torn from the gods, their land, their habits, their life, from the the dance,

from wisdom”(Cesaire, 1972:21-22, as quoted in Lazarus, 8).

What Junior and his society were left with was a postcolonial existence of living on the

margins of white society without the same opportunities as most Americans. Junior and his

people carry with them a soul wound and little promise to ever find hope on the reservation. In a

postcolonial world, the only way a society that exists as an “other” can succeed is to try to exist

within the majority; to try to live and succeed in the white world.

This is what Junior is forced to do. He does find hope, but he has to leave the reservation

to find it. Junior had to choose to leave his people, the Native Americans, and try to live in the

white world because no opportunities existed for him on the Reservation. To achieve this, Junior

had to create a double consciousness - a second identity - one, to be an Indian (Alexie’s term) to

be able to exist on the Reservation as a Native American without being tormented daily and

labeled as a traitor, but also to learn how to exist intellectually and socially at his high school in

the white world. In the end, Junior overcomes huge logistical obstacles and emotional strife to

live in both worlds. He becomes educated, finds friends and finds hope. But he doesn’t gain all

his knowledge from the white world. It is from the people in his Native American world that he

also learns to be a strong Indian (Alexie’s term), to be a warrior and a survivor, to be loyal, to be

a true friend, to be funny, to forgive, to be healed and to be whole.

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The soul wound the Native Americans endure creates a chasm of culture and deep

humiliation from the loss of their way of life. The humiliation is also a result of the derogatory

stereotypes that still exist today in popular culture. Alexie’s argues that humiliation and pain is

synonymous to being Native American:

“‘The fact is you cannot separate our identity from our pain. At some point it

becomes primarily our identity. The whole idea of authenticity—“How Indian are

you?”—is the most direct result of the fact that we don’t know what an American

Indian identity is. There is no measure anymore. There is no way of knowing,

except perhaps through our pain.... As for the characters—I make them suffer!’”

(Alexie, as quoted in Johnson, 227).

At Junior’s high school in Wellpinit, the mascot is the Redskins. At his high school in

Reardan, the mascot is the Indians. So during his time in school, he plays for both the Redskins

and the Indians, one term more derogatory than the other, both stereotypical and degrading to

Native Americans.

Junior’s life is consistent with Alexie’s claim of constant pain and lack of identity

through the soul wound in that he suffers constant humiliation, both on the Reservation and at his

white school.

“...there is definitely a lot of humiliation in Native literature. We write about

being humiliated a lot. And that takes physical forms, emotional forms and mental

forms. I think Native literature is the literature of humiliation and

shame”(Johnson, 228).

Junior endures unfathomable humiliation in his journey.

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Junior admits to us:

“At school today, I went dressed as a homeless dude. It was a pretty easy costume

for me. There’s it much difference between my good and bad clothes, so I pretty

much look half homeless anyway.

And Penelope went as a homeless woman. Of course, she was the most beautiful

homeless woman who ever lived.

We made a cute couple.

Of course, we weren’t a couple at all, but I still found the need to comment on our

common taste.

“Hey”, I said, “We have the same costume”

Penelope replies:

…”You have a really good costume”, Penelope said. “You look really

homeless”(Alexie, 78).

Here we witness an incredible interaction where Junior, dressed in his normal clothes,

pretends to be dressed as a homeless person to get a chance to impress Penelope. In his usual

fashion, Junior uses humour to deflect the humiliation he must have felt. He takes everything

with a grain of salt and forges ahead. Perhaps that is his coping method, to laugh it off. If he

didn’t do that, he might have gone down the path of his father by drinking, or like Rowdy, by

fighting.

He follows through with the trick or treat challenge for the homeless and at the

rez gets spit on, sworn at, beat up and robbed of the change he had collected to donate.

He doesn’t just experience humiliation in the white world, but on the Reservation as well:
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“They all wore Frankenstein masks. And they shoved me to the ground and

kicked me a few times.

And spit on me.

I could handle the kicks.

But the spit made me feel like an insect.

Like a slug.

Like a slug burning to death from salty spit.

....Mostly they wanted to remind me that I was a traitor. And they wanted to steal

my candy and the money”(Alexie, 79).

At Rearden he pretends to be homeless to save face because he looks homeless, a direct

result of the humiliation of his poverty. He then comes home to the Reservation after school to

be spit on as a traitor. But somehow Junior continues to survive - he uses his journal and his

cartoons as his escape, as his therapy and as a way to vent his anger and humiliation. In this way,

he refuses to internalize the soul would that threatens to overwhelm him everyday. Perhaps this

is why he is able to survive - where so many of his relatives and friends did not.

The pain and sadness Junior witnesses is staggering. He experiences numerous deaths of

family and friends most due to accident and alcohol.

“In Diary, Arnold mourns the loss of his grandmother and his father’s best friend,

Eugene, and finally that of his sister, all of whom die alcohol-related deaths”

(Johnson, 235-236).
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Junior succeeds in not internalize the pain of the soul wound hence does not succumb to

postcolonialism as his ancestors and family does:

“In Diary rejecting alcohol and even the reservation becomes for Arnold an act of

resistance to ongoing colonialism and cultural genocide”(Johnson, 236).

Like humiliation, another major effect of the soul wound is anger. Junior’s best friend

Rowdy is abused by his father and is as angry as a teenager could be. He fights anyone and

everyone. This is a common reaction to the lack of opportunity and successive cycles of

domestic abuse and violence within the community. Alexie acknowledges that pain is a direct

result of colonization and the continuing soul wound it created in postcolonial times. Here Alexie

links the tendency to be violent to the Native American past:

“‘....After all, we come out of genocide, and our entire history is filled with murder and

war”(Alexie, as quoted in Johnson, 237).

Junior’s best friend Rowdy’s anger and violent nature is an example of how this

manifestation of the soul wound is perpetuation through familial generations. Because he has no

outlets for the abuse and anger he suffers from, he internalizes it. He cannot escape it, so he

learns to fight. He fights to survive, although it is the very thing that torments him and keeps him

from healing.

As Johnson describes:

“ ...this rage is also invalidated by the dominant culture and denied avenues of

expression.” This rage is generally turned inward and expressed through

depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide, and manifested externally

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within families and communities through domestic and other forms of

violence”(Johnson, 226-227).

Rowdy is a very angry and violent person. He is also Junior’s best friend and protector.

He doesn’t let anyone beat up on Junior without paying for it. In one notable moment in the text

he shaves off the eyebrows and cuts the braids of the Andruss brothers for beating up Junior. We

are told it is the ultimate attack on an Indian’s manhood to have their hair cut.

“That’s about the worst thing you can do to an Indian guy. It had taken them years

to grow their hair. And Rowdy cut that away in five seconds” (Alexie, 22).

Rowdy is able to leave his anger aside for Junior. His “job” is to protect Junior and Junior

repays Rowdy for this protection by giving Rowdy an escape from his pain with the cartoons he

draws. Junior says:

“I like to make him laugh. He loves my cartoons” and,

“So I draw cartoons to make him happy, to give him other worlds to

live inside.

I draw his dreams.

And he only talks about his dreams with me.

And I only talk about my dreams with him.

I tell him about my fears.”

....“Rowdy and I are inseparable” (Alexie, 23-24).

As Alexie iterated to us before, another result of the soul wound is a high level of

depression and suicide on the reservations today. Because their anger and humiliation is turned

inward, many Native Americans use alcohol and drugs to try to ease the pain they feel inside.
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Junior’s dad is an alcoholic. He is most likely also depressed. He uses alcohol to self medicate

the pain of the soul wound. Because of their extreme poverty, Junior’s dad is also emasculated in

that he cannot be strong for his son. When Junior’s dog is sick and dying, his dad cannot save

him because they have no money for the vet. Junior sees in his dad in that moment all of things

he does not want to be: a weak, alcoholic, poor Indian who can’t take care of his family.

“Dad just looked down at me with the saddest look in his eyes. He was crying. He

looked ​weak.

I wanted to hate him for his weakness.

I wanted to hate Dad and Mom for our poverty.

I wanted to blame them for my sick dog and for all the other sickness in the

world.

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”(Alexie, 11).

Despite having so much anger and hating the situation his family is in, Junior uses his

humor and empathy to tolerate his lot in life and forgive those that disappoint him. Although he

is angry at his dad and knows he doesn’t want to be like him, he pities him and loves him. He

does not channel his frustrations with his life through hatred or resentment of his parents.

Junior also sees an effect of the soul wound in the plight of his sister, Mary. She had been

a good student and writer with dreams to be a romance novelist. But she succumbed to self-doubt

and hopelessness and retreated from life to hide in the family basement for the last six years. As
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Junior’s teacher, Mr. P. explains to him in their life-changing interaction, Mary was a very good

student, the best Mr. P. had ever had, but she retreated into depression:

“Mary was a bright and shining star,” Mr. P. said. “And then she faded year by year until

you could barely see her anymore”(Alexie, 40).

When she finally decides to live her life again, she moves away, gets married, and then

dies in a horrible fire at the trailer she lives in in Montana at a party with her new husband. When

Junior hears this news, he laughs and can’t stop laughing, first because he was so relieved that it

wasn’t his dad that was dead as he thought he would be told, but second in the likelihood of the

extreme trauma of losing both his grandmother, Eugene and sister in a matter of weeks. Even in

this unimaginable shock and grief, we can hear the dark humor in Alexie’s writing through

Junior’s reaction. It is the only coping mechanism Junior has to begin to process the horrible

news:

“I swear to you I could hear my sister screaming.

“The police say your sister never even woke up,” my father said. “She was way

too drunk.”

My dad was trying to comfort me. But it’s not too comforting to learn that your

sister was TOO FREAKING DRUNK to feel any pain when she BURNED TO

DEATH!” (Alexie, 204).

When all of these manifestations of the Native American soul wound are combined in

such tragedy and conflict a young person’s life like Junior’s is hard to fathom. The suffering he

is accustomed to dealing with is not comparable to what most Americans are used to. It is on a

different scale of severity. Junior knows his life is bad. But until his confrontation with Mr. P.,
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he doesn’t really know why it is all such a mess nor how to find hope for anything better. Mr. P.

has a discussion with Junior when he visits him after Junior throws a text book at him in school.

Junior is given a text that belonged to his mother when she was his age (Alexie, 30), - a stark

reminder of how terrible his school is and loses his cool and throws the book at his teacher. Mr.

P. forgives Junior, and he admits his role in the attempted annihilation of Indian culture:

“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”(Alexie, 35).

Mr. P. outlines for Junior how the government has tried to destroy any Indianness that

was left in his society. He highlights for Junior how the Reservation is trying to kill him. This

creates a do or die situation for Junior and he must make the biggest decision of his life. As Mr.

P puts it in this pivotal moment in the novel:

“You have to leave this reservation”.

“I’m going to Spokane with my dad later.”

“No, you have to leave the rez ​forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were right to throw that book at me. I deserve to get smashed in the face for

what I’ve done to Indians., Every white person on this rez should get smashed in

the face. But, let me tell you this. All the Indians should get smashed in the the

face too.”

I was shocked. Mr. ​P was​ furious.

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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.” (Alexie, 42).

Junior realizes this is true. He doesn’t want to be like his mom and dad, who never went

to college, suffer from depression and his dad drinks. He doesn’t want to be like Rowdy, angry

and fighting his whole life. He doesn’t want to end up like his sister, a faded star hiding in the

basement. Junior knows he won’t make it. He can’t fight them all off forever with only Rowdy

on his side. Mr. P continues:

“‘If you stay on this rez,” …”they're going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. We

are all going to kill you. You can’t fight us forever.

“I don't want to fight anybody,” I said.

“You’ve been fighting since you were born,” he said. “You fought off that brain

surgery, You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the drunks and drug

addicts. You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope and go

somewhere where other people have hope’” (Alexie, 43).

Junior asks him where that hope is and how he can find it. He answers:

“‘Son”, Mr. P. said. “You’re going to find more and more hope the farther you

walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation’” (Alexie, 43).

So Junior makes a huge decision, he goes to the white world where there may be hope. At

Rearden, life is completely different, he is the only Native American, he knows nobody and is
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totally alone. He feels the humiliation, the pain, the sting of being “other”. But of course in his

usual style, Junior uses humor to lessen the pain:

“They stared at me, the Indian boy with the black eye and 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. What was I doing at Rearden, whose

mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only ​other Indian in town?”(Alexie,

56).

Junior is the most alone he has ever been in his life. He has been labeled a traitor by his

Reservation. He loses Rowdy as a best friend and lifeline. He is humiliated and joked about at

Reardan. He suffers mental and physical anguish; he walks twenty miles to get there and home

when his dad is drunk or has no money for gas. He feels like he has no identity. He loses his

Indian identity when he leaves the Reservation and when he arrives at Reardan, he becomes “less

than Indian”.

He says:

“‘A strange thing was happening to me.

Zitty and lonely, I woke up on the reservation as an Indian, and somewhere on the

road to Rearden, I became something less than an Indian.

And once I arrived at Rearden, I became something less than less than less than

Indian’” (Alexie, 83).

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But somehow Junior: a poor, injured, bullied, teenage Indian finds the strength to keep

doing under such extreme circumstances. He doesn’t fade away, he doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t

start to drink or do drugs. Instead, like Mr. P. prophesied, he starts to find hope in the white

world at Reardan. He learns he is smart - with help from his new acquaintance, Gordy, the

resident white nerd at Reardan. Something happens inside Junior that he has never experienced

before. Despite feeling totally alone and the human equivalent of nothing, or less than nothing,

he discovers he isn’t stupid. He discovers he has a brain and that he is “smarter than most of

those white kids”(Alexie, 84).

In one important scene in his science class Junior is brave enough to raise his hand in

class and explain what petrified wood is. The teacher scoffs at his answer saying:

“‘Okay Arnold”, Dodge said, … “Where did you learn this fact? On the

reservation? Yes, we all know there is so much amazing science on the

reservation’”(Alexie, 85).

But Gordy, the class nerd backs him up and tells the teacher than Junior is correct.

“‘Uh, Actually,” Gordy said, “Arnold is right about petrified wood. That’s what

happens’” (Alexie, 86).

From then on, Mr. Dodge, clearly embarrassed by being outsmarted by the only Indian in

the class, thanks Gordy for his input and leaves Junior alone from then on. In that moment,

Gordy has taken the place of Rowdy, he protected Junior from humiliation but in an intellectual

sense, rather than a physical form. Junior learns to his joy and amazement that it is ok to love

reading and books in the white world, it had been uncool and not accepted to enjoy learning on

the rez:
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“‘In Wellpinit, I was a freak because I loved books.

“In Rearden, I was a joyous freak’”(Alexie, 98).

Junior slowly makes his way into the white culture at Rearden. He wins the respect of

Roger, a popular athlete, by punching him in the nose after he humiliated his ethnicity and used

stereotypes to degrade his society:

“Hey, Chief,” Roger said. “You want to hear a joke?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?”

I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I’d ever

heard in my life…. I couldn’t let him get away with that shit. I wasn’t just

defending Indians. I was defending Indians, black people, ​and buffalo​”(Alexie,

65).

Roger is shocked that Junior punches him. He calls him an “animal” and retreats.

Junior realizes it is a momentous moment in his life. He is unsure why, but knows

something had just shifted. He had followed the rules of Indian fighting, but it had not

worked the way he expected in the white world. His grandma later tells him he “punched

the alpha dog in the face...They’re going to respect you now”(Alexie, 70).

The next day, Junior gets a ride from Eugene to school on his vintage motorcycle.

Eugene is Junior’s dad’s best friend, a kind soul but a depressed alcoholic. Roger sees him on the

bike and thinks it is cool. From there, he has Roger’s respect and Roger’s friendship. It took

playing by the Indian rules by fighting when insulted, for Junior to scare Roger into being friends
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with him and winning his respect. The difference to Junior was that on the Reservation, another

Indian would have retaliated for being punched, Roger, a white teen, on the other hand, does not

fight back. Instead, he becomes Junior’s friend.

In Reardan the white kids start to like Junior as a result of all of the stereotypes he used to

suffer from. Now, at Reardan, the stereotypes of being “an angry Indian” and later at the high

school dance when Roger finds out he is impoverished, he is “a poor Indian”, are working in his

favor.

After the dance when Roger takes him under his wing and gives him money to pay for

the food at Denny’s he is accepted within the cool crowd. He gains popularity because he is able

to make the white kids feel less guilty about their relationships with Native Americans, or lack

thereof, by taking Alfred under their wing. It was how Rowdy makes himself feel better, by

protecting Junior. It makes Roger feel happy to take care of Junior.

At this point in the novel, Junior has succeeded in the white world but his life and

relationships on the Reservation are in tatters. He has lost his friendship with Rowdy, his

grandmother was killed by a drunk driver and Eugene is shot by his best friend Bobby in an

argument over a bottle of wine. Bobby later hangs himself in jail (Alexie, 170). All these

needless tragic deaths due to alcohol happen in Junior’s life in a very short period of time.

Junior thinks that he has caused all the deaths because he defected from his tribe and abandoned

his family in their time of need. We can infer from his words that he thinks he should have died

too:
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“‘I had cursed my family. I had left the tribe, and had broken something inside all

of us, and now I was being punished for that. No, my family wa being punished. I

was healthy and alive’”(Alexie, 173).

He is overcome by the amount of grief on his reservation. He gives us his

sarcastic definition of grief from his journal:

“grief (greef) n. When you feel so helpless and stupid that you think nothing will

ever be right again, and your macaroni and cheese tastes like sawdust, and you

can’t even jerk off because it seems like too much trouble. Webster’s

Dickshunary © 4ever”(Alexie, 173).

But Junior can’t survive alone with only his dark humour and cartoons to help him vent

his rage and sorrow. This is serious. He is joyless and mad. So mad he wants to kill God. He

thinks about killing himself and everyone around him. He thinks of killing the birds, the air. In

his homework he reads Euripides and is reminded of the soul wound of his people:

“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”(Alexie, 173).
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He has hit rock bottom emotionally despite his success at Reardan. Then, just as

things seem like they can’t be any sadder and he is on the edge of grief and anger, he has

an amazing thing happen to him in class at Reardan. After missing his “fifteenth or

twentieth day of school”(Alexie, 174), he arrives in Mrs. Jeremy’s class. She humiliates

him in the face of his grief in front of the whole class:

“Oh, class”, she said. “We have a special guest today. It’s Arnold Spirit. I didn’t

realize you still went to this school, Mr. Spirit”(Alexie, 175).

Junior feels like he has been slapped in the face by her sarcastic remark. He wants to slap

her back and tell her off but admits: “...I was too broken”(Alexie, 175). Then something

amazing happens that Junior could never have foreseen:

“...it was Gordy who defended me.

He took his textbook and dropped it.

Whomp!

He looked so strong. He looked like a warrior. He was protecting me like Rowdy

used to protect me. Of course, Rowdy would have thrown the book at the teacher and

then punched her.

Gordy showed a lot of courage in standing up to a teacher like that. And his

courage inspired the others”(Alexie, 175).

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“Whomp!” Roger drops his text book, then Penelope, then the basketball players on his

team. Then all the students walked out of the room leaving him and Mrs. Jeremy; as Junior notes

in an ironic twist:

“It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to

the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals”(Alexie,

176).

Junior can’t help laughing. Mrs. Jeremy asks why. He says:

“‘I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and

white. By Indian and white. Now 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 all

gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy “(Alexie, 177).

Finally, Junior is allowed a glimmer of hope and a little bit of joy in the white world. But

he is still missing any kind of joy, hope, respect or relief in his Indian world.

Then comes the climax of the book. He is given an opportunity for a rematch basketball

game against his old high school. In this one, he doesn’t let Rowdy beat him up or beat his team.

The crowd boos him as usual when he walks into the gym. His coach tells him over and over that

“he can do it” (Alexie, 189). Junior admits he had never had an adult tell him that before. It

gives him strength to overcome his fear and step into the gym. He gets mad. He defeats Rowdy

and his former team. They beat Wellpinit by forty points. “We had killed the Redskins. Yep, we

had humiliated them”(Alexie, 195). He was the champion. Everyone was crying and cheering,
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his mom had fainted. He looks for his dad and sees him quiet. He looks for what his dad is

looking at in silence. He sees his old team and thinks:

“We had defeated the enemy! We had defeated the champions! We were David

who’d thrown a stone into the brain of Goliath!

And then I realized something.

I realized that my team, the Reardan Indians, was Goliath” (Alexie, 195).

Junior’s mind shifts. He knows the pain and suffering of the Redskins, his former team.

He has been there, felt it himself. He knows some of the kids had no breakfast that day because

they are so poor like him. He knows some have alcoholic parents like his dad. He knows none of

them are going to college and have given up their dreams like his sister. He knows Rowdy will

be beaten by his father for losing the game. This was not really a win for Junior. In winning the

game, he had broken his best friend’s spirit and humiliated his former team. He is ashamed of

wanting to humiliate them. They already suffered from enough humiliation every day from the

soul wound they carry. Junior had left the Reservation long enough to forget about his soul

wound for a moment. But it is still there in the hearts of his people. And he made it worse that

night by beating them.

Days after the game, he regains Rowdy’s friendship by apologizing for beating him in an

email he writes. Rowdy responds:

“We’ll kick your asses next year,” Rowdy wrote back. “And you’ll cry like the

little faggot you are.”

 Ferrell-Horan 22

“I might be a faggot,” I wrote back, “but I’m the faggot who beat you.”

“Ha-ha,” Rowdy wrote” (Alexie, 197).

Junior also finds solace and healing in his family and his tribe. He realizes he is a

member of many tribes. He realizes there are many lonely sad people out there that are not

Indians. He realizes he will not fulfill the destiny of his soul wound as his family and ancestors

had. He will be the one to change his path in history:

“I 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.

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”(Alexie, 217).

He mourns for his tribe. He cries because so many are killing themselves and drinking

themselves to death and will never find hope the way he did. He wishes they could all find a way

off the Reservation.

“It’s a weird thing.

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to

move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

 Ferrell-Horan 23

But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to

be death camps.

I wept because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the

rez. I was the only one with enough arrogance”(Alexie, 217).

By escaping the very thing that was designed to kill him and his people Junior Spirit

survives his soul wound and finds hope and joy in the world outside the reservation as well as

within himself.

Diary’s “theme is about escape” and Alexie hopes “it encourages all sorts of trapped

people to feel like they can escape”(Johnson, 246). In leaving his reservation, Arnold compares

himself to an American immigrant—“millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces

in search of a dream” (Johnson, 236).

Junior Spirit makes an amazing transformation in “The Absolutely True Diary of a

Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie. In this epistolary novel we are shown the effects of the

massive soul wound Native Americans have borne due to the colonization of their society by the

Europeans. In the postcolonial world, they have not able to recover due to lack of opportunities,

depression, nihilism and substance abuse. The reservations offer no opportunities for success and

the Native Americans are unable to pull themselves out from under the weight of depression,

grief, anger and pain.

In this novel, however, Junior defies the stereotypes and finds hope against all odds. He

must go out and live in the white world to better his own life. In the end, he recreates himself as
 Ferrell-Horan 24

a blend of the different societies and characters he encounters in his journey toward inner peace

and hope.

Junior becomes an Indian warrior and peacemaker, a nerd and scholar, a popular athlete

and a normal teenager with a girlfriend. He is himself at heart, but from his encounters he learns

to use the pieces to become whole; he uses the insights from Gordy on how to learn, the

acceptance and friendship from Roger to be a popular role model and athlete, and he remains

loyal to his best friend Rowdy and in the end wins back his friendship.

The best part about this story is that Junior doesn’t stop being an Indian once he enters

the white world. He remains true to his family and friends as well as his ancestors. I think this is

how Alexie has survived as well. He found a voice and success in the white world, but he is still

first and foremost a Native American, and has made it his life work to try to improve the soul

wound for his people through his voice as a successful author. By telling the story of the Native

American soul wound, as sad and terrible as it may be, he has the power to create both for his

own people as well as the white world’s view of Native Americans. If through his literature

people can become educated about the terrible past Native Americans endured, and white people

can begin to know and take responsibility about how it occurred, perhaps our society can begin

to treat the “other” as one of our own and heal the soul wound.
 Ferrell-Horan 25

Works Cited

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Johnson, Jan. ​Healing the Soul Wound in Flight and The Absolutely True Diary

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 Ferrell-Horan 26

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